World Hunger Team – Food Production Attic – Post 1
How great is the need? According to the website for Heifer International, a hunger relief organization based in Little Rock, AR:
• More than 500 million people are living in “absolute poverty” and more than 15 million children die of hunger every year.
• The World Health Organization estimates that one-third of the population is underfed and another third is starving.
• In the United States, 46 percent of African-American children and 49 percent of Latino children are considered chronically hungry.
Our goal at WHT is to build food-growing resources – aka greenhouses, irrigation beds, water storage tanks, barns, chicken coops, etc. – in the areas of greatest needs. We will do this using ordinary trash found in every American’s garbage cans: plastic bottles, caps, packaging and other plastic materials that are currently piling up in landfills across our nation and throughout our oceans – polluting our environment and benefiting no one. We will harness these materials: capture them, recycle them, convert them into building materials, and use these materials to build growing facilities.
During these posts, I will report on one of our research projects. In this set of studies we are reclaiming the space in the harsh environment of an attic and turning it into a food production center. In the attic, on a 90 degrees F day (32 Celsius) temperatures may reach up to 140 degrees F (60 Celsius) and temperatures can also dive below freezing.
Therefore, our first task was to bring this space under control. Also, since it is in the attic we will need to waterproof the space to protect the living spaces below from spills. I will show you more about this later but for now here are pictures of the space we will be using.
The space is about 20 feet by 5 feet with what was two useless windows (no need to have windows in attic except for looks, it adds to the summitry on the outside). Now the windows will be put to use. However, even though this attic space has windows, we will also be adding LED lighting systems to provide a better growing environment. Here we will have 10 LED lights, 40 grow trays, and over 240 individual plants of over 30 different varieties (God willing and the trays don’t rise).
