Longmont organization to teach farming through aquaponics

by Quibian Salazar-Moreno

It was just over a year and a half ago when Marion Murphy felt the urge to contribute something to her local community of Longmont. Just like most of the country, she was entrenched in the presidential campaign, keeping up with the latest news, rumors and polls.

“For the first time ever, I got politically involved,” Murphy says.

But the major jolt of inspiration for Murphy came from an interview with a teenager who was working on the campaign and being honored for her volunteer efforts. The teenager said the best way to make a change was to get up out of your seat, go into the community and do something.

Simultaneously, Murphy was reading the writings of Michael Pollan, an author, journalist and food activist, who wrote an open letter to the president-elect in The New York Times about food policies. At the end of the article, Pollan said people could reinvigorate the local economy by reintroducing agriculture.
That’s when Grow Your Own Meal Inc. was born.

“My primary purpose in the beginning was civic activism,” says Murphy, executive director of Grow Your Own Meal Inc., a business she launched with founding partner Ajay Jha, program director for Limited Irrigation Agribusiness Management and International Agriculture Development at Colorado State University.

Murphy moved to Longmont from the East Coast and noticed a lot of pushback against “outsiders” because of how much the town, which was at one time an agricultural community, had changed over the years.

“The people who grew up here feel like the town that they loved is gone forever,” Murphy says. “It makes them feel lost and disconnected. So I sat up in bed and said, ‘Wow, in an agricultural town, this ought to be the one thing that everyone could rally around without that cultural discord.’”

Murphy decided on first launching a task force. She went around town to see if anyone was interested in getting together to take a closer look at Longmont and Boulder County policies that hurt the local agricultural businesses and try to change those policies. But then there was the suggestion that a task force was limited in what it could accomplish and that the organization should instead build a demonstration or project that is agriculturally based. That’s when the idea of having an aquaponics system was introduced.

“Very simply, you have fish that grow in a tank, and the water is circulated throughout an entire system of growing,” Murphy says. “The raft system is something we want to do, where the plants sit on rafts in a tank with their roots dangling in the water. The water comes from the fish tank, and it has the fish poop in it, and that’s what feeds the plants. And the plants clean the water, and the water goes back into the fish tank. So it’s a fully re-circulating system and completely organic because you cannot introduce fertilizers because the fish would die. You don’t have to worry about augmenting your soil. You use a tenth of the water you use in open-field farming. Your growing time is severely shortened to about a third of the time, and it’s a year-round operation.”

Grow Your Own Meal Inc. is still in the fundraising portion of the project. It needs $200,000, and plans to have a 1,800-square-foot facility with tilapia in the fish tanks and lettuce in the floating rafts. The system can grow a wide range of fruits, vegetables and herbs, along with raising fish. The purpose of the aquaponics project is for researching and teaching, in the hope that someone in the community will be inspired to start their own system as a new business. But ultimately, Murphy wants people to be aware of where their food is coming from, and the closer to home, the better.

“Very few people understand anything about where their food comes from, believe it or not,” she says. “Even the people that are so well-educated in Boulder don’t think twice about food production and food distribution. They think about what they’re eating. They’re very conscious that they want to be healthy, but not [about] where it’s coming from.”

For more information and to send donations, visit www.growyourownmeal.org.

Respond: info@boulderganic.com

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