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Ten News Road Trip Remix
Ten News Road Trip Remix: 👟 Grab your AirPods, favorite pair of tennis shoes, and hop outside, Ten'ers. 🚴 Today's episode is meant for a long walk or bike ride as we learn about ways to be more climate-friendly. 👣 Let's start with Nature Nerds' Laine Farber's take on reducing your carbon footprint. 🐮 Oh, we can't forget Laine's rundown of potty training cows.🌱 And last, but certainly not least, we're talking futuristic farming and revisiting Garrison Harward at his aquaponics farm in Brooklyn!
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TRANSCRIPT:
Ryan Willard 0:01
Gonna get some ice cream. I want some ice cream. Yum, yum, yum. Ice cream! Yummy, yummy, in my tummy. Hello, you've reached Ryan Willard.
Tracy Kaplan 0:13
Ryan, t's Tracy.
Ryan Willard 0:15
Oh, hey, boss. I'm in the car headed to our ice cream social. How's it going?
Tracy Kaplan 0:20
Pretty good. I'm also heading toward our ice cream meeting.
Ryan Willard 0:23
Why do you sound like you're on an exercise machine?
Tracy Kaplan 0:25
I'm biking. Biking is way better for the earth than driving. Wait, isn't the ice cream shop around the corner from you?
Ryan Willard 0:33
Good points, maybe I should get a bike.
Tracy Kaplan 0:35
Ryan, you could just walk.
Ryan Willard 0:38
But, I do my best singing in the car.
Tracy Kaplan 0:40
Okay, okay, I have an idea. I'm gonna pull over and send over some of our best Ten News climate segments that should help convince you to sing while you walk to the ice cream shop.
Ryan Willard 0:50
Like, Laine Farber's segment on how big your carbon footprint is? Alright, I'm pulling over. Let's do this. I'm Ryan Willard. That's Tracy Leeds Kaplan and this is a Ten News Road Trip Remix.
Various Voices 1:02
10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1.
Laine Farber 1:21
What do you call a mark you leave behind when you walk? Go on guess. A footprint. Yes, that's right. Whether it be footprints paw prints, or a trail of slime, all living creatures big and small, leave behind signs of their movement. Now, these footprints typically don't last very long. They're trampled, washed away with the rain or swept up by the rising tide. But did you know that there are footprints that are far more permanent marks that last much longer than your footprint on the beach, or even the handprints you left in once wet cement? I'm talking about a very special footprint, your carbon footprint. Scientists describe carbon footprints as the amount of greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere based on a person's actions. But what does that really mean? Well, greenhouse gases are gases in our atmosphere that trap and reflect solar energy back onto the planet, causing the earth to heat up. It's natural for there to be some greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. But high concentrations cause serious issues such as increased global temperatures, rising sea levels, severe weather and the death of certain species. Over the last 100 years, the percentage of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, fluorinated gases and methane in our atmosphere has greatly increased. This is because of human activities. Let's take a look at exactly what activities caused greenhouse gas emissions. And what we can do to reduce our carbon footprint this fall Awesome. Let's start with the biggest battery in the bunch carbon dioxide at 76% carbon dioxide makes up the largest concentration of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere. It's produced by burning fossil fuels such as coal, oil and natural gases. We burn fossil fuels to create energy that we use to fuel vehicles and the electrical devices in our homes, schools and places of work. So what can we do to help reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere? Lots of things. As we creep into October, our houses get colder, and we start to crank up our heaters. by just turning down the thermostat a few degrees, you can cut back on the use of fossil fuels. Speaking of October, you can reduce carbon emissions this spooky season by vanquishing the energy vampires that lurk in your home. Don't worry, these vampires don't drink blood. They drink electricity. Energy Vampires are devices that continue to suck up energy, even when turned off or non use. Common energy vampires you may find slinking around in the shadows of your home include phone and computer chargers, TVs, and coffeemakers. Slay these monsters by simply unplugging them when not in use. Now let's talk about methane. That's one bad guy. Methane is a colorless, odorless gas produced when organic materials break down. Methane is produced naturally when plants decay or when animals digest food. Yeah, that's right. You produce methane. It's one of the gases that makes up a fart. The problem with methane is that humans are producing too much of it? No, it's not because we're farting. It's because the cows are farting. You see, farming is a major source of methane gas. And the biggest contributor is the beef and dairy industry. cows have special stomachs that allow them to break down food that other animals can't digest, such as grass. But this unique diet is difficult to decay. And the process produces lots of methane in the cow's gut, which comes out as farts and burps. Current demands for beef and dairy are high. So we have to raise lots of cattle. We can all do our part to help reduce methane emissions by cutting back on beef and dairy just a little bit. Try a meatless Monday or maybe even a dairy free Friday this fall.
Ryan Willard 5:52
Wow, Laine Farber dropping knowledge over here. There's so many ways to reduce my carbon footprint. Maybe instead of getting a bike, I'll get rollerskates.
Tracy Kaplan 6:01
Just make sure you get all the pads, too.
Ryan Willard 6:03
Are you referring to the time I fell through your wall at the office? Because that was a fluke.
Tracy Kaplan 6:08
So, that wall really came out of nowhere? Hmm, why don't we check out other solutions out there for the climate in case rollerskating doesn't work out?
Ryan Willard 6:16
Ooh, like the segment where Laine investigates potty training cows. I'm here for it. Let's go.
Laine Farber 6:30
Potty training, the not so glamorous process of teaching people where to put their pee and poop. It's not the most pleasant thing to think about. But we've all gone through it. And our world is a better place because of it. No joke. It takes toddlers anywhere from three to six months to master the porcelain throne. But cows learn where to place their bovine behinds much faster. Why? Yes, you heard me correctly. Today we're talking about potty train cattle. According to a recent study, it only takes 15 days for cattle to become bathroom loving bulls and commode using cows. You're kidding me. Now, you might be thinking, Why in the world are scientists teaching cows to use the toilet? Well, to save the planet, of course, okay. You see, cows are big animals. They eat a lot and drink a lot to sustain their large frames. But when you eat a lot and drink a lot, you poop and pee a lot. Just how much pee are we talking about? Well, a single cow can produce eight gallons of pee a day, round up five cows and you can fill a bathtub That's gross. Cow pee and poo are not inherently bad. However, things get complicated when the scat and the urine unify. You see, the resulting mixture contains a chemical known as ammonia. And when ammonia soaks into the soil, it breaks down and becomes the greenhouse gas nitrous oxide. Though it only makes up 7% of the greenhouse gases in our atmosphere, nitrous oxide is not to be taken lightly. With this in mind, scientists at the University of Auckland came up with a wacky theory for reducing nitrous oxide emissions, manage the waste proactively by potty training the cattle first proposed is a joke. The idea eventually became a full blown study involving specially constructed cow toilets called Moo lose. Now, don't get too excited. The cows were not trained to sit on toilets. Oh man, the mu bears no resemblance to your bathroom at home. Rather, it's a special metal stall with a graded floor covered in fake grass. scientists conducted the experiment with 16 young cows at an indoor lab in Germany. To begin the study. They brought the calves into the moo and waited for nature to take its course, once the cows peed, they were rewarded with their favorite special treat a molasses milkshake. shiz and any calves that released themselves outside of the designated potty training area got a little squirt of cold water. The process was repeated. And after about two weeks 11 of the 16 cows were entering the mu to pee without prompting. So the initial study was a smashing success. But what does it all mean? Well, training a handful of cows to pee in a cool box doesn't do our planet much good, but training a lot of cows to pee in special boxes could initial estimates from the Auckland study suggests that collecting 80% of cow urine produced on a farm could reduce ammonia emissions by more than half. Excellent. Those are some pretty sizable numbers. And if scaled globally and implemented correctly, it's possible that potty training cattle could have a considerable positive impact on lowering greenhouse gas emissions awesome, but only time will tell if the idea of commode-loving cattle and bathroom-using bowls makes it into common agricultural practices. Until then, enjoy the fact that you get to use a real toilet instead of the moo.
Ryan Willard 10:14
Cow farts are never not funny.
Tracy Kaplan 10:17
Oh, something never not funny to me is that time you were scared of bug larva.
Ryan Willard 10:22
I wasn't scared. I was terrified. But, it was cool to meet Garrison Harward and tour his aquaponic farm in Brooklyn. That dude is so cool.
Tracy Kaplan 10:31
Let's take a listen.
Ryan Willard 10:43
Ryan Willard here, head writer of the Ten News, I'm joined by Tessa Flannery, staff writer on the Ten News, and I am here with a gentleman who's going to show us something that I've never seen before. So first off, tell us who you are. And what it is you do.
Garrison Harward 10:56
My name is Garrison Harward. And I am an aquaponic farmer in Brooklyn, New York.
Ryan Willard 11:02
What exactly is an aquaponic farmer?
Garrison Harward 11:05
So, Aquaponics is the process of using fish in order to grow vegetables in a hydroponic system in a controlled way.
Ryan Willard 11:13
Whoa. So repeat that, for me, you're growing fish, to grow vegetables in a controlled way.
Garrison Harward 11:19
It's actually even cooler than that I'm growing insects to raise fish to raise vegetables.
Ryan Willard 11:24
So you're telling me that in just a few minutes, we're going into a room we are growing insects, fish and vegetables?
Garrison Harward 11:31
That's right. And the whole thing is trying to create a circular system that can deal with food waste in a more responsible way, so that we can take something that is normally a problem in our cities and turn it into part of the solution, I had the idea that maybe I could create something that would be able to utilize food waste in a more efficient and environmentally friendly way.
Ryan Willard 11:51
Now, why is it important to use food waste this way, instead of just throwing it in the garbage?
Garrison Harward 11:55
Food waste when it is thrown in the garbage goes to the landfill, and it ends up creating a lot of methane gas, that's the stinky gas, that's the California gas. So your scraps, they go into the landfill, they get piled in with everything else, and they get suffocated. And that's where you only have that bad bacteria that's growing. Creating all of these greenhouse gases and greenhouse gases are the things that are warming up the planet and contributing to climate change. So diverting food waste from landfills and keeping it from producing methane is a great way that we can help to fight climate change.
Ryan Willard 12:31
So, in this aquaponic farm that we're about to go walk into, what is it like hanging out with flies and fish?
Garrison Harward 12:39
It can get a little bit smelly sometimes. But overall, I think it's really cool. I just love being there and experimenting with different combinations of food scrap densities, and how many larvae I put in there, how much they can produce. And then, you know, changing the different feeding rates, with the fish seeing the different vegetables that I can grow.
Ryan Willard 13:00
Would you call this basically a grown-up science experiment that you're doing right now?
Garrison Harward 13:06
Absolutely, yeah, this is a 100% of grown-up science experiment. But my goal is to figure out a process that can help all of our cities to deal with food waste.
Ryan Willard 13:16
So, what is the coolest thing about growing food?
Garrison Harward 13:19
The coolest thing about growing food, I think it's like magic, you could take a seed from anywhere, you can take a seed from halfway around the world you can have sometimes they find seeds, you know, that have been buried in loss for hundreds or even 1,000's of years. And you end up being able to create a whole plant and food essentially out of nothing.
Ryan Willard 13:39
How can kids get started growing their own food?
Garrison Harward 13:42
It's super easy. My mom always like to say, seeds know how to grow and plants want to grow. So the best thing that you can do is to try it if you have even just a tiny little windowsill and you can get a little bit of soil and some seeds, the best way to do it is to just start to try and make adjustments. It's what I'm doing here. Everything is about learning. So sometimes I have failures, I've had total crops that I had to throw, you know, back into the soldier five began to get recycled. But then I learned from them and by now you know, it's been about a year that I've been doing this process and now I can produce lettuce, tomatoes, other crops and mostly most of the time it succeeds. So the learning process is a little bit difficult sometimes, but the best thing to do is just to try.
Ryan Willard 14:33
Alright, I say we go and check out this crazy aquaponic farm right now. Are you ready?
Garrison Harward 14:38
Let's go do it.
Ryan Willard 14:39
Okay, Ten'ers, the Ten News team is about to walk into an aquaponic farm. Garrison, are you ready? Let's do this. Let's see what's happening. So, Garrison, there are so many different things that are happening in this room on this farm. How do you control it all?
Garrison Harward 14:54
You know, believe it or not, I run the whole thing on my phone.
Ryan Willard 14:57
So, you've got a farm on your phone, is that correct? Yeah, it's kind of like real life Farmville, except you can actually eat the things instead of just clicking on them. Yeah, that's true. Okay, it smells interesting in here. What is that smell?
Garrison Harward 15:12
That smell is a little bit of the larvae production, they produce a little bit of ammonia. So if you've ever smelled a compost pile, or maybe some cow manure, you get a little bit of that ammonia smell.
Ryan Willard 15:27
So, it's not me smelling right now. Right?
Garrison Harward 15:30
I can neither confirm nor deny. So the first thing you're going to see when you walk in is the fish tank. That's the primary biggest part of this system. And in there, we've got about 20 Blue Nile Tilapia, and the fish then we feed them the larvae that we produced using food scraps, and that's the only food that they get, they swim around, they live their happy fish lives, we don't eat the fish, you could but for us, the fish are just there to produce nutrients in the water to grow the vegetables. So they eat and they poop. And that is the most important thing that the fish do.
Ryan Willard 16:05
That is what I do every day of my life. So I relate to those fish, and I'm glad you don't eat them.
Garrison Harward 16:09
We actually have filters that filter out all of the fish poop and all of the little micro fine particles. Because we don't want any of that in the system, we get all of that out. And we take that out and put that on the garden beds. It's great for the garden, but it kind of gunks up the roots. You don't want fish poop in your lettuce roots, but the dissolved ammonia that the fish produce, that's what really runs the whole nutrient cycling. And that is run by beneficial bacteria that live inside the system. They take the ammonia, and they convert it through natural biological processes into nitrite and nitrate and then that's the food that the plants eat.
Ryan Willard 16:46
Okay, so after it's dissolved into that, can you walk us over to where it goes? It's the plants, right?
Garrison Harward 16:53
Yeah, absolutely. So the whole thing goes through a filter system. It goes around to a couple of different grow beds and then a big old top tank that runs down through some gutters where we've got all of our lettuce production.
Ryan Willard 17:03
Well how does that help the lettuce grow?
Garrison Harward 17:06
So, this lettuce is growing in something called an NFT system and...
Ryan Willard 17:11
Like, a nonfungible token system?
Garrison Harward 17:13
I wish. That would probably be more profitable. No NFT in hydroponics is called the nutrient film technique, you have just a very thin layer of water that is always circulating. So this has just at the bottom of these just a tiny little stream of water that constantly keeps the roots wet, but not submerged.
Ryan Willard 17:33
How long does it take for lettuce to go from a seed to a head of lettuce?
Garrison Harward 17:38
From a seed to a head of lettuce inside like this, it takes about five weeks, the longest part of the process actually is from seed to transplant, eat it into the system which takes a little over a week and a half, two weeks. And then it's really only three weeks in this system for it to grow out.
Ryan Willard 17:55
And could I just eat this lettuce right off of this right now? Is it ready to eat?
Garrison Harward 18:01
You absolutely could let us is great because you can really eat it at any size.
Ryan Willard 18:04
Interesting. Okay, what else have we got?
Garrison Harward 18:06
So at the bottom of our system, once we get down through this nutrient film technique, and we've grown the lettuce, we go into these beds that have duckweed and duckweed is a really really nutritious water vegetable that is a part of our nutrition for the fish do ducks eat duckweed? Is that why it's called duckweed ducks do in fact, eat duckweed? I don't know if that's why it got named duckweed. But I would bet that it has something to do with that.
Ryan Willard 18:33
Alright, so is that is this the final stage of this farm right here? Is this the end all be all? Because this is honestly looking like nightmare fuel for me what I'm looking at right now is this garrison and get it away from me.
Garrison Harward 18:49
Yeah, this is where things get a little bit achy. It's actually my favorite part of the whole system. I think it's really cool. These are the black soldier fly larvae and black soldier flies are they say that they're flies, but they're very different than a house fly. They don't bother people. So these are a naturally occurring insect all over the United States. And they will eat almost anything in their larvae form. And they're 100% harmless. So you can see you might be back in a way but I've got them here in my hand, a big pile of larvae, and they aren't doing anything
Ryan Willard 19:23
Weird, so it doesn't eat humans?
Garrison Harward 19:26
No, they have a really tiny mouth. The mouth is so small that they can't pierce human skin. But they're really good at kind of pushing and routing their little mouth into food so they can break apart meat they can break apart dairy. I threw some cheese rinds in here once and they went bananas for him. They also like bananas. They like all kinds of everything. If you can think about it, if it's a food product, they'll eat it.
Ryan Willard 19:53
So, where do you get the food that you feed this fly larva with?
Garrison Harward 19:57
I get all of the food for these Are they from the same restaurant that I give the lettuce to? So they're giving me their food waste, everything that comes off of people's plates at the end of a meal. You know, if you don't finish your spaghetti, you got a little bit of lettuce left from your salad, all of that goes into a bin and it comes to me and I use that to feed the larvae. And so then what do you do with larvae, we want to keep the food waste from the restaurant from going to a landfill because normally if you are throwing away your food waste into the landfill, you're creating a lot of carbon, you're creating a lot of co2 and a lot of methane, the next thing that the larvae are for so now we've prevented bad greenhouse gases from being produced. And we have created a bunch of really nutritious grubs. And these go to some chickens on Governors Island. As a part of their composting efforts there, they've got a flock of chickens. So we help to feed them and they produce eggs. They go to local food pantries. And then there are also the food for our tilapia. So the tilapia that we are growing and the lettuce that we are growing have essentially no negative impact on the environment.
Ryan Willard 21:09
I think this has been one of the coolest things. exploring this aquaponic farm. Thank you so much Garrison for showing us around. And can you can we have some of the lettuce right after this?
Garrison Harward 21:21
Absolutely. Let's make a salad.
Ryan Willard 21:22
This is Ryan and Tessa from the Ten News team. And we are going to go eat some salad right now. Anything else you want to add Tessa?
Tessa Flannery 21:28
No, I'm just so hungry for salad.
Ryan Willard 21:38
Let's crunch away! I still can't believe he had a whole farm in one room and controlled it all with his phone.
Tracy Kaplan 21:44
Speaking of food, I'm locking up my bike at the ice cream shop.
Ryan Willard 21:47
I'm almost there. I hope they have oobey ice cream.
Tracy Kaplan 21:51
Ryan, remember to do an outro.
Ryan Willard 21:53
Alright. But first, here's a quick note for the grownups. This has been a Ten News Road Trip Remix. Technically, we're off for the summer, but look out for our road trip remixes and re-airing of some of our favorite episodes all summer long. And if you're looking for more podcasts about the environment and climate, we love the Big Melt, Nature Nerds, How We Explore and Earth Rangers. I'm Ryan Willard, and thanks for listening to the Ten News. Hope you're having a great summer and staying cool, kind, and informed!
