8 More Food with Less Water, Poor Farmers Produce Food

Be a GREEN MUSKETEER reforest the world with us! Elshout (The Netherlands) August 2013 This is episode 8 of the series ‘More food, less water, with Groasis’. Groasis did these vegetable trials with the Groasis Waterboxx during 2013 in The Netherlands. The experiment has 2 objectives: Can we grow vegetables with 90% less use of water and keep the production equal? Can we replace artificial fertilizers through adding mycorrhizae (funguses) to the roots? The reason that I started this trial is that while traveling all over the world, I see the problems that people have if they want to grow vegetables. Or if they want to grow food. They have little capital, they often do not even have energy for pumps, there is a water problem. They cannot even pay the fertilizers. So if we can develop a method to grow vegetables with very little water, without using energy and without using fertilizers, then we can actually help poor farmers to still produce sufficient food for the people in the cities. There are about 300 million poor farmers in the world that have a problem to grow in the modern way with hydroponics. If you want to grow with drip irrigation, you need to dig a well and a well costs you 5000 dollar. You need electricity for the pump which is also very expensive. So you cannot grow vegetables on a small scale if you want to do that with drip irrigation. With this method, any family can buy 5 or 10 boxes, and then produce food even for their own use. What I actually hope is that when I have proved that this principal of growing works well, that governments or NGO's will develop instruments, micro credit instruments, for poor farmers. So that they are able to buy the Groasis Waterboxx and produce their food with it in a very efficient and cheap way. We are now at the cucumbers. You have to pick the biggest one of the cucumbers, and cut it with a knife just on the stem like this. Then you remove the flower, because the flower starts to rot. The cucumber is giving some juice here, and it is sticky. So you have to put every cucumber in the same direction. Up, not turned. Here we see hot pepper plants. These pepper plants on the left side have not been treated with mycorrhizae fungi. On the right side, they have. When we take soil samples in the middle of the Waterboxx, and we take 100 cubic centimeter of soil, and we determine how much root development there is in that sample, then we find that the untreated plants have about 25 percent of root development compared to the mycorrhizae plants on the right side. The non treated plants do not just form less roots, the root system grows in a different way as well. The soil is more superficial. And that reflects also on the production. The mycorrhizae plants form much deeper roots, they take up more nutrients and water, and therefore they start to produce one bunch earlier than non treated plants. How do you bring the minerals, the food that the plants need to the plants. You have to cut off the leaves of the tomato plant. and you see this bubble here, this is the breaking point. Be a Green Musketeer with Groasis, reforest the world with us! Buy the Groasis Waterboxx at www.shop.groasis.com Go and see the next Episode of ‘More food, less water, with Groasis’ on YouTube Groasis wants to thank you for subscribing and commenting. We really appreciate it when you send this video to your friends! Subscribe to our news bulletin at www.groasis.com