One Hell of a Way to Grow the Best Food! - Our Trip to the Aquaponic Ouroboros Farms in Half Moon Bay California!

Hello again Steemit family!

For our second post we wanted to share a true highlight of our two week trip to California and Las Vegas! During this vacation we went from San-Francisco to Los Angeles and finally Las Vegas. This was an amazing trip that we made a ton of great memories on. We drove through an amazing forest on the outskirts of San Fran all the way down to Half Moon Bay and it was unlike anything we had seen before!!

Once we arrived in Half Moon Bay we had the night to explore and have fun. We headed down to the cliffs on the side of the water and even got in a freshly caught lobster, shrimp and crab meal!!!
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The next day, which just happened to be Justine's birthday (destiny!!) we headed to Ourboros Farms. This part of the trip was extremely special and unique and honestly a turning point moment for us. As outlined in our first post we are very passionate about eating healthy and becoming entrepreneurs in order to get away from the societal norm of the 9 to 5. Before embarking on our trip we came across a place online called Ouroboros Farms where they are growing food in a truly amazing and sustainable way through Aquaponics.

Without getting into too much hairy detail, aquaponics is essentially growing food through the nutrients of fish waste... not as gross as it might sound we promise!!!

The farm has 8 of these large tanks which house catfish however you could use virtually any fish.

Below we document some truly mind blowing pictures of Ourboros Farms and the amazing fresh food they produce everyday, all year round!!!

The owner of Ourboros Farms gave us our own private tour and let us ask as many questions as we wanted. He explained how his business runs and was very open about the growth the business has experienced over the past couple years. He sells to about 7 different restaurants in the Half Moon Bay area and is continuously starting new plants while harvesting the old ones and then bagging them up for delivery. He said instantly chefs are impressed and excited when you show them the product because most produce has an 80% success rate which means at least 20% of what is received in a restaurant has to be instantly discarded as it is spoiled by the time they receive it. You can't beat the freshness of produce harvested, delivered and eaten the same day! Something only local farms can provide, support local!

After spending a couple hours with the owner and feeling our entrepreneurial spirit tingling we decided that this was something we had to give a try in Canada! With our harsh winters if we could find a way to grow vertically indoors with lights year round then we would be able to supply daily fresh produce all the time! This was super exciting for us and we got to work on a prototype right away once we got home.

Below is a picture of a rough looking prototype we set up to begin experimenting to see if we could get a successful aquaponic system setup going!

Over the next couple months we grow a couple batches of different types of lettuce and learned a ton! Since then we have documented ways to improve our system so we can produce faster and much more dense heads of lettuce.

In this post we really wanted to capture our adventure to Ouroboros Farms and explain how we got involved with aquaponics! Moving forward our plan is to upload a very detailed post on how aquaponics works and how we set up the system seen above for very cheap so you to can have daily fresh lettuce year round! We also plan on taking this to the next level and using our garage to setup a scaled up system in order to start our first business!

Please upvote, follow and comment as we would love to answer any questions!