ABOUT THE PROJECT
This project explores an alternative method of growing plants in the absence of soil. Plants are grown in a liquid nutrient solution or inside the moist inert materials, under controlled conditions. This method promises to be very efficient in the growth and production of micro-green plants. Mostly targeting the urban settings, this is part of an effort to establish capabilities in the climate change problem area through application of the hydroponics system.
ABOUT THE MENTOR
Atta Frimpong is an Agribusiness Development Executive at Growniche Ltd. With a PHD in Applied Agriculture from Agrostudies Israel. His expertise range from Agribusiness development & management to Sales marketing, Vegetable production, Horticulture and Procurement.
ABOUT THE TEAM
The selected team is made up of eight dedicated and eager to learn students from two universities, namely Ashesi University, Ghana and The University of Bamenda, Cameroon. There is diversity in academic discipline, nationalities, and aspirations. To mention a few, Tyrone Takawira is poised to become more innovative and able to think outside the box, while Lucia Chebi is expectant of skills which will help her implement hydroponics projects for the future.
THE JOURNEY SO FAR
Two intensive training sessions have been held in the months of May 28th and June 11th respectively, with guest presenter Mathais Ossom facilitating the latter.
May 28th
Innovative systems for hydroponics, as well as the demerits and merits of these systems were discussed; The team chose a low energy consumption systems for the project, due it's fairly easy management and little to no requirement of constant electricity. That is a fantastic well thought out problem space. Eco-consciousness and design thinking are certainly on the radar.
June 11th
A session on nutrition and fertigation on plants took place on this day. Participants delved further into the problem space and partly into the ideation stage by discussing common nutritional deficiencies in plants, as well as how to address them.
A fun takeaway was to develop a concept paper on a specific problem within participant's locality, and outline how the knowledge acquired so far, can be used to solve the problem.
Some of the milestones that have been achieved so far include:
● Learned Git GitLab Virtual Machines Dockers.
● Introduction to Tensor Flow Stream lit Ubuntu OS.
The way forward for the project is to build a recommender system using neural networks with Tensor flow and deploy it to a web app.
Current Ongoings
With the project still ongoing, the team is working on the next phase – prototyping. The task is to create low-cost designs which are precise enough to showcase the mechanisms taught to the farmers. This will further engage the students to find a more hands-on approach in bridging the theory to reality.
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