Breaking New Grounds with Aquaponics – Part I

Despite Costa Rica being a place of lush rain forest and bright green jungles there is a dramatic gap in healthy and sustainable food. Most of the food available throughout the country, and especially Esterillos where we are, is equivalent to what you would find in a remote gas station/mechanic shop somewhere in the middle of Nebraska, but worse. The food is highly processed, full of chemicals, stale, genetically modified, sprayed with pesticides, and rotting. We knew this was a problem when originally felt called to help establish a sustainable healthy food source in this community, it’s just much worse than we anticipated. Part of the problem is a mixture of poverty and lack of knowledge – if the farmers here lose a crop they could lose everything, and no one has shown them that these farming practices they have adopted from their western friends are bad. The consumers aren’t creating demand for anything different either, because… after all if its on the shelves in the store it must not be bad for you right.

In trying to learn from past moments of overzealousness, one of our main focus’ for this season was to approach our mission here with flexibility and openness to whatever Father’s plan was for us down here, even if it looked completely different than what we originally thought.  This is why our response to the question “how long are you going to be down there?” has been vague. We’ve recognized that He placed this vision for sustainable food in Esterillos on our hearts BUT we understand that one, He can change that plan at anytime, and two we are faulty people and could have misunderstood. It’s through that lense that we find we are truly dependent on Him daily to understand what our direction is knowing it could change at any moment. One of initial goals is to get buy in from the community first before anything else. That hurdle is raised due to lack of desire for agriculture, lack of education on health food sources, no previous knowledge of aquaponics, and language barriers. Honestly, I was never sure we would ever get over that first hurdle, but to our surprise, Father has not changed the plans and we have seen and been able to be part of getting small pockets of people bought into and excited about the possibility of aquaponics in Esterillos, HalleluYah.

We usually try to come down every six months to support in whatever way is needed, it was during our planning for our next trip that we felt like Father called us to move here instead of come on a short term mission. The main reasons being that if this were to be successful we needed to:

  • Understand that we have been blessed to be a blessing
  • Operate on His timeline
  • Fulfill a current need in the community
  • Get community buy
  • Find locals to own and champion it
  • Be here long enough to build, train, and establish systems to ensure its self sustainability.

So it’s with those priorities in mind that we have headed into this community, and Father has been so good in bridging those connections, stretching us more than we ever imagined, and truly showing us there is a deep need here for what we came to do.

We spent a lot of time researching aquaponics in Costa Rica before we came and found 4 groups that were supposedly doing aquaponics down here that we had hoped to connect with. Interestingly enough, we have connected with all 4 groups and not one of them actually completed the project nor is actually doing aquaponics – so it because of those circumstances that we are breaking new ground here in Costa Rica.

As usual each of these paragraphs below deserve their own blog post but I find it challenging to keep on top of everything while being down here. So in a quick summary below are some of our adventures in breaking new ground in agriculture and aquaponics in Costa Rica.

One of our first adventures started with us connecting with another couple Dan and Chloe who are here full time doing ministry work in Esterillos, and they have quickly become some of our new friends as they also have a passions for the Kingdom, agriculture, and Esterillos. It was only after a short time we connected in a deep way and next thing you knew we were talking about leaving for the southern part of Costa Rica together to go visit a remote self sustaining community we both had wanted to visit because it was doing permaculture and supposedly aquaponics as well. We decided to leave at 5 AM the two days later, and like most Costa Rica trips it would have seemed off it we could have simply hopped on the road and headed south. After going through 4 jumper cables (no joke, apparently the jungle isn’t only deadly, it eats jumper cables too) we finally jumped Dan’s truck, and piled in to head to the Osa Peninsula.

In the backseat alone was 2 kids in car seats, Megan, Antonio, and myself,and yes we should have taken a picture because it was awesome. We went to learn more about permaculture and aquaponics. Osa Mountain Village is a self sustaining remote community deep in the jungle of the Osa Peninsula, the goal is to turn every piece of landscape into food. They have a few permaculture and agriculture guru’s on staff and so for two days we learned as much as we could, and while they had hoped to start aquaponics we discovered they never have. We also go to hike 20 minutes into the mountains (we were already off the map, so this was Bear Grylls crazy intense rain forest territory and hiked up to a beautiful waterfall, enjoyed Fathers creation and drank water right off the rocks.

Megan and I took a bus back north, got stranded because of a late bus, rented a car, picked up some swedish hitchhikers, and realized that wasn’t our typical Sunday morning to Monday night back home.

Click here to read part two of our continued adventures of Costa Rica and Aquaponics.


Comments

5 responses to “Breaking New Grounds with Aquaponics – Part I”

  1. Nick Parsons Avatar
    Nick Parsons

    Sweet! That is so awesome and fitting that you guys are the first ones who are really doing aquaponics, and that Father is opening those doors in getting community buy-in. Looking forward to part 2.

    1. Daniel Murdoch Avatar
      Daniel Murdoch

      We had a great time as well bro and have really enjoyed getting to know you guys. Wish i had more time to help you get the ball rolling with aquaponics a little more but hopefully i will be slowing down enough to make that happen. We are definitely excited on every level and look forward to seeing things develop and the Fathers kingdom taking ground and manifesting in His children. Look fwd to your return.

      1. Kenn Kelly Avatar
        Kenn Kelly

        Daniel son it’s only been a blessing to have met you guys down here. A little Dan and Chloe is like coffee and pinto…. can’t live without it!

  2. Laura Behney Avatar
    Laura Behney

    Hi Kenn & Megan – My name is Laura Behney and live near Indianapolis, Indiana. My family (husband, Richard and 3 children) were recently in Costa Rica (almost one year ago) with the full intention of living there permanently, however, God had us return to the states for now. Our hearts are in Jaco and we long to return soon.

    Anyway, we know Holly, Chris, Penny, Daniel, Chloe and attended Horizon Church, which we miss more than we can express. Holly and I are friends on facebook and I saw a posting that Megan did (which Holly commented on) about “Renewing All Things”. As this is an area I am very interested in, I drilled down (OK, “stalked”) you both and found your blog. What an adventure you both are on! And Praise God that he has given you both a spirit of adventure and serving!

    So to FINALLY get to my point: I wanted to share a website that was sent to me a few months ago that you might be interested in. It shows how to build a vertical aquaponics system AND raise Tilapia. It is VERY cool! My husband and I are very much interested in this type of thing. As I see you are working with Seeds of Hope and Daniel & Chloe (we were at their house a year ago and they showed us their vision for growing healthy food for the community), I thought this might be something of interest to you all. Here’s the link: http://www.offgridworld.com/simple-aquaponics-system-for-growing-your-own-food-fish-at-home/ If they can do this in the frozen tundra of America, why not Costa Rica??

    We will be praying for your ministry and work there in CR and look forward to meeting you both when God brings us back FOR GOOD!

    Laura Behney

    PS Enjoy the weather in CR. Here in Indy — 15 degrees and 7″ of snow. 🙁

    1. Kenn Kelly Avatar
      Kenn Kelly

      Hi Laura –

      Nice to meet you, I have to say that group of folks is a set of rockstars and we feel incredibly blessed to have met them all and be able to call them our friends.

      Aquaponics is exactly what we are down here for building a system for Pura Vida Church and Uno Mas. Cool thing is that it looks like we will also be building one for Seeds of Hope as well. Also not sure if you saw the two posts after this but here is the last: https://chasingthelion.com/breaking-new-grounds-with-aquaponics-part-iii/ if you click the gallery you can see where we were – since then we have actually gotten pretty far and are almost to the place of adding fish – things just have been moving at the speed of a pura vida drift.

      Can’t tell you how incredibly grateful we are for you’re prayers – especially from someone we don’t know that’s extremely generous.

      Looking forward to meeting you guys someday!

      Blessings,

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