World water Day logoA few weeks ago I was on Skype with Meg Stout going through some changes to the Aquaponics Association website. Meg asked me if I had ever heard of the United Nation’s World Water Day. No, I hadn’t. She said that it was a day set aside every year by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations to think about the importance of water in the world and, by the way, this year it was focused on Water and Food. Wow!! She sent me a link to the site and said that they were encouraging organizations to get involved. That sure started my mind racing.

If I had to pick just one sustainability message that aquaponics wins, hands down, it would be low water use. Because the water in an aquaponics system re-circulates, as opposed to seeping into the ground or evaporating into the air as a sprinkler’s mist, aquaponics uses somewhere around 10% of the water of typical soil-based agriculture.

This is a fantastic opportunity for the Aquaponics Association and the Aquaponic Gardening Community to join hands and work together to promote the water-wise ways of aquaponics. Some of us have been furiously working in the background on a plan to do that. We have to act quickly because this event is less than two months away, but we are small, nimble organizations made of up energetic people and I think we can do it!

Here is the plan

  1. World water day tee shirt front

    Front (click to purchase)

    Solicit ideas for a slogan around aquaponics being a water-wise technique for growing food on this Community site. This is already complete, and Aleece Landis (TCLynx) came up with the winning slogan. ‘Aquaponics: More Food With Every Drop’

  2. Create a tee-shirt using that theme and the WWD graphic and register it for sale with Cafe Press. This is also complete, and the tee-shirts can be purchased at our Cafe Press Aquaponics Store! Click hereto purchase.
  3. Announce the availability of the tee-shirt to both the Aquaponics Association and Aquaponic Gardening Community members and challenge them to dosomething on March 22 to promote aquaponics. Some ideas are…
    1. Helping a school class build a small AP system
    2. Speaking to a local Rotary Club
    3. Giving a tour of your systems and announcing it in the local paper
    4. Holding a free class or workshop
  4. Once folks figure out what they are going to do, we ask that they register their plan on a page in the Aquaponic Gardening Community.
  5. world water day tee shirt back

    Back (click to purchase)

    Register this page of events with the UN WWD website.

  6. As members do their cool things on March 22, we ask that everyone try to do it wearing the tee-shirt and have someone take a picture of them ‘in the act’.
  7. Rob Torcellini of Bigelow Brook Farms has agreed to pull together a video of all the photos that he will put to music with a voice over to promote aquaponics!

So, this is an ambitious plan that is going to ask for a lot of support from this community to promote aquaponics and help the world know about its incredible potential for the future of agriculture.

Are you in?