FA RM

URBAN

Farm Urban

INTERVIEW

56

First of all, why aquaponics? The Produce

Pod is incredibly neat, but what’s the

problem that it’s supposed to solve?

PM The Produce Pod is part of a solution

to the fact that the way most food is

produced currently is inefficient and

unsustainable, and a lot of the food we’re

encouraged to consume is bad for us.

That’s what Farm Urban in general is

trying to combat.

More sustainable food production,

more sustainable food distribution,

and engaging people in healthier food

choices. So actually for us, the Produce

Pod does all three of those. On the first

two, production and distribution, on a

very small scale, because you can do it

in your home. But where we’ve seen the

most power is in behavioural change and

attitudes towards food.

The story I always use, and

I’ll say it again because its

really important, is that my

daughter – who’s two and

a half... I was trying to get

her to drink kale smoothies

and eat salad but she wasn’t

interested whatsoever. Then

I put one of the systems in

development — it looked

like crap, it was a first iteration — in the

kitchen. My daughter took an interest in

the fish and she wanted to feed them. The

leaves growing on the plants; she wanted

to touch them, smell them, pick them,

and it engaged her with her food. And

now we make these super juices, so we

harvest the leaves, put them in a blender

with an apple and some honey, and it’s

the same green frothy liquid that I was

trying to get her to drink before but now

she’s interested, because she’s connected

to her food, she’s interested, she’s named

the fish, she knows them. She’s smelt

and seen the herbs grow. And so that’s

what we’ve really got with the Produce

Pod: putting those systems into schools

and community groups and developing

a whole workshop around that so people

can actually build a system themselves;

and then keep it in the school or the

community centre.

Right, so that will be why you’ve got

similar systems installed at Alder Hey

Children’s Hospital.

PM The systems in Alder Hey are much

larger, bespoke systems with glass fish

tanks and some commercial NFT (nutrient

film technique) hydroponics above that.

But again, its the same farm-to-fork

principle. The kids there climb all over the

systems; they want to smell and taste the

leaves, so when it gets presented to them

on a plate they saw it grow, they watched

it being planted, and they’ve got that

relationship with the food.

It’s amazing how many adults we know

who will only eat beige. Nuggets, fish

fingers, no veg at all.

PM We do a lot of outreach events and they

came over and we give away smoothies

that we’ve made. We say “beige is bad,

green is good”. It’s simple. Just follow that

rule, eat less beige, eat more green.

There are fish in the bottom of the tank

producing fertiliser for the plants. Is the

aim eventually to turn the fish themselves

into a food source?

PM Aquaponics in general, yes you could.

Its a really sustainable efficient way to

produce protein in cities. But I’ve not eaten

any of the fish out of the produce pods, you

get too attached; you name them.

Up to now, all the fish we’ve used have

been ornamental, but certainly in the

future as we scale up and use larger spaces

we would look to scale up and consume

the fish. In all the systems we’ve done up to

now we’ve used Goldfish and Koi carp. The

waste they produce is fertilising the plants.

Essentially they’re providing a free organic

fertiliser. Whereas if you were to eat the

fish you’d also get a protein source from

the fish as well as the plants.

I notice you’ve open-sourced the design of

this system. Why?

PM When Jens and I first started, we

googled around aquaponics and found all

sorts of YouTube videos where people were

plumbing together old bathtubs and water

tanks, and we had a go at that ourselves,

but we made lots of mistakes. We realised

that you need an awful lot of knowledge

to be able to assemble what could be

a relatively simple system, and there

wasn’t a uniform, readily available design

anywhere. That’s when we decided that

we wanted to make something

that’s affordable, accessible,

and scalable out of components

that are readily available in a

large part of the world.

Then it was just a case of

experimenting, trial and error

with different components.

And we came up with the

Produce Pod.

How long did it take you to reach

that point?

PM It was an iterative process over

between six months and a year. Just little

tweaks here and there. It was a trip to

Ikea, seeing the storage bins and thinking

actually, they’re cheap, there’s plenty of

them, they don’t look too bad, they fit

together quite nicely, the proportions, for

a fish tank and a grow bed for the plants,

and then just various ways of putting the

plumbing together, so the plumbing is just

from Screwfix or B&Q.

Can you talk us though the actual

mechanism? How does the Produce

Pod work?

PM So we’ve got the top tank, the smaller

tank with about a 30 litre volume, and

that’s the grow bed. We fill that with

”

We decided that we wanted

to make something that’s

affordable, accessible, and

scalable out of components

that are readily available

”