Bill here.
We're in a car driving from Santa Cruz down to Watsonville to go visit and aquaponics
place.
I'm here with my family.
There's my kid, my mom, there's my dad.
What's the name of the place we're going to?
Do you know it dad?
Viridis.
Viridis?
Okay, Viridis Aquaponics.
It's run by Drew?
Drew Hopkins, and I don't know the other fellow.
Okay, Drew Hopkins.
So, we're going to meet up with Drew Hopkins.
Miles, do you know what aquaponics is?
No?
Okay, well, I think you're going to find out.
Alright.
See y'all.
My name is Curtis White.
I've been here with the Viridis project from day 1.
Fantastic.
I'm Nick Kaufman, and I do education and outreach here at Viridis.
Awesome.
Fantastic.
Well, let's take a look.
Really everything we've got is over here.
This is a fish tank.
It's a 600-gallon tank.
We've got White Pacific Sturgeon in here.
I'll try and wrangle one up.
There you go Miles.
Whoa.
These guys are about 8 months old.
We'll sell them off when they're about 30 to 50 pounds each to be harvested for their
meat.
But for now, we feed them and they metabolize that food and as they metabolize that they
excrete waste.
You mean they poop.
They poop.
There in there, they're pooping up a storm.
Basically fish excrete about 80% pure liquid, pure liquid ammonia, and then the rest comes
out as a solid and that's really what has all your sulfur, potassium, magnesium and
everything.
They excrete all their waste in here and then it's a series, these two barrels which are
a series of biological filtration.
Basically these are designed to catch any solids and give them a place to be broken
down by the bacterial processes.
We rely on what are called nitrifying bacteria.
A couple classes, Nitrosomonas and Nitrobacter bacteria that actually convert the ammonia
that the fish produce.
They convert it first to nitrites and then into nitrates.
Both ammonia and nitrites are really toxic to fish so that's why in a conventional aquaculture
system essentially you have a pond and when it starts to go fowl you simply drain off
half the water and refill it with pure water.
In an aquaponic system we never drain that water off.
We simply have bacteria that converts the ammonia and nitrite into a bioavailable form
of nitrogen for plants.
Then the plants actually absorb the nitrates.
They remove it from the water and clean it for the fish.
Basically after it hits these two filtration barrels the water passes through what is called
a wicking bed.
If you can imagine the water is passing through these beds actually only about right here.
Below that it's just gravel and above that it's a later of soil.
You can imagine the waterline is right at the base of the soil so it's just kissing
the bottom of the soil.
Then if you've ever dipped a paper towel into water and you see it wick its way up, we utilize
the capillary action to maintain a constant level of moisture in our soil so even just
an inch down it's nice and moist and cool, but it's not wet.
The soil is never saturated so it's ideal for root vegetables, carrots, beets, onions,
garlic, things that would be really susceptible to an excess of water if they were ever waterlogged.
It's great for peppers.
I mean, obviously we've got chard and kale that are just doing great.
So, it will go through the wick bin and at the end underground we have it piped over
into these what are called deep water culture beds.
This is our primary growing method here.
It's about a 1 foot deep channel of water, 4 feet wide.
We grow directly into these floating rafts.
The roots just dangle straight into the water.
It also makes the ease of harvest, transplant, seeding really easy.
We feed directly into these plugs.
When they have roots that start to protrude we'll actually just pop it right in just like
that.
Essentially there is no transplant shock, no lapse in growth.
It also allows us to have seeding and transplanting be like a one or two person job instead of
an entire operation.
Okay, we need to do the test.
Hey, Miles, how's the basil?
Good.
Is it fantastic?
You want a second bite?
Is it good enough for a second bite?
Alright, cool.
Do you use an IT system to support this?
How do you know when the chemical composition of the water is right or whatever, or is that
like dipping a stick in?
We have electronic monitors for everything here.
Right now it's all manually done.
Once a day we do electronic testing and then once a week with reagent-based testing just
to double check that our electronic probes are still functioning like they should.
All the temperature controls and everything here in the greenhouse, that's all run by
computer.
Essentially as soon as it hits 78 degrees in here the roof vents will open.
As soon as it gets below that they will close.
The entire day they're opening, they're closing.
It will actually be totally independent because that side of the greenhouse gets hit with
sunlight much earlier in the morning than this side so it will usually heat up a lot
faster.
When I was a little kid man, the first sign of a sore throat or a cough mom would whisk
us off to the doctor for a shot in the bum of antibiotics, right?
Nowadays we know that we need some of this biology that's inside us to help us digest
our meals and our immune system, our immune function.
Some of that is biology that's on us, and if we kill everything we become immediate
hosts to all kinds of other things if we lose all our protection.
The same thing happens with this system.
Instead of sterilizing our system all the time which makes it susceptible for all kinds
of new residents, we nurture the biology.
We're looking forward to this water becoming older and older and older because things show
up in there that are beneficial, and that's what we're nurturing is beneficial bacterias.
That's why we drink kombucha and probiotics.
All those things are part of the age today where we start to respect the helpful biologies.
I need more coffee.
Our neighbors here in this valley which is the most abundant valley in America, the salad
bowl, Salinas Valley, is where 95% of the lettuce in America comes from.
Third generation farmers here will tell you that they grow a head of lettuce per square
foot two times a year.
They turn their crops once, twice, and then winter is here again.
Two heads of lettuce per square foot for a year compared to our 60 per square foot per
year.
So, inside this 10 acres we grow a million heads of lettuce a month.
To do that out there requires 450 acres once.
When you consider the amount of water that is going on that mud as those seeds are taking
hold, the amount of tractors that are tilling that land, the harvesters that are breaking
their backs down low, the pesticides, the fertilizers, everything, none of which we
use in here.
Look, there is no dirt, there are no furrows, there are no sprinklers.
We use 99% less water than they do because ours is all preserved and we have hundreds
of times the yield.
This is the agriculture of the future.
One thing I asked your colleagues but I was wondering on your thoughts on it as well,
and Viridis have other thoughts on it since the course is focusing on information technology,
they were mentioning to me a couple of the ways that IT features into the system as you
currently have it.
Do you have a sense for how might information technology be used over the next 10 or 20
years in an endeavor like this?
Oh, man, dramatically.
One of the fortunate things we're looking at is we caught the eye of NASA.
Williams Research Center has offered us something called the Space Act Agreement where we will
have a co-collaborative effort in the sciences.
They want to study the nitrification process and the feasibility of growing food in space
for the space station and further exploration, as well as just humanity on earth.
We have a great deal of impact happening in agriculture.
NASA is putting 14 scientists in a laboratory here on this site to perform data collection
and study why this is working so well.
That science will be shared by us and them.
What we're looking forward to immediately in information technology is a way to test
our water and the production cycles, the nitrification processes, what happens to the mineralization
of elements in the soils being able to be uptaken by plants, the oxygen levels, the
dissolved oxygen in the tank, the pH levels in the tank.
There are so many things that we need to test for, and we have dramatic massive catastrophic
failures when that occurs.
We have an acre of water here and if chemically something happens we lose a massive crop so
we have to monitor consistently.
That monitoring needs to happen minute by minute wirelessly and be sent to our phones,
and this is Viridis 1 of thousands.
We're going to put thousands of these all over the world.
We need this modernized and wired.
In this house we really have our chard, kale, cucs, a substantial amount of tomatoes introduction,
mostly Cherokee Purple and a few other varieties.
After time these sprouts will actually spiral around these buckets because they grow so
long.
It's kind of like weaving almost.
We already have tomatoes going on here.
They're braided together.
These are all indeterminant tomatoes so essentially as long as they have the right conditions
they will keep growing and keep growing and keep growing.
We'll let these get to be like 25 even 50 feet long before they'll really start to have
diminishment in the amount of fruit set.
I only come down a few days a week and these were transplanted two weeks ago, these cucumbers.
Now they're producing fruit.
They were maybe 6 to 8 inches tall each and now they're well over a foot and a half, two
feet tall each.
They're producing cucumbers.
They're really just an idea of the rapid growth that we experience on this farm.
We're beyond organic.
Organic has 226 different pesticides that are approved for use on organic produce.
We didn't want to stoop to that.
We can use none.
Everything in our system has to be digestible.
We have to be to feed that to our kids to spray it on our plants because otherwise it
will kill the fish or the bacteria which must be protected so we can use no fertilizers.
UC Santa Cruz, hippie college of California and the growers of the world, understand what
we are talking about and they are pretty enthused about our products.
It didn't take but two tours from the procurement department and then the entire dining staff,
which 20 more will be here tonight on a tour, they gave us a beautiful food purchasing contract
for thousands of dollars and that's just to supply all of the lettuce, tomatoes, any specialty
goods.
Anything we grow we're first in line now at UC Santa Cruz over the food service contracts.
Now we've been contacted by the Office of the President of the UC Association and are
looking at a similar contract for the entire UC network to be able to provide this beautiful
food to all the students at UC.
Awesome.