(upbeat music) >>What holds society together?

In a lot of cases it's our waterways.

Our waterways were our first interstate system.

They still are really important.

They connect everyone.

>>My heart is just always at the river.

You feel the spirit of your ancestors here.

That's like a part of your being and about who you are.

>>In Virginia, there's a lot of agricultural pollution, polluting the waterways, getting into the Chesapeake Bay >>Agriculture is the largest land use in Chesapeake Bay, and so it's also still our largest pollution source.

Some people think that's automatically a bad thing, but it's lots of opportunity.

>>How can we create a system that uses everything that you put into it?

As we continue to grow as a global civilization, we have to start producing food in a different way.

>>Controlled Environment Agriculture is a solution.

Traditional agriculture is gonna require about 20 gallons of water to grow one head of lettuce.

We're gonna use about less than a gallon.

>>You can produce plants, and you produce fish the same time.

>>Today you guys are gonna help us finish planting this out.

And how many of y'all like tomatoes?

Farming and figuring the future out is gonna require a spirit of adaptability and experimentation.

(dramatic music) >>A person one said that agriculture is not the planting of crops.

Agriculture is really about the cultivation of the human spirit.

♪ In the heart land, we rely on ourselves and one another ♪ ♪ Hand in hand, we must stand in the heart land ♪ >>Production funding for "Life in the Heart Land" was provided by the Chrisman Family Foundation and by.

>>I was born April the 5th, 1931.

I fished for 72 years.

My wife kept going after me.

You stop fishing.

You too old to go out there.

(Grover laughing) (upbeat music) The technique for the boats was cut the knees out of the tree limbs.

That came out of a tree.

I built about six boats, I think.

Yeah, I'll tell you, when I moved back here in '66, I told everybody, I said this is my last move.

Next one will be behind the church.

(Grover laughing) (upbeat music) Well, there weren't five in here, six in here when I first started with them.

Since I've been in here, they've added two, four, six, eight.

I'll tell you the hatchery started back long time ago.

Have y'all talked to John Henry?

He ran that hatchery for quite a while.

>>That was a sturgeon we caught in the shad net.

That was in my younger days.

Didn't have a hatchery like they got today.

They had a box with screen wire around it.

We didn't have no motor.

We had to row the boat, and that wasn't easy, pulling that old heavy boat.

You take one female shad that's spawning, and you squeeze it in a bucket, and you get a male shad to spawn it, and then you stir it.

>>We start a system, and we pump river water in.

You know, gravity feeds all the tanks, and the water flow keeps the eggs rolling on a soft roll.

>>We used to have 12, 14, 15 guys fishing, And they bring eggs in.

But see you ain't got but two guys fishing now.

Three years ago was the last time I fished.

I thought I would miss it, but really I don't.

I just let the work go and everything go.

>>The shad season starts about the second week in March.

It's cut down 'cause the numbers aren't there that they used to be.

We used to go out and catch 100 on a tide.

Now you're lucky if you catch, you know, five or six.

>>The last four years we've had very little shad, and we haven't had the hatchery open for two years now.

>>Whole lot less fish now.

>>Yeah.

>>Whole lot less.

>>We started getting moss, you know, growing on the bottom of the river, and there never used to be moss.

(dramatic music) >>With climate change you can see that the types of fish coming into Chesapeake Bay are changing, and the rate at which they're coming into Chesapeake Bay is changing.

A lot of those headquarter areas, there's changes in temperature in those streams happening.

There's changes in the algo community.

We've actually seen some of our waterways, like the Shenandoah River actually be closed to recreation over the last few years.

>>We're starting to see impacts from the globe getting warmer because of CO2 emissions, ocean acidification, rising sea levels.

You know, these are all things that have a ripple effect.

>>I make potteries, the clay is from the banks of the Pamunkey River.

I can tell it's Pamunkey clay 'cause I'll see just a little hint of glitter in there.

The river has changed so much.

I have a picture of my Great Uncle Paul down there getting clay right at the edge of the riverbank.

Now you can only get to that spot when the tide is super, super low.

(dramatic music) >>I believe that nature will, if you give it time, it'll heal itself, and we can help with that.

There's a concept of biomimicry, right, where you're taking these concepts, you know, how does a bird fly so efficiently and applying that to airplanes, understanding and observing nature in its natural setting.

>>It's all about pattern recognition.

Using nature as a model and then designing systems from that.

>>Having an indoor enclosed system, you can capture any sort of runoff that might be occurring, potentially reuse that.

You know, a lot of times you say aquaponics to someone and someone says, oh hydroponics, I know exactly what you're talking about.

And it's like, hang on, you know it's a little bit different.

Aquaculture is the raising of aquatic species, fish, plants, invertebrates.

Hydroponics is soil-less plant production, and then aquaponics is a combination of aquaculture and hydroponics.

(fish splashing) >>Swim Shady is quite frequently baptizing us as we come in and out.

Welcomes everyone to Healthy Harvest Fresh as they come in the door.

This is an aquaponics production facility, a recirculating system that combines plant and fish production into a food production system.

(upbeat music) >>These are our six larger tanks that house our adult fish.

>>Our production space is about the equivalent of a quarter acre.

Traditional agriculture production, you would turn about maybe 8,000 heads of lettuce in a year.

We're gonna turn about 180,000 heads of lettuce in a year.

>>Come on into the greenhouse.

This is our aquaponics system.

We just harvested catfish, and today I anticipate tilapias, little tilapias going in.

You can look at the size of that tank, it's quite small.

When we optimize it, we'll be able to harvest 200 pounds of fish out.

>>Our fish actually provide the nutrient content for the plants.

>>The dirty water pumps through here into clay media.

>>The solid is in the form of ammonia, and the bacteria work upon that ammonia, break it to a nitrite and then to a nitrate.

That is a form that the plants can absorb.

The plants take that nitrate out of the water, and then the water is returned cleaned back to the fish.

>>You can buy a organic fish fertilizer and apply that to your fuel crops, and we're pretty much doing that but just in a controlled system.

(upbeat music) >>We truly have a ministry here.

We are feeding the masses.

Blue tilapia would have been the fish that Jesus served at the Sermon on the Mount.

You know the fishes and the loaves story.

Hello babies.

I just feel like it's a real connection to a greater mission.

We can work and serve the masses here.

>>There's a beauty in a local food system period.

You know, regardless if it is in an urban area, if it's in a rural area.

>>The more small farms, medium sized farms you can have the more resilient of a system you have.

Having these educational opportunities for K through 12, undergrad, graduates, that has to be a part of the equation too.

If the communities don't have access to it, if your everyday person doesn't have access to it, then what good is that doing?

(birds chirping) >>We're at my favorite place on the planet Waynesboro Education Farm.

We grow organic mixed vegetables and other curriculum ready plants.

The last year we raised 10,000 pounds of food.

6% of that is donated to River City Bread Basket.

This year's goal is 13,000 pounds on a third of a tilled acre.

We've got two lines of hot sauce, and these are all hot peppers, grown and raised here by students.

(dramatic music) I grew up here, I met my best friend on that court when I was eight years old in 1987.

I have a distinct memory of playing up here and actually not liking it 'cause if you lose a ball, it goes.

Putting a fence up here and a farm ended up being a really nice solution.

(upbeat music) You know, we're talking six and seven year olds, and go like this, and it's just magic.

It stops, and I'm like, what do you think's gonna happen if I face the sun again?

They get so excited.

(upbeat music) We are a outdoor learning lab.

We're a classroom.

Our main goal is not food production.

It's to integrate the pre-K through 12 curriculum into the farm setting.

When I say cool, y'all say cool.

Cool?

>>Cool.

>>All right, today we're gonna talk about ecosystems in the greenhouse.

Who can tell me, hands up please, what an ecosystem is?

I'm always looking for ways to make SOLs, our Virginia standards come alive for students.

>>So a ecosystem is where non-living and living things like interact to kind of make a society and a community.

>>Make community work, I like that answer a lot.

Y'all, we're gonna talk about a specific interaction ecosystem.

It's called interdependence.

The aquaponics that we're gonna go in here and work with, I like to call that a deconstructed ecosystem.

We're gonna be able to see what is interacting with what.

You guys wanna go in and check it out right now?

>>Yeah.

>>Follow me.

Come on in.

(upbeat music) >>Aquaponics is such a beautiful medium for education on so many levels.

I mean it is the absolute true ground for STEM education.

It's science, it's math, it's engineering, it's plumbing, it's construction, it's bacteriology, microbiology, it's chemistry.

It brings all of those concepts to life.

>>Go ahead and stand right here for now, facing me shoulder to shoulder, and we got some tomatoes to try.

Everybody can take one.

This one's called white cherry.

Ms.

Brennan, you want one?

>>Sure.

>>What grows in water?

>>Algae.

>>Yes, that's a good answer.

What else?

This way.

We can do it over on this one.

So go ahead and adjust there.

Nice, Matt.

>>Okay.

>>Just like that.

Nope, you're good.

All right Iris, now shake it.

Just get those roots, and let's see those roots.

>>You bring relevance for students who may otherwise not get it.

>>Yes, yes, all right.

I know y'all love strawberries.

>>100%.

Good job, good job.

I know I got dirt in my nails.

I did that for, y'all.

You're welcome.

>>We always end with a chant, and the chant is whose farm is this?

And they say.

>>Our farm!

>>Yeah, peace out, y'all.

See y'all.

>>Grab your jackets girl.

>>Soon.

A deconstructed ecosystem like we have here, the aquaponics, it's not really a closed loop system like folks say.

I'm still agnostic in terms of whether it's truly sustainable.

For now we feed fish food that we buy, and to me that's the vulnerability of the system.

>>As old as the process of aquaponics is, it's still relatively new in commercial operation.

>>We're still finding kind of our footing in terms of what's profitable, what's not.

It's just been such a slow process to kind of get things to where they need to be here with the program.

Sustainability is a funny term 'cause you know you can be sustainable in terms of resource efficiencies and conservation, but then you know from an economic sustainability perspective too.

You can be as sustainable as possible, if you're not gonna make money doing it, then no one's gonna adopt it, right?

And it's never gonna have those grand, you know, impacts that it could have.

(woman laughing) >>I told you, you're gonna have to filter the expletives.

>>You got your beads?

Yeah, they're over here somewhere.

Okay, so this is our fifth anniversary of the Diamonds and Denim Gala, and we are still working to tweak it each year, and perfect it and get it right where we want it to be.

Kind of making it fit who we are.

(dramatic music) >>I think everything is in good shape, yeah.

I mean making sure everything is all whatever, but nobody's gonna know if it's not done except us.

(dramatic music) Some of our produce and our tilapia will be served this evening, so we're pretty excited about that.

(dramatic music) >>I saw the beautiful lettuce they had here.

We're using the butter crisps, gorgeous lettuce that they have.

(upbeat music) >>Is it apple or pear?

>>Did you taste it?

>>No, I haven't tasted it yet.

I want an oyster.

(people laughing) (upbeat music) (audience applauding) >>Tammy Cole is our Director of Operations for Healthy Harvest Fresh.

This is the team of Healthy Harvest.

We work long hours, and we work hard because the five of us up here today are the full-time staff.

We were serving over 11,000 individuals last year, our last fiscal year, and in the last quarter that number has jumped.

We are serving actually 3,000 more individuals and 1,000 more families right now.

(upbeat music) When the SNAP benefits were affected with the USDA cuts and everything, that had a big impact.

I was born and raised here in the Northern Neck.

I've witnessed this cycle of generational poverty where these kids get stuck, and they can't find a way out.

Children depend on us for weekend meals a lot of times because the only time they get healthy food is when they're at school.

We were in a food desert.

We were not being properly served in this area.

I got a text message that said, look up aquaponics.

And I just knew, I knew, the rule of thumb around here is if I get goosebumps and chills we're onto something.

The reason behind that was to try and help these kids.

>>Humans are part of the ecosystem.

The large human sector rely on other living systems like a farm for food, for fun, for medicine and for culture.

>>We're all intertwined, you know as as far as the land, the people.

The river's changing its course all the time.

I am sad about the loss of that shad population, and I would like to think that there'd be a way that that could be brought back.

(dramatic music) >>Each year we look for a better year, so we are looking for a better year this year than we had last year, and we just hope it will pan out for us.

(dramatic music) >>There's the love for the river.

It gives and it takes.

Life changes doesn't it?

The environment changes, and you have to roll with the flow sometime on it.

>>Water quality was probably the best around the time of first contact when there were 50 to 100,000 Native Americans in the watershed.

We had very vibrant oyster reefs, we had very vibrant maritime forests.

Now we have 17 million people and growing in the watershed.

We have a tremendous amount of impervious surface.

We as the residents of Chesapeake Bay ecosystem can have profound impacts, both good and bad on the ecosystem.

We're basically right at the mouth of the Lynnhaven River.

So if I was to look straight ahead, I'd actually be looking like out on the Atlantic Ocean.

Back in 2001, 2004 timeframe, 97 to 98% of this river was closed to oyster harvest.

It was all the development around the shoreline.

You couldn't, you couldn't pull oysters out directly and eat 'em.

So when it comes to habitat restoration, and we talked about how important oysters are, this is kind of the start of it all.

A way that we like to engage especially waterfront property owners with the community at large is to run a program called oyster gardening.

Using a pretty low tech cage like this that can be hung from a dock or from a boat slip, folks can actually grow those oysters up off the bottom 'cause the higher up in the water column the oysters are, the faster they're gonna grow.

Now about 50% of the river is actually open to oyster harvest, and so the oyster industry here, in Lynnhaven has grown tremendously over the last 10 to 15 years.

We've actually seen oyster aquaculture companies pop up as a result of that.

Protecting water quality provides a lot of benefits both economically and ecologically for the commonwealth.

We're seeing improvements in water quality, and we're also seeing that sense of community build around that.

This is a good example of how we can as citizens actually have a profound impact.

>>Cash, if you wanna power up the AR sandbox on your way to that, that would be.

>>Okay.

>>We have culturally important fisheries, blue crabs and oysters and striped bass that people love to be part of.

They have these shared experiences that give them a tie to the land in some way, shape, or form.

I think in a lot of ways it's those shared experiences that hold people together and allow them to find common ground.

(upbeat music) >>All right, Hamilton, are you straight?

You know where you guys are at down there?

You good?

>>I'm here.

>>Today is very special because this is a taste of Randolph farm, so we'll get a chance to showcase quite a bit of the great things that we do.

>>I just need, I need muscles to like lift up all the whiteboards and stuff.

I'm coming with you.

(upbeat music) (woman yelling) >>Hey Curtis, can you put this in the greenhouse?

Appreciate it.

There's gonna be lots of different samples of food produced at the farm.

We've got three different fish, lamb, couple other vegetable products too.

I didn't think you were gonna make it.

>>How are you doing?

>>I'm so glad to see you.

Our job is to take the science-based work that happens at the university and use that to help solve the problems of the community.

>>You want a community that supports it, that understands it, and that eventually could probably bring ideas to the table that you might not have in your little corner.

(upbeat music) >>How we doing?

Good, okay, excuse me, Billy.

When I got here, we kind of looked at the farm kind of in different pieces, you know, like just different sections, and I've worked really hard the last four years on like trying to get us to look at the farm like as a whole.

Being able to to take the waste and be able to recycle it in our own composting facility and be able to integrate some of our programs together.

(upbeat music) This is a working farm is what I try to tell folks.

When people come, they see the animals and stuff like, oh my gosh, look at the animals.

And I'm like that's food.

(goats bleating) (upbeat music) >>I've got lamb raised here on the farm.

Try and win some people over, eat more lamb, especially locally raised Virginia lamb.

>>On the menu today we have a pineapple cole slaw paired with trout as well as catfish, fried, deep fried.

We raise it, we produce it, and then we fix it, and you bring it to the table.

>>Excellent.

>>You gotta know where your product comes from.

So you gotta know how to process, how to work it, how to cut it up, how to cut it, whatever you wanna do, but you gotta know where it came from.

>>Well, we have some striped bass here and some channel catfish.

(women greeting each other) >>You can't get to health or nutrition or even just community viability without talking about where our food comes from.

>>And this garden is floralpy, flower therapy.

>>These local networks, these local ties, this local way to get food, this local way to get fish.

You know, we want everybody to know that there are these options there.

(upbeat music) Agriculture really is, you know, the embodiment of everything that we do in life.

So it's all of the parts of STEM, it is the original STEM.

>>Okay, I can fish are full now.

Thank you, boys.

>>They will keep eating.

>>Okay.

>>We can feed some other tanks too if you wanna keep feeding.

>>There's more?

(fish splashing) (boys squealing) >>You know an aquaponics system can be done on any scale.

>>Wow.

>>Giving these kids the opportunity to learn to be self-sustaining.

>>Being successful at no matter what scale is messy, and it is not a straight line.

If we fall in love with aquaponics, we can scale this up.

It's the fractal patterning, it's how you build resilience one piece at a time.

(upbeat music) >>I still get goosebumps and chills every time I walk into that greenhouse.

This was where I was meant to be because I am living a life of purpose here where I was born and raised, helping people that I know need me.

And I think we've only just brushed the surface of what this facility can do.

>>Production funding for "Life in the Heart Land" was provided by the Chrisman Family Foundation and by.

♪ Babbling brook reminds us growing holy ♪ ♪ Plow the earth and plant and weed ♪ ♪ Watch your children grow ♪ ♪ Day breaks into nightfall ♪ ♪ Soon we're reaping all we've sown ♪ ♪ And who belongs ♪ ♪ Is it you is it me and is there room ♪ ♪ In our hearts for this whole land is there room ♪ ♪ For us in the heart of the land ♪ (dramatic music)