About Us
Who Are We?
Our family lives on a seven acre farm in Myakka City Florida, where we strive towards sustainability. My grandfather taught me that our ancestors, farmers of the Abruzzo region of Italy, had gained our family name from our two greatest attributes, an innate aptitude for farming, and their remarkable friendliness. According to him, in the dialect of our town, our family name translated exactly into; friendly farmer! I moved from the city and started our new family farm because small American farms, the lifeblood that built this great nation, are now near extinction. Monopolistic corporate interests have bullied millions of family farms into serfdom and demolished any semblance of soil health. By supporting us you support the effort to bring about a revolution in agriculture, to drastically improve the quality of food available to everyone. We humbly ask you all to please join us in our fight for the small farmer. We must begin reclaiming the tremendous bounty that we as a people have lost by blindly turning to industrialized agriculture. Together with your help we hope to make the world a better place for future generations.
How Do We Grow?
We utilize a forty foot refrigerated shipping container as a shell for our microgreens operation, because the heavy duty insulation of the container, along with a modern mini split AC unit and dehumidifier, allow us to exactly control the growing environment efficiently. Inside we have two shelving units with six stainless steel flood trays each. Watering is controlled exactly through individual lines plumbed to and from each tray and back into a water recycling system. Energy efficient grow lights are suspended above every flood tray. While most hydroponic microgreen growers like ourselves would purchase a chemical fertilizer to provide the necessary nutrients to the crop, we employ aquaponics. Aquaponic systems mimic ecology, combining aquaculture and horticulture into one loop. Our state of the art filtration system removes microscopic particulates from our 1,000 gallon fish tank, then passes the water through a powerful UV bulb to kill harmful bacteria and viruses, and last a pressurized tank of countless tiny ceramic beads provides ample surface area for colonies of beneficial bacteria which chemically transform the nitrites in the filtered waste into the nitrates required from plant growth. Aquaponics promises a future of sustainability, harmony with nature, foods that are nutrient dense, and necessarily free of harmful pesticides. We are working on building aquaponic grow systems for lettuce and other greens as well!
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