CAN (ON): Students grow all sorts of veg through aquaponics
Truth be told, aquaponic growing is a bit more complicated than that — but not too much, if you start small, says Nason, who teaches at Notre Dame Catholic Secondary School near Guelph Line and Dundas Street in Burlington.
"In the initial stages … we used a bathtub for the fish," he explained, standing beside his now-expanded system in the high school's bustling greenhouse. "A lot of it is visual perception and basic knowledge. It doesn't have to be sophisticated knowledge."
"It uses 95 per cent less water than a traditional agriculture system and grows five to 20 times the crops that we could on land," says Lyn Bravo of Green Relief, a 30,000-square-foot medical marijuana facility in Flamborough that uses aquaponic growing. Bravo is the organization's operations consultant and responsible person in charge — a title stemming from the government's marijuana licensing process.
Before getting its federal approval to grow marijuana, Green Relief started as a vegetable farm, producing kale, Swiss chard, beets, tomatoes, hops, lettuce, watercress, radishes, spinach and herbs for more than a year. The company still grows lettuce and kale for water filtration in between cannabis crops.
While Bravo's company is a massive operation with several employees, Nason's classroom rig is a simple system run largely by his students.
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