As the population increases, more is needed, that includes living space, water, and food supply. Responding to the needs, hunger may be a problem since there would be less space for agriculture usage which would supply us food. Future food is an exploration where we peeked into a corner of the solution for the problem stated above. In this particular exploration, we focused on implementing a hydroponic and a green roof system since these systems would take less time for to stabilize compared to other systems, for instance, aquaponic which we had learned from our research. Once deciding the system we would use, we did further research to learn more about the steps we were making. As more research had been done, we learned that we had to make more choices, for an example, the type of hydroponics system we would use, we chose the Nutrient Film Technique (NFT) system. The NFT system is a system where the nutrient solution would be pumped to the growing trays and to the reservoir. Then it would be recycled and circulated throughout the growing system. In this system, growing medium is not a requirement; the root of the plant can be set to swim freely in the nutrient solution. However, this can only be used to grow leafy light-weighted crops. This system suits our need for a couple of reasons; (1) it suits for the crop we want to grow (the most consumed crop in our school; bok choy and lettuce), (2) there is an organization (RDI) we know that had implemented this system, therefore we would more support and a place to look to while we try to implement our own system, and (3) it is less complex compared to other hydroponic systems. Since there were two things we hope to implement, we divided the exploration members into two teams, one to work on the green roof and the other to work on hydroponics. I was assigned to hydroponics, where I and my partner, Rathanak work mostly on calibrating censors that will be used to automate the hydroponic system. I and my partner worked with Ph, conductivity and some other sensor. We also worked on testing to the acid that would be needed to be used to lower down the Ph of the water nutrient solution at some point of the growing cycle once the system started running. Towards the end of the exploration, we work on making the power supply box and the brain of the automated system, where the signal would be sent around to different sensor once something went wrong, for an example the water nutrient solution don’t have the right conductivity standard. During the exploration, we went out on a few trips to learn more about hydroponics as well as buying supplies to build the system. One of the trips was RDI which had been mentioned earlier. Despite all the effort, every member put into bringing the system alive, we could not get it done by the end of the exploration so we continue working on it in expertise and after-school extension time.
I will always sing my heart out.