Next Step: A Board Of Directors

We've found 20 acres in east Greensboro.

We've found a potential design engineer with experience in Aquaponics.

The Guilford County Agricultural Extension Office is working with us and is willing to bring Aquaponics experts from NC State University.

I've located a nearby church that will rent us temporary office and classroom space until our own building is built. And it's only a 5 minute walk.

Our first corporate sponsor has pledged to help.

I've shown how Bessemer Aquaponics can become the biggest economic generator to come to Greensboro since Cone Mills.

We have a vision.

We have volunteers ready to work.

Grant money is available from the United States Department of Agriculture and possibly the North Carolina Department of Agriculture.

But without an active Board of Directors we are stuck on hold. We cannot form a 501 (3)c without a board. We cannot apply for grants without a board. And we cannot accept donations without an active board of directors.

Are you someone who can step-up, fill this void and actively work to build Bessemer Aquaponics thus bringing the Nation's first accredited Aquaponics school to Greensboro and make Greensboro a world leader in this emerging technology?

If yes then e-mail me at RecycleBill@gmail.com

And please, share this post with everyone you know.

Our First Corporate Sponsor

I'm happy to announce tonight that I've been able to secure sponsorship for Bessemer Aquaponics from Salvage America Inc., a locally owned and operated recycling company located at 3001 Holts Chapel Road in the Bessemer Community of east Greensboro.

Salvage America buys scrap metals and other recyclable materials from individuals and companies, has been in the community for 10 years, employs numerous local residents and is dedicated to our community's success.

Oh, and the dinosaur on the sign out front at Salvage America? The owner of the company has 3 young children who thought a dinosaur would be cool.

Good News!

As we get ready for our 3rd meeting tonight I'd like to bring you up to date on the latest happenings at Bessemer Aquaponics.

Bevan Suits, an industrial engineer and Aquaponics designer with AquaPlanet LLC has sent us an extensive proposal outlining in great detail how he can help design and build our system based on proven designs researched at NC State University.

I have secured temporary office and classroom space at Bessemer United Methodist Church within walking distance of our Bessemer Aquaponics site.


On Saturday I presented my ideas and vision before members of the Greensboro Partnership at The Forge. They seemed impressed and have already started advising me.

Our 3rd Meeting: Thursday May 21, 7:00 PM

We've got over 20 acres and so far all we've looked at is the parking lot. Come on out and let's do some exploring, see what's in the woods, if any of the old buildings and stables remain.

Wear long pants and real boots or shoes, be prepared to venture into the woods. Bring a canteen or a bottle of water. Go at your own risk.

When I was young there were Quonset huts and horses there but all you can see from the road is over 40 years of trees. I know who the horses belonged to but what happened to everything else? Are there buildings there we could use? Don't worry, we won't get lost, I used to play there as a child.

I've got lots of good news to tell you all.

You'll find us  in the empty field due west of the Guilford County Agricultural Extension Office 3309 Burlington Rd (Link to Google map: https://goo.gl/maps/P9cFn ) Thursday May 21, 7:00 PM

What Could Bessemer Aquaponics Do For Greensboro And The Piedmont Triad

Aquaponics has the power to put locally grown, quality organic food on Greensboro tables that might not otherwise get it. That alone should be enough to convince Greensboro, a city with over 23% poverty, the highest unemployment in the state of any comparable city and the hungriest population in the nation to jump at the chance to convert over 20 abandoned, County owned acres located slap dab in the middle of one of Greensboro's poorest neighborhoods into an Aquaponics school and production facility.

Sadly, that won't be enough to get our community to act. Sadly, in this town you've got to show people how they can profit before they'll extend a hand.

For those of you average citizens who are simply worried about getting quality produce at good prices:

"Production can occur year-round under a greenhouse or in a temperature-controlled enclosure.  This allows producers to market fresh produce during seasons when trucked-in produce is at their highest seasonal prices."

How about this, Greensboro developers, Aquaponics can fill your empty old buildings. All around the world what would have been abandoned buildings are being turned into Aquaponic farms.

For the downtown Greensboro restaurant owner: want the freshest ingredients possible year 'round to impress those Irving Park customers with money to spend and demanding tastes? Our location is 3 miles due east of downtown-- just follow East Market Street. The vegetables in the farmers market will never be as fresh and they don't sell fresh fish.

For the downtown business owner, no matter what type of business you own, wealthier Greensboro communities mean more people shop and do business downtown. Since 1957 the leaders of downtown Greensboro have waged war against Greensboro communities in the name of downtown development with the end result being a completely dysfunctional downtown development organization that forever remains in constant turmoil. When our communities thrive so will downtown.

For Greensboro's hotel and motel operators: Bessemer Aquaponics will be the first accredited Aquaponics school in the nation. Our goal is to bring 80 to 100 students a month from outside of Greensboro on top of those students who live locally. Those 80-100 students will need to sleep somewhere.

The creation of the nation's first accredited Aquaponics school in Greensboro would mean a boon for Greensboro's already established plastics, chemical, metal and machine industries as equipment, chemicals and parts would have to be made. Already Silicone Sealant, the only kind of sealant that can be used with live fish, is made in Greensboro and fish safe PVC pipe is made in Colfax.

With all the concern about food deserts and food insecurity the lucrative cut flower industry often gets forgotten. That's right, those imported roses and carnations you just bought for Mothers' Day could be grown using Aquaponics right here in Greensboro. From the Agricultural Marketing Resource Center:

"Cut flower imports in 2012 were valued at $615.7 million, a 30 percent drop from 2011. Colombia was the largest supplier of cut flowers, providing flowers valued at $480.1 million, a 15 percent decline from the previous year. Ecuador was another main supplier of cut flowers, followed by Mexico and Thailand.  (FAS)

Roses are the leading cut flower imported into the United States. In 2012 fresh rose imports were valued at $367.3 million. Imported fresh mums were valued at $128.9 million, and imported fresh carnations were valued at $82.5 million. In each case, Colombia was the largest supplier, and Ecuador was usually the second largest supplier.  (FAS)

Imported nursery products except for cut flowers were valued at $1.0 billion in 2012, jumping 51 percent from 2011. Canada was the largest supplier of imported nursery products, followed by the Netherlands and Colombia. All three countries experienced double digit or greater increases in the value of their U.S. sales.  (FAS)

Orchid plant imports in 2012 were valued at $65.3 million, decreasing 6 percent from 2011. Taiwan was the main supplier, followed by the Netherlands and Thailand. Flower bulbs continued to be supplied by the Netherlands. Tulip bulb imports totaled $52.0 million in 2012 and lily bulb imports totaled $29.7 million.  (FAS)"

That looks to me as if Greensboro could make major strides towards reducing our portion of the US Trade Deficit.

What about the increased property tax revenue the City and County would receive from the dozens, perhaps hundreds of business start-ups an emerging industry would generate? Isn't that the excuse our elected officials always use when passing out questionable incentive packages?

Bessemer Aquaponics is the regional solution to the problems of unemployment and food insecurity in the Piedmont Triad.

We have 20 acres. The Guilford County Agricultural Extension Service has agreed to bring in Aquaponics experts from NC State University. If we do it right the project will be eligible for grants from the United States Department of Agriculture. Now we need Greensboro to get behind the idea for Greensboro's sake. Please share, please tell your friends, please ask your elected representatives to act now.

Don't assume this is happening. It won't happen without your help.

Give Me Aquaponics Or Give Me Death!

"September 12, 1954: Greensboro is suffering from its first drought in modern history. Since water rationing hasn’t helped, the City Council hires a professional rainmaker who promises to produce rain in 60 days by seeding clouds with iodide crystals."
 
"October 15, 1954: Hurricane Hazel exacts a death toll in an eight-state area, but brings an end to an extreme drought in North Carolina and Greensboro."

California is now in its 4th year of drought. 12 million trees have died in California's national forests. The price of water and fines for wasting water are going up in California as water becomes more scarse.

The Colorado River no longer runs to the ocean as so much water is pumped off of it the river runs dry before it reaches the coast. Farmers in the California Delta are fighting with farmers to the south over who gets to use the water in the Delta-- who stays in business and who goes broke. The 100 square mile lake in Owens Valley has been pumped dry and is now a dust bowl.

Not only farmers but ordinary citizens and other businesses are at odds with one another over
"riparian rights." Some predict actual water wars as all the best laid plans of central planners crumble under Mother Nature's wrath.

But it's even worse than that. From Think Progress:

"In 2014, some 500,000 acres of farmland lay fallow in California, costing the state’s agriculture industry $1.5 billion in revenue and 17,000 seasonal and part time jobs. Experts believe the total acreage of fallowed farmland could double in 2015 — and that news has people across the country thinking about food security.

“When you look at the California drought maps, it’s a scary thing,” Craig Chase, who leads the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture’s Marketing and Food Systems Initiative at Iowa State University, told ThinkProgress. “We’re all wondering where the food that we want to eat is going to come from. Is it going to come from another state inside the U.S.? Is it going to come from abroad? Or are we going to grow it ourselves? That’s the question that we need to start asking ourselves.”

The California Central Valley, which stretches 450 miles between the Sierra Nevadas and the California Coast Range, might be the single most productive tract of land in the world. From its soil springs 230 varieties of crops so diverse that their places of botanical origin range from Southeast Asia to Mexico. It produces two thirds of the nation’s produce, and, like Atlas with an almond on his back, 80 percent of the world’s almonds. If you’ve eaten anything made with canned tomatoes, there’s a 94 percent chance that they were planted and picked in the Central Valley."

But there is hope. Maybe not for California but for the rest of us.

"But a lot of the things that California produces in such stunning numbers — tomatoes, lettuce, celery, carrots — can be grown elsewhere. Before the 20th century, the majority of produce consumed in the United States came from small farms that grew a relatively diverse number of crops. Fruit and vegetable production was regional, and varieties were dictated by the climate of those areas.

“There may be reason for the citrus and some of the nuts that are uniquely suited to the Mediterranean climate, but there’s no real reason that you have to produce all the fruits and vegetables. Those were grown other places before California came in,” John Ikerd, professor emeritus of Agricultural & Applied Economics University of Missouri Columbia, told ThinkProgress."

So why did it happen?

"Ikerd, who taught agricultural economics before becoming an advocate for sustainable farming, grew up in rural Missouri, where he estimates that the majority of the food he ate came from within 50 miles of his home. At that time, the Midwest was still covered with small and mid-sized farms growing a diverse portfolio of crops. Ikerd described a tomato cannery in the town where he grew up, built to process the tomatoes grown in the farms from the surrounding area. Orchards, too, were once plentiful throughout the Midwest, growing apples and fruit for markets both local and national.

But the tomato canneries and the orchards that Ikerd remembers have largely disappeared, replaced by fields upon fields of corn and soybeans, commodity crops that government subsidies help make the quickest, fastest way to profit in the Midwest. From 1996 until the most recent version of the Farm Bill, farmers that grew commodity crops like corn and soil were actually prohibited from also growing specialty crops like fruits and vegetables on their land. Anyone who grew a specialty crop on land meant for subsidized commodity crops would have to forfeit their subsidy and pay a penalty equal to the market value of whatever specialty crop they grew, a policy that did little to discourage farmers in the Midwest from becoming large producers of one or two commodity crops. The U.S. government spent almost $84.5 billion dollars subsidizing corn between 1995 and 2012, and a good portion of corn crops does not make it to a plate, instead used as ethanol or feed for livestock. 

Of the corn that is intended for consumption, much of it ends up as high fructose corn syrup, which is now so ubiquitous it encourages maximizing the yield of corn at the expense of agricultural diversity. From 2002 to 2012, the amount of land dedicated to growing the nation’s top 25 vegetables fell from 1.9 million acres to 1.8 million. In the same amount of time, corn production grew from 79 million acres to 97 million.

“The deeper people look at it, they’ll see it’s a deeper part of the whole,” Ikerd says. “It’s not just a California drought problem, it’s a problem with our whole food system.”

I encourage you to read the entire article.

But there is good news for Greensboro. Last night a reporter from  O.Henry Magazine, there to do a story for their July issue listened in and asked questions as a small group of people met on the grounds of what we hope will someday be the nation's first accredited Aquaponics production and teaching facility where people can actually learn how to build and run Aquaponics systems that produce 6 times as much food per acre while using less than 2% of the water of traditional agriculture.

Guilford County Agricultural Extension Interim Director Karen Neill and Extension Agent John Ivey answered questions about Aquaponics and explained the Ag Service's roll in the project including helping to bring in Aquaponics experts from North Carolina State University.

And we'll not have to worry about the weather as Aquaponics is practiced indoors.

Please, spread the word, get involved, change our city for the better and give your children the world you never had.

Aquaponics For Vegans and Vegetarians

Some Vegans and Vegetarians might be deterred from getting involved with Aquaponics because Aquaponics involves raising fish for food but Vegans and Vegetarians shouldn't let that keep them away. You see, there's no rule that says the fish must be eaten. Some Aquaponics growers raise more expensive exotic fish that are sold for pets. Others who are simply practicing Aquaponics as a hobby or to feed themselves and their families the healthiest fruits and vegetables just keep the same fish until they die from old age.

You could be raising Goldfisk, Koi, Oscars, Betta, Tetra, Molly, Guppies or no telling what other kinds of fish. Even giant catfish and turtles if you build it right.

You see, the fish convert fish food into organic fertilizer for the fruits and vegetables and in turn the plants filter the toxins out of the water to keep it safe for the fish. The way Mother Nature intended just more intense through the use of technology.

That brings us to another possibility for Bessemer Aquaponics. If the members and board of directors wanted to go this route we could open the world's first Aquaponic Aquarium open to the public.

The water from the aquarium could be piped to a greenhouse where the plants are grown separately. This would allow filling the greenhouse with CO2 at night to speed up plant growth without adversely affecting the health of fish or people.

And an Aquarium in the neighborhood, even a relatively small Aquarium, would go a long ways toward making East Greensboro a better place to live. Maybe children could get in free so they've always a safe place to go and learn.

Isn't it time Greensboro had a few firsts?

Our second meeting of Bessemer Aquaponics will be on Wednesday, May 6, 2015, 7:00 PM in the 20 acre empty field due west of the Guilford County Agricultural Extension Office 3309 Burlington Rd (Link to Google map: https://goo.gl/maps/P9cFn ) Long time residents will recognize it as the former location of the Polio Hospital and a nursing home both torn down about 40 years ago and left vacant ever sense.

What To Bring: a folding chair unless you prefer to stand. Friends.

Who is invited? Everyone who is interested in creating jobs and bringing quality food to Greensboro.

Another Reason To Join Us

 Our second meeting of Bessemer Aquaponics will be on Wednesday, May 6, 2015, 7:00 PM in the empty field due west of the Guilford County Agricultural Extension Office 3309 Burlington Rd (Link to Google map: https://goo.gl/maps/P9cFn ) Long time residents will recognize it as the former location of the Polio Hospital and a nursing home both torn down about 40 years ago and left vacant ever sense.

What To Bring: a folding chair unless you prefer to stand. Friends.

Who is invited? Everyone who is interested in creating jobs and bringing quality food to Greensboro.

From WFMY TV2:

Before you buy frozen white fish, there is something 2 Wants To Know wants you to know about it
Posted by WFMY News 2 on Wednesday, April 22, 2015