In September of 2010 I was invited to vist a branch of our organisation in Pontianak, West Borneo. While I was there I became interested in the community development work they were doing in some of the remote villages of West Borneo.
Many of these villagers are rice farmers. Growing rice is very labour intensive and most of these farmers work 7 days a week just to survive. Our team in Pontianak have been blessed with a large property and they are using that land to trial growing different types of vegetables. They are also using converted rice fields to raise fish. Their aim is to understand what works and what doesn’t so they can introduce farmers in the villages to alternative crops that have been tried and tested.
In my discussions with the team.in Pontianak I became aware of some of the difficulties they were facing with water quality in their fish farming program. On my return to Australia I began to do some research into these issues. It was during this research that I came across the idea of aquaponics.
As I began to study aquaponics in greater depth discovered that there are a number of people all over the world who are seriously looking at using Aquaponics as a means of helping 3rd world countries tackle the problem of food shortage. One such group is called Revalesiois. They are working in conjunction with The University of the nations in Kona, Hawaii. They have a large aquaponics system that feeds aproximately 100 people The following website has a very good video that showcases the Kona System as well giving a clear explanation as to how aquaponics works.http://foodmachine.org/about/
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