A holistic approach to our children’s future.
Our Mission & Approach
We are stewards to their dirt; their earth. We live in a time when many things are on the brink of extinction. We’re losing our precious dirt by bad management. We grow food with chemical fertilizers but we cannot grow dirt with chemical fertilizers. In order to have healthy dirt we need to have life in the soil. When the dirt is alive so is our food.
Observation and patience.
If we observe Mother Nature, all the answers are already there. We walked away from nature towards technology. And in the process many have lost their connection to the earth. It is time to walk back to nature with the right technology. Solar panels; cars that run on spring power, compressed air, fuel cells and magnetic bearings; cooking and heating off of methane biodigesters, wind generators, and electromagnetic energy, which is all around us. We have everything we need, it is only a matter of harnessing it. Farming it should be the same. We have everything we need already present, it’s just a matter of management. We can grow and target plants for Potassium, Phosphorus and Nitrogen (NPK), eliminating the need for pesticides by keeping a healthy balance. We can allow the predator insects and pray insects (such as ladybugs and aphids) to exist together in balance. Biodiversity is key. It takes a whole forest to raise a tree.
By feeding our fish organically grown plants that we grow on site, their waste becomes our fertilizer. Water that would normally only be used to water the plants in the field is now being used to create electricity and biomass for worms which in turn creates soil and other key fertilizers, micronutrients, and humic acid. The water can then head to the orchards and fields, nutrient rich and full of life. Now the worms follow oxygen-rich, nutrient-rich water and become our tillers.
By working together we can help set the stage for a healthy environment in which all the pieces of Nature’s puzzle have a place and are symbiotic to each other. Solar lights on our ponds attracts some of the insects from our crops into the fish diet. The extra protein and calcium from the exoskeleton make for heathy naturally raised fish. If you feed fish dog food, they are dog food, which would also mean their waste would be dog food. If we feed veggies with that, it translates into us eating dog food.
Biomass is anything that we can naturally grow and use to make living soil. That includes for us banana, sugar cane, moringa oliferia, glaricidia, vetiver grass, and many localized legumes thought to be only pests. We also grow water hyisaths, and a floating fern known as azola, which is eaten by the fish, worms, ducks, and farm crew.
Biomass is used for thermophillic composting, which uses and creates heat from nitrogen. We also use it to feed earth worms – three different types. One type of worm travels through tunnels as deep as 15ft. One resides on the top two feet, and another that lives in the top 2 inches of leaf litter. They all ingest each other’s waste and recycle and create superfood for the earth. Not to mention drainage, mycorhyza, rhizobia, and humic acid, the essential building blocks of heathy living soil. This cold compost, which is made by living creatures, is often referred to as vermiculture.
We use some of the biomass to make food for the fish and ducks and other animals on the farm. It can also be used to create methane gas for cooking, heating and generating electricity. The oil can be extracted to create biofuel.
We are raising fish in large ponds that are using bog filtration, allowing the water to flow through gravel beds filled with three different types of worms. The water flows through the gravel leaving the solids behind for the worms. The worms eat and process the solids into worm castings which can be harvested with living worms and eggs and then deposited in garden beds to create living soil. There are also plants growing within the gravel bed that send out root systems that filter the nitrate and nitrites out of the water returning the water clean to the fish. We use efficient aeration systems to dissolve as much oxygen into the water, as a healthy ecosystem would, so there’s no need for chemical inputs of any sort. We seek a natural balance like Mother Nature does it. We are able to irrigate fruit trees and vegetables below the ponds, with the water from the ponds. It has oxygen, nitrogen and other microbiological creatures, as well as calcium and minerals, all that we’re able to bring down to the fruit trees using gravity, like Mother Nature would from the stream.