Aquaculture and aquaponics on a family-sized scale in Maui, Hawaii. They are growing mainly tilapia whose waste they filter out and use to grow food plants.
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Joanne in Northeast Seattle (she gets some help from the community) converts her front lawn into a food-growing garden. She talks about and shows us the various steps in the process.
A look at Ozark Forest Mushrooms,a family owned 18,000 shiitake log farm located in the Missouri Ozarks Big Springs region.
“Short piece from CNN featuring bicycle trucking company and delivery service, New Amsterdam Project”
Danny Rhodes of Desert Fungi in Velarde, New Mexico gives us a detailed tour of his greenhouse mushroom farm operation. I found the wet wall/swamp cooler system he rigged to control the temperature in his mushroom growing greenhouse in the summer especially interesting. Danny produces between 100-150 lbs of Oyster, Shiitake, and Lion’s Mane Mushrooms per week, most of which he sells at the Santa Fe Farmer’s Market and direct to local restaurants.
A look at the Lundberg Family Farms’ rice growing operation in California. I had no idea that they sow rice from the air.
On the Isbell Family Rice Farm in Arkansas they grow a Japanese variety of rice called Koshihikari for export to that country.
Christian Richard, a rice farmer in Louisiana balances growing rice and raising crayfish.
This video has us meeting the Simonsens, in Nebraska, who grow sorghum. They use no-till rotational planting. They mill sorghum flour themselves and sell it direct through mail order. The grit left over from the milling gets fed to their livestock.
This was a really interesting entry. Here several Navajo students from Paul McCarl’s class at the Whitehorse High School in Montezuma Creek, Utah present their solar cooker projects.
Especially interesting is a Fresnel lens cooker the students built in order to be able to fry the popular Southwest fry bread.
As one of the student notes, you don’t see too many solar cookers that will fry.
The students introduce themselves in Navajo and then go on and explain their projects.
This mini documentary is a bit rough because it’s old and grainy and in German (narration) and French with English subtitles, but it is worth watching because of the amazing energy innovation it shows.
“Jean Pain – A French innovator who developed a compost based bio energy system that produced 100% of his energy needs. He heated water to 60 degrees celsius at a rate of 4 litres a minute which he used for washing and heating. He also distilled enough methane to run an electricity generator, cooking elements, and power his truck. This method of creating usable energy from composting materials has come to be known as Jean Pain Composting, or the Jean Pain Method.”
Will Allen walks us through the Growing Power farm operation in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. They use vertical growing techniques to maximize yields and growing space for vegetables and mushrooms and they also produce tilapia (in heated tanks) and yellow perch (a lake fish that can no longer be fished for in many places because of contamination) in unheated tanks. The greenhouse producing all of this food is heated by compost.
The Real Know How 