This is a small sideshow that the students will see tomorrow at the Bronx Writing Academy

If you want to support my project with the school, but that you cant volunteer, you can give a donation to Chfermette see the donation button on the top right corner. Any donation will be used to finance a trip to one of NYC rooftop farms or to insure the continuation of the project after the end of the spring semester. Also, I am in the process of making it a non profit. Please If you enjoy the blog content, comment and/or subscribe.

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Considering setting up an aquaponics system to feed your family?  Heres a few thoughts for the home gardner.

An aquaponic system with ten square feet of growing space can cost 1500 dollars and will feed you for about a week.  Think Im wrong?  Heres the facts.

The aquaponic system in question comes with a 100 gallon fish tank.  A one pound fish, lets say a tilapia, will yield two 4oz. filets.  A one pound tilapia requires 3.74 gallons of water to survive.  A 100 gallon tank will hold 26 one pound tilapia assuming you could fill it to the brim.  The fastest growing tilapia, a hybrid between Orange Mozambique and Black Hornorum (Wami), will grow to one pound in 6 months if fed a very portion controlled amount of food.  This means that you can get 13 pounds of fish every six months from this system under optimal conditions. A value of about 51 dollars at the grocery store.

This same system has 10 square feet of growing space.  That about the area of a standard computer desk.  What are you going to grow in ten square feet that can possibly justify the cost of the system?  Lettuce? Some peppers?  Forget corn or most root crops like carrots.  Regardless of the claims of the aquaponics cult, there are far more crops that will not grow in hydroton balls without real soil than there are crops that will.  Okay so you might get about a weeks worth of some salad greens.  A street value of less than 50 dollars.

It doesnt take a genius to figure out that its going to take you several years (if ever) to recover the initial costs of any aquaponic system assuming that nothing wears out, like the pump.  So unless you have a die hard cultist attitude with a huge bank account, I highly recommend you just buy your lettuce and fish at the grocery store.

Now,  whenever I write an article debunking the claims of an industry or business, I always offer a solution to the problems that I expose.  The problem here being the costs.  So heres my common sense solution.

Go to Walmart and buy a 14 dollar blue plastic splash pool.  Its about a foot deep and six feet in diameter.  Thats about 28 square feet for 14 dollars.  Drill 4 one inch holes at the bottom edge as a drain and cover the holes with coffee filters so the soil doesnt wash out.  Then fill it with 12 cubic feet of garden soil from Lowes for about 36 dollars.  And theres your grow bed.  It costs about 50 dollars.  Now set up a kiddie pool.  A 12 foot diameter pool with just 24 inches of water will hold almost 1700 gallons.  Thats big enough for over 450 pounds of fish and will feed you over 225 pounds of filets every six months. You can buy your tilapia at BackyardTilapia.com for about a dollar each.

Now, every day, grab a five gallon bucket of water from your fish and give it to your plants.  Your plants will grow just as fast as any aquponic system and you can plant a greater diversity to suit your taste.  Oh and the time it takes to recover your set up costs?  About six months.

In my own yard, I use splash pools for short root crops, three row high cinder block beds for deep root crops (like carrots) and I plant 72 corn stalks in plain old dirt about 8 inches apart in 4 rows. I grow over 30 different varieties of fruits and vegetables and they last all year.

Commercial aquaponics offers an exciting business opportunity with great income potential, but for the typical backyard gardener its just an expensive hobby.

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Last week I had the pleasure of participating in this wonderful event hosted by MESA, the Multinational Exchange for Sustainable Agriculture. What a privilege to be part of a panel of such amazing women working diligently to build more resilient food systems around the world. 

The panelists were all so different and accomplished including the fiery Joelci Dannacene, a militant organizer with The Landless Rural Workers Movement of Brazil and Myriam Kaplan-Pasternak, owner of Devils Gulch Ranch in Marin, founder and director of HaitiCoffee.com, Inc and a USAID Farmer to Farmer volunteer in Haiti and El Salvador with Partners of the Americas, Winrock International and HaitiCoffee.  The panel also included Clara Nicholls, a lecturer in the Latin American Studies Program at UC Berkeley, teaching "Perspectives for Sustainable Rural Development in Latin America" and president of the Latin American Scientific Society of Agroecology, as well as, Shu-Chen Cheng, a beginning small-scale farmer from Taiwan who hopes to educate farmers in sustainable methods, and share with her community the importance of supporting local farmers.

Not only was the conversation inspiring and stimulating, the homemade Puerto Rican tapas were off the hook!  Thank you MESA for including me in this uplifting evening, I am honored and excited to collaborate further in the future!

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We are a circle within a circle with no beginning and never ending...

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rooftop photo of the spiral garden at Grow Bio-intensive Agriculture Kenya

Greetings of Peace and Love!  It has been many months since Ive written, so much has happened.  I have had the profound opportunity and gift to go on several life changing adventures, travel around the world, visit some AMAZING farming projects, meet many inspiring people, make life long friends, start a new business and learn a whole lot about myself and the creation.  I am excited to share so much information I have picked up along the way, much more than can be shared in a single blog post.  So the next few posts will be full of pictures, ideas, and inspiration from my journey.  I pray that you enjoy.  And that there is something new and inspiring for everyone who reads.  As always, we are sending and channeling love and healing light to you all, above and below like mycelium running through the veins of Mother Earth!  Many Blessings..?

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This document was brought to my attention by a good friend (thank you Stella)- one that I would have missed in the madness that this past two weeks has been chaotically lost in, lol.

This, my friends, is NOTICE.  Lloyds of London is putting it all out in black and white, as notice.  The insurance industry is the biggest scam ever created- even bigger than the idea of "derivatives" and "leveraging" and its impact is directly related to both.    When the Insurance companies are running out of things to insure, they have to create a "need" else where so that they can continue to perpetuate their fraud.  This is clearly seen in Zerohedges article:

Wall Streets Next Bonanza: Subprime Marriage-Backed Securities

The last crash was caused by reckless investments in subprime mortgage-backed securities, an ingenious way to repackage and redistribute staggering amounts of credit risk to unsuspecting investors. After losing their house and their money, some investors may take comfort in their enduring marital relationships.Unfortunately, marriage is one of the riskiest bets of all, which makes it a prime, or should I say "subprime" target for Wall Streets masters of innovation.....If marriage insurance sales take off, its only a matter of time before Wall Street repackages it and sells it to investors via subprime marriage-backed securities. A boom in marriage speculation would ensue. Did you see your neighbor with his mistress last night? Buy some MBS credit default swaps on him and tell his wife what you saw. Is your other neighbor away from home a lot? Buy some MBS insurance on his wife, seduce her, and when they get divorced, you can cash in. Consider it "inside her" trading. Does it sound preposterous? Its not any crazier than buying credit default swaps on poor peoples mortgages and making $15 billion when they become homeless. Remember, everything is fair in the "free market."

I have posted the entire PDF of Lloyds Emerging Risk Report – 2015:  Food System Shock Below.   please share this information around as it is more important than most of the crap the MSM is putting out there- this is the NOTICE that is being handed to us.

"There is a pressing need to reduce the uncertainty surrounding the impacts of an extreme shock to the food supply. Sudden disruptions to the supply chain could reduce the global food supply and trigger a spike in food prices, leading to substantial knock-on effects for businesses and societies. The food system’s existing vulnerability to systemic shocks is being exacerbated by factors such as climate change, water stress, ongoing globalisation, and heightening political instability
Lloyd’s commissioned the development of a scenario of extreme shock to global food production in order to explore the implications for insurance and risk.Experts in the field of food security and the economics of sustainable development were asked to develop a scenario describing a plausible, relatively severe production shock affecting multiple agricultural commodities and regions, and to describe the cascade of events that could result. ....
A shock to the global food supply could trigger significant claims across multiple classes of insurance, including (but not limited to) terrorism and political violence, political risk, business interruption, marine and aviation, agriculture, environmental liability, and product liability and recall. These losses could be compounded by the potential for a food system shock to last for many years; and the ability of insurers to pay claims quickly is expected to be an important factor in post-shock recovery. More broadly, the insurance industry may also be affected by impacts on investment income and the global regulatory and business environment.
The insurance industry is in a position to make an important contribution to improving the resilience and sustainability of the global food system. As businesses become increasingly aware of the threat posed by food system disruption, they may invest more heavily in comprehensive risk transfer structures, and a severe shock could motivate individuals and businesses to address gaps in their risk management. As such, global food supply shock could also represent a substantial opportunity for insurers, who will have a key role in assisting clients to understand their risk exposure and to tailor appropriate risk transfer solutions.
Scenarios are an important method of exploring emerging risks; they are not predictions or forecasts. The following scenario is simply one of a multitude of events that could occur. When the scenario considers actions or events by individual governments or individuals within specific countries, it is not stating that Lloyd’s is predicting that the events will occur. Many of the comments are based on events that have occurred in the past – either in the countries mentioned or extrapolated from other regions. However, individual countries are only named specifically to give realism to the event and allow appropriately detailed calculations to be made – events could occur in different countries or not at all, and to illustrate this some alternative scenarios are provided. Lloyd’s firmly believes that the insurance industry will be stronger by considering a variety of scenarios around mega-risks, and the only way to do this consistently is to give sufficient detail. This has long been the approach within the Lloyd’s Realistic Disaster Scenario process. Lloyd’s has chosen to share this work openly because it believes that a debate within the insurance industry, and beyond, will strengthen the global community

LLoyd's Emerging Risk Report – 2015: Food System Shock

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Tilapia hatcheries that throw out non-GMO claims are playing to an audience shrouded in fear and ignorance for financial gain.  The truth is, the term GMO was invented by journalists, television writers and newspaper reporters as an acronym for another made-up term, genetically modified organism.  Today the term non-GMO is used to market products to consumers who are fearful of a process that they dont understand.

Genetic improvements have been developed by breeders and growers for over 8000 years.  Moving pollen from one plant variety to another to generate new seeds with traits from both plants happens in nature with the blowing of the wind or on the bodies of bees. But even if the pollen is moved by the hands of a farmer, the results are still the same. In more modern times, scientists use other methods to induce changes by using chemical compounds or irradiation.  Obviously when people hear chemicals they immediately think of all the skull and crossbones warning labels on their household cleaners and bug sprays. But remember, to a scientist, H₂0 is a chemical, to the rest of us, its just water.  And irradiation is also used to cold pasteurize hundreds of everyday foods. Even farm animals are selectively bred for a number of reasons, including the prevention of disease and improved production using such techniques as artificial insemination or embryo rescue.  The truth is, almost everything we eat today has been genetically modified in one way or another within the last 8000 years.

Genetic engineering is different from genetic improvements in that genes from any species are introduced. As a way to illustrate this difference, genetic improvements can be made by combining two types of corn but not one variety of corn and one variety of rice.  Rice pollen will not pollenate corn.  However in the laboratory, scientists can take genes from either plant and create a new variety of either.  This is genetic engineering.  The resulting plant may be more corn than rice or more rice than corn but ultimately it will be a new variety of one or the other, similar but different.  There is another level of genetic development called precision breeding which is sort of a hybrid between genetic improvement and genetic modification.  The methods used in precision breeding are far more predictable than anything else, and can result in getting exactly what the scientist is after.

For a tilapia hatchery to be truly non-GMO they would have to sell natural colored random sized and shaped, mixed-sex, certified pure strain tilapia exactly as they were from ten thousand years ago.  Like it or not, breeding for size or color is just another form of genetic improvement.  And we all know from the fear mongers that genetic improvement falls under the dark cloak of GMO.

At Backyard Tilapia, we sell everything from pure strain naturally colored tilapia exactly as they were 100 centuries ago to one of the most genetically improved hybrids of all time.  Yep, GMOs are served here, and were darn proud of it.

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