Every Friday we start the day by harvesting. We pull the lettuce from our systems, we bag and weigh it. If we plan to deliver to the cafeteria that day, we weigh all the lettuce from each system to see if we have the 10 pounds we need. We also add new plants to the system and plant seeds so that we will have plants ready every week. During the week, we have a lot of work to do in order for the fish/lettuce to have what it needs to grow and for the fish to be happy.
When a water change needs to happen it takes two people in order to make it easier. There is teamwork needed in a lot of things we do. When we arrive in the morning and are doing system work there has to be communication. If not you could repeat stuff you've already done or forget that some things have to get done.
When testing, we may come across having a bad test result. Majority of the time it's always the PH that is too low for comfort. So how we deal with this pest. We add a calcium chloride combination into our fish tanks to raise the PH.
We also learn about woodworking, money and business. We have to keep track of how much fish food, seeds and materials we use to run our systems. We record all this information on how much money we spend on the products. We also record how much money we get from selling our produce.
We are still trying to figure out more things to get it all working the best it can. Over this year, we will still have to work on figuring out the right number of fish in our systems, the correct breeding environments we need and how to make the fish grow in a way that keeps our systems running. Next year we should be ready to sell our tilapia.
Although this is a classroom and we are students, we try to approach our schoolwork as if it were a job. For now, we are able to grow and sell fresh lettuce that is grown locally. (and not worry about contamination like they do in the stores) These experiences have been important in practicing how to work and problem solve but most important is that I will have the knowledge to build and maintain a system that can provide healthy food in my future. I can also work at a business that does this or maybe I could start my own.