Areas of research 

What type of research is Together We Stand interested in?

So my search for knowledge began. I began asking about my culture: Educated growers, commercial farmers, independent growers and anyone in the business of growing. What I found out was they didn’t know. No one had done the research. They knew what I could plant and grow in the soil but not aquaponics. 

I also learned that just about everyone I spoke to was trying to make a living by growing and selling a crop on a small scale and failing and going broke. There just wasn’t enough profit in it to compete with big farms and mass produced products. 

So I started to explore this beautiful puzzle called aquaponics. What can I do with it? Where does it fit? It doesn’t seem to work for growing food for profit in our local economy. Can aquaponics succeed where growing crops in soil fails on a small scale?

Can I grow medicines? And no, we are NOT growing cannabis. So we started to do research into medicinal plants, herbs, teas, & other natural remedies and what we learned was that they were all around us. This isn’t voodoo or witchcraft. This stuff really works! I am an educated, well informed, American man. Why didn’t I know about this? Well, come to figure out that there’s more money to be made by selling me a pill than teaching me to grow medicine, and our culture lost it! 

We have greens for a salad, fish for protein, and medicines for our body. What else can I grow? Can I create low tech power to run the pumps? I could have used solar or some other high tech solution but to be truthful we didn’t have the money. I told you that I was into automotive so I took a generator and modified it to run off the methane gas I was producing from a compost pile.