61
FARM
URBAN
You said you’d extended a scheme with
local school pupils working on their own
systems – what have the next generation
been coming up with?
PM The UTC, which is the building we’re
in now, has a school above us, and we’ve
worked with them for the past four years.
The first ever aquaponics system we built
is the double helix design that’s in their
reception. That was part of a twelve week
programme where students learnt what
aquaponics, urban farming is , why it’s
important, and then they designed that
system and we built it with them.
That’s now evolved into a twelve week
enterprise program where we teach
the kids about startups. What a startup
business is, what’s an eco-startup, what’s
a social enterprise, and they form their
eco-enterprise, learn about project
management, how to be a managing
director, marketing, finance, sales, and
then they have to design their own
aquaponics system.
We give them a £1 000 equipment
bundle, which is largely equipment that
the police have donated to us from the
cannabis dismantling team. So we’ve got
these kids repurposing this equipment,
designing, and building these systems in
order to solve food security issues.
Do you get much donated equipment from
the police? A lot of hackspaces would
jump at the chance to get free stuff from
their local constabulary.
PM They’ve donated a lot to us, to the point
where we’ve said we need to find homes
for all of this now. We started off getting
the old sodium lightbulbs, 600 W ones, but
luckily the cannabis growers cottoned on
to LED technology, so we’re getting some
really nice energy-efficient lights. We give
them away with the systems that we put
into schools, and the kids here are using
them to build their own systems. We’re
just launching schemes at the end of
February, we’re going to roll that project out
to ten schools across Liverpool, so they’ll
all be competing against each other to
come up with the best business and the
best aquaponics system made out of this
equipment. We’ll have a Dragons’ Den-style
pitching competition at the end.
Do you use any smart devices?
JENS We do have one called the Water Elf.
It was developed by a team at Sheffield
University, a mix of academics, a professor
called Hamish Cunningham, and a little
group of hackers. You’ve got an Arduino
Uno and a board with various sensors on
it. It connects to WiFi and you can use that
to connect your computer or an online
database. It collects data, then pushes that
data to it.
It’s got pH, temperature, light sensors,
and you can also link it to a Raspberry Pi,
so that allows them to do stuff like link
a webcam so you can have a webcam
monitoring the fish and the plants.
One of our collaborators at the
University of Liverpool, Iain Young, has
done some work using a standard webcam,
doing a kind of artificial intelligence
project to monitor the fish and to track
whether they’re unwell, whether they’re
behaving unusually.
And one really cool project is, they’re
getting the fish to feed themselves. At one
end the tank itself is quite well laid out, it’s
got plants, it’s somewhere the fish want
to be. In contrast, the bit where they get
fed is horrible. It’s bare, the fish don’t like
going there. There’s just nothing. But they
realised that’s where they go to get fed. The
webcam monitors them and when there
are enough fish in the area, it feeds them,
but only then. Otherwise you feed the fish
and you’re never quite sure whether you’ve
given them enough, but this way the fish
tell you, because when they’re hungry they
swim into that end, so they only get fed
when they’re hungry.
We’ve done a little bit of work with
Daresbury Laboratory on the Pi Sense and
Python to do a similar job with a different
technology stack. And that’s quite nice,
because it comes with Python embedded
in it. With the Arduino you have to learn
a sort of sub-set of C, so it’s a little bit
tricky, whereas Python’s a sort of de facto
language that everybody uses.
It’s so easy for us to extend and develop
that, but also if we want to take it into
schools or use it in education, chances
are that the kids are already going to
know Python.
PM That’s probably the next step for us
with the Produce Pod: add the sensor rig
and the kids to run their own experiments.
See how light levels affect plant growth,
see how the water temperature affects
the fish growth rate; there’s a whole raft of
experiments that can be done.
Above
Lettuce and
parsley don’t
travel well, so
they’re perfect
for home
growing
