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Agri Matters Podcast: Interview With AquaFarms Africa Co-Founder On Empowering Women With Aquaponics
In the latest episode of the Agri Matters Podcast, we spoke to Wiatta Thomas, co-founder of AquaFarms Africa, an agritech startup based in Conakry, Guinea
In the latest episode of the Agri Matters Podcast, we spoke to Wiatta Thomas, co-founder of AquaFarms Africa, an agritech startup based in Conakry, Guinea. She told us about implementing aquaponics technology, a combination of fish farming and soilless vegetable growing, in Africa.
In this ecosystem, the fish excrete waste that is converted by beneficial bacteria to nutrients for the plants, which purify the water in return.
"The focus of AquaFarms Africa was to locally produce fruits and vegetables that normally are imported because they're not able to be produced in Guinea," said Thomas. The produce would be sold to high-end restaurants and hotels that offer higher margins.
Aquaponics is also generally considered more efficient than conventional farming. It is more productive on a per square meter basis and requires 95% less water than traditional agriculture. It is also completely organic.
For the last nine years, Thomas has lived in Guinea and worked across West Africa in youth economic development, giving her a deep understanding of entrepreneurial ecosystems and promising agricultural value chains. She has also built a business incubator called Dare-to-Innovate. She actively promotes economic development and African diaspora investment in the continent, with agriculture being a priority sector.
To Listen To The Podcast, Please Click Here
Here are some of the highlights from the interview:
Pinduoduo: How did the idea of AquaFarms Africa come about?
Thomas: What I found is that it's very, very difficult on the continent for young people especially to start agribusinesses, for several reasons. One is that there's a lack of capital. So the idea was that rather than just start an aquaponics farm ourselves, what we would do is create or design a franchise system.
Pinduoduo: Why did you or your partner choose aquaponics?
Thomas: The main reason was that we needed a way to have a closed system that would allow us to control the temperature in order to produce some things that wouldn't normally grow in a tropical climate or very intense weather conditions. So aquaponics gave us a way to control the entire environment in which we're growing our produce.
(In the aquaponics system,) you can't put chemicals because it'll kill the fish. So automatically, you're going to have organic produce. And so it's really an all-natural system. We really wanted to recreate an environment inside of our greenhouses.
Pinduoduo: What kind of yield can we expect?
Thomas: One farm (12 by 12 foot) will produce somewhere around one ton of vegetable and fruit product that doesn't include fish product. We haven't included that yet in our total revenue system — it's more just to keep the system going. But we will be selling fruit shrimp and tilapia fish later on.
Pinduoduo: Do you work with local lending partners to provide loans to franchisees?
Thomas: Part of the loan system is provided by investments from the diaspora. Some of it is with partnerships with local banking systems that we've already started forging. So it's a combination of all of that. Because it's very, very hard for a young person to come off the bat and be able to get loans in Guinea.
Pinduoduo: What are the training and technical support provided?
Thomas: We are building an app that we haven't deployed yet. But in 2021, we're going to be deploying it that will allow our franchisees to be able to monitor their system so all of the indicators, such as the nutrient levels, or the temperature in the system, through IoT devices that will be placed in their systems, and will be able to monitor or to track growing schedules, harvesting and planting with an app.
Pinduoduo: Does this technology gives women more opportunities than traditional farming?
Thomas: It's actually more geared toward women. And the great thing is that because it's not as strenuous of work, and because it's in urban areas, we can give a lot more opportunities to women who are in urban areas and who are unemployed.
In case you missed our end-of-year newsletter, here's the link where you can find the best of Agri Matters podcasts of 2020.
Agri Matters is a podcast about cutting-edge technology and innovation in agriculture. From scientists, venture capitalists to startup founders, we talk to the people responsible for bringing food from farm to table. Subscribe to Agri Matters on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and other major podcast platforms.
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Most Americans Have Roundup in Their Bodies. Researchers Say One Week of Eating Organic Can Help
Organic, pesticide-free eating is an important factor in health and is something consumers should remain conscious of when shopping.
Photo courtesy of Scott Warman, Unsplash.
One week of eating organic can dramatically reduce pesticide levels in the body, according to a recent study conducted by the Health Research Institute, Commonweal Institute, and Friends of the Earth.
The group of researchers tracked the pesticide levels of four families across the United States. They took measurements after six days on a non-organic diet and again after six days on an organic diet.
The study, and a companion study published last year, found 16 different kinds of pesticides and chemicals in every participant. But after six days of organic eating, these compounds decreased an average of 60.5 percent—and some as much as 95 percent. Glyphosate, the main ingredient in Roundup and the most used pesticide in the world, dropped an average of 70 percent.
A study by agricultural economist Charles Benbrook finds that the use of glyphosate has spiked 15-fold globally since genetically modified, “Roundup Ready” crops were introduced in 1996. The percentage of Americans with traceable levels of glyphosate in their bodies rose from 12 percent in 1972 to 70 percent by 2014, according to researchers at the University of California San Diego.
Glyphosate exposure has been associated with a wide range of health problems. Researchers have flagged glyphosate as a probable carcinogen, and the chemical has been linked to kidney disease, reproductive issues, DNA damage, hormone and digestion disruptions, fatty liver disease, and more.
The recent study poses organic eating as a straightforward way to avoid glyphosate. But the authors also recognize that organic food isn’t always accessible.
To improve the availability of organic foods in the United States, the team calls for top-down policy changes—like stricter regulations on pesticide use, more federal research into the effects of pesticides, and aid for farmers as they transition to organic farming.
“Our federal pesticide policy system is broken, and we need people shouting about that,” Dr. Kendra Klein, a co-author of the study and Senior Staff Scientist at Friends of the Earth, tells Food Tank. “Companies like Bayer, Syngenta, and Dow are spending millions lobbying, and they’re also spending tens of millions of dollars to shape the narrative and perpetuate myths, like the myth that we need pesticides to feed the world.”
Klein points out that just 1 percent of U.S. federal agricultural research dollars go towards ecological farming, and pesticide regulations are few and far between. In fact, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has loosened some pesticide restrictions in recent years. Between 1993 and 2008, the EPA raised the threshold for glyphosate residues on oats from 0.1 ppm to 30 ppm.
Larry Bohlen, Chief Operating Officer at HRI Labs and another co-author of the study, also emphasizes a lack of resources for farmers who want to transition to organic farming. He explains that universities and government training programs have taught farmers how to use pesticides for decades. “If they placed models of successful organic farming side-by-side with the synthetic chemical models, farmers would have choices instead of just one option,” Bohlen tells Food Tank.
Stringent pesticide regulations might seem like a lofty goal in the U.S., says Klein, but change is already underway abroad. Earlier this year, the European Union announced plans to halve the use of “high risk” pesticides by 2030 and make at least 25 percent of farmland organic.
To spur change in the U.S., Bohlen urges consumers to vote with their wallets, if they’re able. “Each person’s purchase is a small vote that, when considered collectively, sends a signal back to the grocer and the farmer about what type of food is desired. It’s your purchase that has one of the biggest effects on land, farmer, and consumer health.”
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A Healthy Hydroponics Ecosystem
“I believe the current pandemic has provided us the opportunity to completely reimagine the global food system,” says Tony Hunter, a global food futurist
October 28, 2020
How New Ways of Growing Can Help
The UAE Achieve Food Security
A little under two years ago, Mariam Hareb Almheiri, UAE Minister of State for Food Security, made a presentation to the country’s leadership. The National Strategy for Food Security aims to take the UAE to top spot in the Global Food Security Index by 2021; enable sustainable food production through technological means; improve nutrition; and reduce waste. One of the technologies that can help turn this national strategy into reality is hydroponics.
Rethinking the food system
“I believe the current pandemic has provided us the opportunity to completely reimagine the global food system,” says Tony Hunter, a global food futurist. “Countries should look to ensuring domestic manufacture of basic foodstuffs for their own populations.” Hunter, who gave a talk on the potential silver linings of the pandemic for the global food industry in a Gulfood webinar earlier this year, believes hydroponics may be a promising method of ensuring a country can supply some of its own fresh produce at a time when Covid-19 has rendered international supply chains vulnerable.
Paresh Purushothaman, Managing Director at Greenoponics, says, “There is a lot of support in the local community for developing farms that use water-conserving methods such as hydroponics.” His company, which specialises in hydroponic and other soil-free agricultural technologies, serves both retail customers – primarily homes and offices – and commercial clients, who use slightly larger systems to grow their own produce.
Hydroponics at home
It’s easier than you think to set up a mini hydroponics system in your home – so long as you have a good grasp of its principles and a bit of patience, explains Purushothaman. “All you need is one free square metre to get started. A small system using a technology called deep water culture is the easiest way to start. You can grow leafy greens including basil, parsley, coriander, various varieties of spinach and rocket leaves.”
Greenoponics’ smallest system, Ezee, can grow all of these, and can fit 16 plants at once. Slightly more ambitious home gardeners can opt for the bigger Eva, which can grow up to 20 plants at once – including cucumbers and tomatoes – using a nutrient film technique. A staple for both salads and cooking, these fruits take about 35 to 40 days to mature, and one plant can provide multiple harvests.
New technologies
Meanwhile, The Sustainable City in Dubai is home to special controlled-environment domes that fuse fish farming and urban farming – a term referred to as aquaponics. “We have advocated urban farming since day one not only in response to the UAE’s food security strategy but also as a lifestyle,” explains Karim El-Jisr, Chief Sustainability Officer - Social. “Urban farming can assume many shapes and sizes, including aquaponics, which combines conventional aquaculture (better known as fish farming) with hydroponics (soilless farming).
“Whereas indoor farming tends to focus hydroponics for the production of leafy greens and vegetables, we wanted to explore aquaponics as a way to produce animal protein within a community. We currently operate an aquaponic system that produces fish and fodder such as alfalfa. Aquaponics is about nutrient cycling, whereby fish waste becomes a source of nutrients for the plants, which help maintain water quality for the fish,” he says.
El-Jisr says the pandemic has highlighted the need to prioritise local supply chains, and urban farming is simply a great opportunity to create value for society while protecting the environment. “Food security is about improving the availability of and access to healthy and essential foods, including fibre and protein. The benefits of urban farming, including hydroponics, is that we can produce a lot of food in small spaces, and save a lot of water.”
While he says hydroponics can increase yields over conventional farming by a factor of 12 while reducing per-crop unit of water consumption by up to 95 per cent, he does concede that one of the challenges of indoor farming is the energy requirements of recreating a plant’s natural environment.
Purushothaman points out to the increasing affordability of LED lighting and automation solutions as key to the medium-term growth of indoor farms. “Automation can set the release of nutrients and water circulation to a timer, while ensuring the oxygen content, PH levels and electrical conductivity of the water are at their optimal levels – all factors that determine a plant’s growth.”
Besides energy consumption, both El-Jisr and Hunter highlight the cost competitiveness of hydroponic produce – compared to conventionally farmed imported produce – as a key challenge to hydroponics becoming more mainstream. However, Hunter cites the lowering cost of technology as a means of redressing the balance, while El-Jisr says, “With time, through innovation, indoor farming will overcome these challenges.” With technology, believes Hunter, “Countries no longer need to be bound by the tyrannies of arable land and fresh water or be at the mercy of the agricultural and political policies of other countries.”
Lead photo: A mini hydroponics system at homeImage Credit: Supplied
Extraterrestrial Ecosystem
With long-term space missions and a potential colonization of Mars in mind, Dr. Robert Ferl of the UF Space Plants Lab studies how plants grow beyond Earth.
March 26, 2019
Patrick Williams
Dr. Robert Ferl (left) and Dr. Anna-Lisa Paul (right), principal investigators of the University of Florida Space Plants Lab, outside the EDEN ISS growing module in Antarctica Photos courtesy of Dr. Anna-Lisa Paul
In The Future, Plants Could Play A Key Role in Space Exploration
An “earth ship” en route to Mars would need plants to sustain life by recycling air, water and human waste, and producing oxygen and food, says Dr. Robert Ferl, distinguished professor at the University of Florida (UF) and director of the university’s Interdisciplinary Center for Biotechnology Research.
“There is very much a realization that long-term space missions — anything that lasts more than a year or two years — it’s going to be hard to take enough good food,” Ferl says. “Biological reconditioning of all of our waste and nutrients, and production of food, is really a long-term, very realistic goal of the space exploration agenda.”
There is very much a realization that long-term space missions — anything that lasts more than a year or two years — it’s going to be hard to take enough good food."
— Dr. Robert Ferl
As one of the two principal investigators of the UF Space Plants Lab, Ferl, who works alongside the other principal investigator, Dr. Anna-Lisa Paul, focuses on genetically engineering plants and researching them in spaceflight. In February, he and Paul returned from a trip to the EDEN ISS growing module in Antarctica. They have been in parabolic flights in aircraft; sent plants to the International Space Station (ISS) and on the Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic suborbital flights; and, every summer from 2006 through 2012, worked at the Arthur Clarke Mars Greenhouse on the uninhabited, cratered and Red Planet-esque Devon Island in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago.
By sending plants to space and studying outer space’s impact on plants, scientists such as Ferl and Paul are trying to expand our knowledge of how plants can grow in extreme environments. Ferl says understanding how plants grow in space can improve our understanding of how they grow on Earth. And if humans need or choose to colonize Mars someday, it will help with that, too.
A budding interest in sending plants to space
Ferl became intrigued by sending plants to space because of what he calls a “pretty simple” progression of events. Working in molecular biology, he tries to understand how genes work, including which genes make some plants one color versus another, and what makes some plants survive while others die.
In the mid-1990s, Ferl was studying plant tolerance to flooding and flooding gene expression. Plants were being sent into space at the time and coming back, it appeared, stressed, almost as if they had been underwater. That is when Ferl became interested in working with the space program.
“Our proximity to the Kennedy Space Center and our interest in gene expression and plants in strange environments really all coalesced in the middle to late 1990s to suggest that we can learn a lot about plants — plant reactions to environmental conditions and plant productivity — by studying plants in space,” Ferl says. “And conversely, if we learned how to grow plants in space really well, we’d learn how to feed people on extended spaceflight environments.”
Seedlings growing on the International Space Station above EarthPhoto courtesy of Dr. Anna-Lisa Paul
Spaceflight experiments
Ferl is interested in questions addressing the limits of biology, such as if organisms can survive in space without gravity or other environmental conditions on Earth. He says it is a possibility that people will eventually colonize Mars, and by that point, astronauts will need to know how to use plants at their maximum potential.
“I’m really interested in asking the question, ‘How can we make our plants most beneficial to us, using every photon, using every electron of energy that’s produced by the system, every volume, every CO2 molecule and everything at the most efficient way possible?’” he says. “‘What can we do with plants, to plants or around plants to make them the most efficient biological life support system available?’”
In the early 2010s, Ferl and his colleagues used digital photograph imaging to watch Arabidopsis thaliana grow on the ISS, and they made an idiosyncratic discovery. Plant roots do something called “skewing,” where they find their way through soil and avoid objects, Ferl says. In his book “The Power of Movement in Plants,” Charles Darwin wrote that roots skew because of touching other objects. However, watching roots grow on the ISS, Ferl and other scientists found the roots skewing without gravity.
“In a very real sense, although not having to do with evolution, but still in a very real sense, we proved that Darwin was wrong,” Ferl says. “How many people can in their career say that they proved Darwin wrong? So, from a very simple observation of the directionality of root growth in space we changed the way that people have to think about root growth direction choices. I think that’s pretty cool.”
In researching how plants adapt to spaceflight, Ferl and his colleagues study processes such as gene expression in roots and leaves. They consider a stressful environment one where many genes in a plant must be activated, and a less stressful environment one where fewer genes must be activated. Responses to environmental stimuli may differ between plant varieties. “Can we select for varieties that grow well in microgravity?” Ferl asks. “Can we select for varieties that will do well in spaceflight vehicles?”
“What we’re learning, quite honestly, are some really interesting biochemical facts about that adaptive process,” he says. “One of them is, for example, that plants in the absence of gravity still know how to grow their roots away from their shoots. In other words, the shoots still grow to the light but actually the roots still grow down, away from the light, because they activate genes that let them light cues for determining that architecture, instead of gravity as the determinate.”
Inside the Future Exploration Greenhouse, part of the EDEN ISS project in AntarcticaPhoto courtesy of Dr. Anna-Lisa Paul
From ice sheet to orbit
In Antarctica, the German Aerospace Center (DLR) and other public and private organizations are growing produce in a module in Antarctica via the EDEN ISS project. There, agricultural engineers monitor photons of LED lights and amp hours of battery use to determine calorie count and feed people, Ferl says.
“Our role there is to use the kind of imaging and data collection that we use on the International Space Station to monitor plant development, and especially plant health, so that we can, as a remote science backroom, help troubleshoot any issues that the plants might have,” Ferl says. “[We can] help understand how plants might be adapting differently in that environment than they would here, and [figure out] how to maximize plant productivity in that highly closed, highly engineered environment that is truly dedicated to keeping people alive.”
Most of Ferl’s work involves Arabidopsis rather than ornamental crops or produce, but he says there are parallels between greenhouse production and the type of work he does. After all, commercial growers expect a lot out of their crops and need to understand how environment affects plant growth and health. Studying what growers and farmers do, and looking at natural processes on Earth, can influence scientists who research plants in space.
He asks: “What can we learn from the productivity of our farms, our fields, our forests, our ecology, that can help us drive towards a place where we maximize truly every photon of light coming in, every molecule of nutrient, and produce the least wasteful, most beneficial, food, fiber, water and oxygen available?” Greenhouse growers may help push space exploration ahead.