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Hunger in America and the San Francisco Bay Area
A recent investigative piece published in The Atlantic, entitled The Return of American Hunger, highlighted the fact that the uneven economic recovery in the country and new food-stamp restrictions has left millions of families without enough to eat. This fact is as true in the San Francisco Bay Area as it is anywhere else. Perhaps because there is so much conspicuous wealth around us and in the media, we tend to forget that. However, there are many pockets of poverty and need in every county in the region.
At the same time, as noted in the Marin Post, American's waste more food than ever. Millions of tons of perfectly edible and nutritious fruits and vegetables end up in landfills simply because it had some kind of superficial blemishes, or because they were unable to reach the market in time.
As noted in The Atlantic,
When it comes to the number of Americans who go hungry, it’s almost like the recovery never happened. The U.S. Department of Agriculture defines food security as "access by all people at all times to enough food for an active, healthy life,” and in 2006, the year before the housing market stumbled, the USDA estimated that fewer than 10.9 percent of American households were food insecure. By 2009, that figure had spiked to 14.7 percent. And now? As of 2014, the most recent year on record, 14 percent of all American households are not food secure. That’s approximately 17.4 million homes across the United States, populated with more than 48 million hungry people. By the time the USDA reports its 2016 figures in September 2017, new food-stamp restrictions could make that number higher.
The Challenge
Low income families and communities do not have sufficient access to local, healthful, fresh produce. Currently, local farmers markets are attempting to fill that gap in so-called "food desert" communities. But prices are often too high for low income residents. Government assistance programs along with homeless shelters, soup kitchens, food banks, nonprofit organizations and religious organizations carry the majority of the burden of feeding those most in need.
At the same time, current “on the land” farming methods, even those using best practices, remain too environmentally impactful, require too much water, and produce too many greenhouse gases from transportation, getting their goods to market, and cannot produce reliable quantities of many types of produce, year round, through all seasons.
Infill, urban farming has demonstrated that it is an important option to increase “local” access to fresh, healthful food. However, with land prices increasing rapidly, urban farming must maximize efficiencies and food outputs to adequately address community food security needs.
Implementing new farming methods, climate controlled environments, and utilizing new kinds of farming technology will be essential to addressing these challenges, going forward. In addition, new business models must be utilized in order to more fully tap into the power of private capital in collaboration with nonprofit funding, to finance such solutions.
Responding to the challenges
Community Venture Partners has spent the past 18 months immersed in research and development of one way to address this increasing problem. We have developed a state of the art, aquaponic, climate-controlled greenhouse, business model that aims to address "food safety" challenges, first and foremost. This prototype, urban / suburban farm required approximately one and one half acre of land, and can be located in any SF Bay Area community.
This project demonstrates our commitment to:
- Social equity, and environmental and economic sustainability;
- A replicable, economically self-sustaining model that will provide a minimum of $100,000 in free, fresh, healthful produce and fish, every year, to feed those most in need, in the community;
- The advancement of research and the science of aquaponics design, development and operations;
- Dramatically reducing the environmental footprint and resource demands of food production, while vastly increasing the yield per acre;
- Public education and community outreach programs to engage, train and inspire;
- “Open source” sharing of research and technological advancements to the aquaponics community.
Why Aquaponics?
CVP is working to demonstrate a prototypical, infill agricultural model of sustainable development, to enhance and feed communities, and integrate 21st Century farming technologies directly into the heart of urban and suburban environments. Recent advances in greenhouse technology and growing enhancement systems increase crop yields, food quality, and have made our social and environmental benefit goals financially feasible.
Although aquaponics is a growing industry around the world, with the exception of large scale, mono-cropping corporate farming, and unlike commercial hydroponics, it remains essentially a “one off,” sole proprietor business, run by small entrepreneurs. However, infill-scaled aquaponics can more efficiently utilize capital and better lends itself to replication. Aquaponics’ technology has advanced to such an extent and its output is so abundant that we believe we can demonstrate that significant public benefits can be incorporated into a sustainable, nonprofit / for profit, replicable model, which provides direct benefits to those most in need in the communities in which it is located.
Aquaponics' Advantages:
Aquaponics is an ancient practice that is taking on increasing importance in our resource and waste conscious world. Aquaponics is a symbiotic, closed-loop, ecosystem approach to food production where plant and animal agriculture are integrated, and nutrient production and water filtration are linked. As such, it uses negligible outside resources and has virtually no impacts on the local environment. Fish breeding produces a nutrient rich medium for growing a wide variety of vegetables in a recirculating, hydroponic, floating raft system. Properly designed, a state-of-the-art aquaponics facility:
- Consumes less than 10% of the water of best practices soil farming methods;
- Produces 300% to 500% more fresh food per acre (depending on type of crop).
This abundance is achieved without the use of any toxic pesticides or artificial fertilizers.
“Triple Bottom Line” Sustainability for Community Benefit
Defining “Enough”
CVP is committed to pioneering a new social benefit business model. We believe the most essential ingredient in creating a sustainable business model for social, environmental and economic benefit is having a definition of “enough,” with regard to personal gain and profits. The philosophy of what we generally define as “business,” today, is that no matter how much money an enterprise makes, it is never enough. The conventional goal is to always make “more,” regardless of the social, environmental and the long term economic consequences.
We completely disagree with this belief. We believe that defining what "enough" is, how much profit is enough profit, at the outset, is an essential part of designing and operating a sustainable human enterprise.
Social / Community Benefits: The design and development of our aquaponic prototype is grounded in our social benefit goals.
These include:
- Feeding the local community by committing to give away a significant percentage of our annual production of fresh, healthful fish and produce, to those most in need, in the community;
- Public education and community outreach programs to engage and inspire participation and investment in 21st century farming methods;
- Jobs training for military veterans and disadvantaged members of the community;
- Paying employees a “living wage” and providing basic essential benefits, employee profit sharing and equity vesting;
- “Open source” sharing of research and technological advancements with the aquaponics community.
Environmental Benefits: Aquaponics is arguable the least impactful type of farming possible on the planet. Our goal is to develop, to the greatest extent possible, a zero impact model that:
- Increases food production to many times the per acre yield of best practices on-the-land farming, in a nutrient producing and effluent cleansing symbiotic closed loop ecosystem;
- Provides organically fed fish and sustainably grown produce without the use of toxic pesticides or artificial fertilizers;
- Decreases energy use (solar, LED grow-lighting, pneumatic circulation);
- Dramatically increases water conservation by using less than 10% of water of conventional farming, and by implementing water recapture (rainfall) technology;
- Creates minimal waste by implementing compost to biogas and fertilizer production.
Economic Sustainability: Our financial analysis indicates that each project developed will be profitable and provide reasonable returns to investors. Each successive project will result in a wealth creating platform that will enable the venture to become economically self-sufficient and replicable after the development of three farm projects.
Revenues in excess of operating costs go toward fulfilling public benefit goals.
A Sustainable Business Model For Public Good: To replicate this model in the future, we will employ a tested, hybrid nonprofit / for profit business model that maximizes available funding opportunities from donations, grants, loans, and investment, while maximizing potential public benefits.
CVP will develop and operate each facility. We intend to utilize corporate sponsorships and pro bono contributions by collaborators and equipment manufacturers, and all other means available, to maximize public benefits. Our nonprofit status and utilizing an L3C, limited liability company model, ensures the maximizing of financial benefits to the community.
Marketing and sales strategies for community benefit: Restaurants and specialty food retailers currently pay premium prices for certain types of produce. These highly profitable products combined with the abundant food production and operating efficiencies of our growing technologies go toward subsidizing our ability to offer food donations, educational outreach, jobs training, research efforts, and other public benefits.
This represents a triple win for our donors, the community and the planet.
For more information or to get involved in assisting us with our efforts, please see our web site or contact us for more details.