My original plan was to make Aquaponics a central part of a Downtown Greensboro Aquarium but being the Greensboro City Council recently sold the best site in the entire Downtown to place an aquarium to developers who have yet to disclose what they plan to build, there won't be an aquarium and 3 million visitors a year to Downtown Greensboro. But that doesn't mean the rest of Greensboro has to suffer.
You see, Aquaponics doesn't require an aquarium. Aquaponics require tanks full of water and a place to grow crops. And some pumps, pipes and a few people to manage and harvest the fish and vegetables. Depending on what breed of fish you raise you may or may not need a building but any old abandoned big box retail building, warehouse building or commercial building, old school buildings, abandoned war memorial auditoriums, you name it...
With Aquaponics Greensboro could become an exporter of fish and vegetables and the jobs would be in the neighborhoods where the people live and not in industrial parks on the county lines or in megasites in counties other than our own. And with world fish stocks in crisis it just makes economic and environmental sence to start raising our own.
Did I mention all the byproducts of Aquaponics are marketable commodities? Every last drop, flake, scale, leaf and speck of dirt has value.
Aquaculture, a form of Aquaponics that only involves plants and not animals, can also be used in water filtration to remove toxins from polluted waters. We might want to look into that as well. You know, to take care of some of Greensboro's runoff into Jordan Lake.
So if Greensboro's "movers and shakers" and "non profits" are serious about bringing jobs to Greensboro's communities and not just making Greensboro's developers richer than they already are then they need to be talking about Aquaponics.
You see, real economic development puts money in the pockets of the working class first.
We have the expertise on East Market Street and McConnell Road at NC A&T University to build the most successful Aquaponics program in the world, all we need is the political will to make it happen and Greensboro could become a world leader in this green form of feeding the world and putting people to work at good jobs in the very neighborhoods where they live.
You see, Aquaponics doesn't require an aquarium. Aquaponics require tanks full of water and a place to grow crops. And some pumps, pipes and a few people to manage and harvest the fish and vegetables. Depending on what breed of fish you raise you may or may not need a building but any old abandoned big box retail building, warehouse building or commercial building, old school buildings, abandoned war memorial auditoriums, you name it...
With Aquaponics Greensboro could become an exporter of fish and vegetables and the jobs would be in the neighborhoods where the people live and not in industrial parks on the county lines or in megasites in counties other than our own. And with world fish stocks in crisis it just makes economic and environmental sence to start raising our own.
Did I mention all the byproducts of Aquaponics are marketable commodities? Every last drop, flake, scale, leaf and speck of dirt has value.
Aquaculture, a form of Aquaponics that only involves plants and not animals, can also be used in water filtration to remove toxins from polluted waters. We might want to look into that as well. You know, to take care of some of Greensboro's runoff into Jordan Lake.
So if Greensboro's "movers and shakers" and "non profits" are serious about bringing jobs to Greensboro's communities and not just making Greensboro's developers richer than they already are then they need to be talking about Aquaponics.
You see, real economic development puts money in the pockets of the working class first.
We have the expertise on East Market Street and McConnell Road at NC A&T University to build the most successful Aquaponics program in the world, all we need is the political will to make it happen and Greensboro could become a world leader in this green form of feeding the world and putting people to work at good jobs in the very neighborhoods where they live.
