Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

I'd be interested if I can get free when you need me.
I have many years of heavy construction under my belt, concrete and underground utilities. roadway construction mainly. Can run all kinds of equipment although its been a while.
Mainly a desk jockey these days.

tell me TCLynx was the pickle electrified with HV?

is that the same pickle im thinkin bout B1

HV?

Don't try this at home kids,

The other half took a bit of light cord and stripped out the end, used nails or paper clips to wire the ends of the pickle to the wires, then plugged the thing into the wall socket. It made noise and bounced around a little as it lit up and flashed. Did I mention the other half is an entertainment electrician.

If you could target an AP/permaculture solution to the mega slums like Kibera, Soweto (in your backyard SM, haha Backyard AP) or outside Rio using humanure, peeponics, AP, etc. it could make a big impact in an area that could really use some help. Lots of nutrients available there.

In my personal experience an aid worker in West Africa and SE Asia this sort of thing in the 80's was a routine way of connecting electricity from a mobile generator to whatever pumps, equipment etc you needed to connect to. Why bother travelling for 5 hours to get a plug? Fuses ? RCCB safety swithches? Forget it!. A few strands of wire wrapped around a couple of nails will do the job perfectly!

Delivering aid is often not a romantic picnic!

But the good you do if you are lucky stays with you. The kind poor villagers often give you their hearts. (Often that is all they have to give!)

Gunshots, mortar fire and threat of raids from opposing factions. Seeing children sold.

Prolonged galloping squits and vomiting due to poor hygene...

village politics...

Would it be worth alerting organizations such as FAO, Oxfam, World vision, red cross or other international organisations etc regards your intentions and goodwill?

These organisations are experienced and can help you to do what you want to do. These organisations have many years of experience regards getting aid to needy, lots of contacts and could save you loads of heartache!

There is nothing worse than being in an aid situation, giving all, and finding that you have been ripped off, petrol tank has been regularly siphoned or that someone sees you as an easy target because you really do care.

Aid reciprients in certain countries often see novice aid personnel coming and milk them for all they can get. Novices are easy targets (and easy spotted!) for the guys that are out to make an easy profit. Their survival or lifestyle often depends on it. Other times it is just greed!

May I suggest that you consult with experienced people in order that your aid is well targetted.

Just my 2 cents worth having been exposed to this in remote aid situations.

Regards

Would I do it again?

U bet!

Johnnie

Luckily Synaptoman is already (at least to some extent) working with authorities.

I know that stuff like humanure, pee ponics, aquaponics, and permaculture could all play a huge role in improving the life, nutrition, health, sanitation, etc but it is amazing how hard it is to get many of these ideas going. Perhaps part of the problem is that people in these poor slum areas are too busy looking at the lifestyles of the industrialized world and thinking "why should I go back to farming when all those people have to do is sit around watching TV."

Far easier to get people already functioning in an agricultural society to take on these agricultural innovations.

Giving Aid doesn't necessarily help much, sharing ideas and methods may so long as they can be put to use with locally available reasonably priced or free materials.

I have training in picking up landmines if that means anything?
You know because that sort of skill is always coming in handy working with fish....

If we go to Bosnia, I want Don the fish feeder to go with us!!!!!

Don ,, ( tongue in cheek ) , The training course for picking up mines is only approximately 3 minutes. I think the trick is picking the blinking things up without them going BANG ( this I believe is a very intensive training course).

The Sierre Leone project seems the most promising at this stage. Not a very pleasant country, but they do have 2 functioning Tilapia hatcheries and a custom of farming fish in earth ponds. I normally use the CIA World Fact book to research countries and the entry for this country is here => https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/sl.html

Rather depressing reading. I will try and arrange a trip there once things move along a bit. Our mesh pond supplier in Johannesburg has installed two large Tilapia growout facilities in Lusaka, Zambia and I would like to go and look at this as well to see how a similar plan could be incorporated into our plans. It's basically a 20m x 30m pre-fabricated raceway system that folds up into a container and then just gets assembled on site. You put the Tilapia in at the one side and harvest at the other with no handling or size-sorting of the fish in between. I envisage long earth channels running away from this for growbeds and then a way of pumping water back up to the raceway. I am trying to get an image of this system to post here.

It will be community based, ie a village of 100-200 will run it for own consumption or resale of produce.

They have a good harbour at Freetown so we'd ship a container from South Africa straight to this point and then truck it further.

I want to stress that these projects are commercial ventures, that is even if sponsored by Aid agencies, we are working on a strictly commercial basis and will be paid accordingly. We will not be Aid Workers but skilled contractors hired to design, install and train.

With years of civil conflict, mine clearing may just be a very useful skill !!

Thoughts along these lines ??

I hope you succeed in this.

As a newbie I can only watch now.

I like this very much, as I have some philanthropic tendencies too.

Good luck you all!!

You would be surprised how much of it is outsmarting the person who put it there in the first place. Even big dumb AT mines can be made rather nasty with an anti-handle device.

3 basic tips though....
1) go where the locals go. If they avoid an area don't go there.
2) find out how they mark mines in that area. If its a stack of rocks, keep an eye out for stacks of rocks. Or it could be a tripod of sticks or cuts on a tree... anyway theres usually a marking to warn friendlys.
3) Unless you know the type and have trained on it, leave it the hell alone!!!

Sorry to take the topic off track there, was a throw away comment. But I do have training on finding and picking them up. I would want a nice refresher course on the common types in the area beforehand but I was serious. Mines don't scare me as much as they should.
+1 for enthusiasm
-1 for common sense

Are vaccinations required when traveling to Sierre Leone? I have never traveled outside the use, other than a quick trip across the river.

You picked one helluva place to start!!!! 6 million people in an area the size of North Carolina, less than 8% farmable land, slash and burn agriculture, soil exhaustion, 50% of the population in subsistance agriculture and 70% living below the poverty line.
But it sounds like a perfect place for aquaponics.
So far in my priliminary research, there are a few things we will need to address.
Excessive rain- 195" a year- adding an overflow to the system is easy but unless we can cover with plastic, this is seriouly going to dilute the nutrients- we can ramp up fish production just before rainy season and we can make sure that we capture all availabe nutrients with self cleaning tanks. The other thing we can do is plant young plants at the beginning of the system and as they reach maturity, place them lower in the sytem. The reason for this is that young plants need the most nutrition and they can actually fix more nutrients than they require, so later when the nutrients are less in the system, the plants still have some reserve.
Sand storms- we will need a wind break of some sort to protect plants, especially if we plant in gravel. Topography of the location will also come into play here. Constant and/or severe winds, especially with sand will cause havoc with our system.
Freshwater snails- this is a big one that we need to consider, the snails are the intermediate host for the parasitic disease schistosomiasis (Bilharzia) and is very common in this area.
Quote from Wikipedia-
Civil engineers from the 1950s onwards unwittingly caused a massive increase in the debilitating water borne infection schistosomiasis (Bilharzia) for locals as a result of irrigation schemes that lacked simple low cost counter-measures built in, simply because they had no knowledge of these counter-measures. A decade later the UN publishes guidelines explaining these cheap counter measures and how they should be necessary to built-in to the structures of the irrigation schemes.
The civil engineers were victims of the relevance paradox because they only thought they needed to know about concrete, water flows, etc. and not how to restrict velocities to prevent the snail species which carried the disease from multiplying.
Charnock, Anne (1980) Taking Bilharziasis out of the irrigation equation. New Civil Engineer, 7 August. Bilharzia caused by poor civil engineering design due to ignorance of cause and prevention.

We need to get a hold of the UN guidelines and incorporate this into our system so that WE don't add to the problem.
Rats- rats carry a virus for Lassa fever, another common disease in this area. The virus is shed through droppings and urine and sometimes even air-borne partacles. It sounds similar to the Hanta virus here in the U.S. that is shed from field mice.
The disease is transmitted through direct contact with rat by-products, touching objects that are contaminated, eating contaminated food or through cuts and sores and even when the rat is used as a food source. It can also be transmitted from an infected person by body fluids but not through casual contact.
Both of these animals are going to be naturally attracted to our system. There is some mention that crayfish could be used to control the snail population but rats are difficult.
The agricultural products mentioned will not work in our system, although we could possilbly use a drain to waste with Tilapia broodstock for a rice patty. We need more research on local diet. Additionally alot of the country is being mined, this may/may not work to our advantage.
Have they given you any idea as to what location they are planning to put these system? The terrain is very diverse in such a small area and the mangroves caught my eye- there are systems being developed for aquaculture that uses the ocean's natural tidal waves and mangroves as the filtration system. Of course, these systems are saline or brackish, not freshwater but again, maybe something we could incorporate- rice can grow in brackish water and Tilapia have been known to tolerate 100% ocean water, although other fish might be of better use here.
Also posting pictures of the tanks you talked about would be of great help in system designing.