Farming The Future
Farming The Future pairs engineering expertise and leadership in system design to bring food, entrepreneurship, and community to Tallahassee. Farming The Future is a women owned, award-winning Progressive Business. We are a greenhouse distributor. Inside of those greenhouses we design and build aquaponic systems. Aquaponic systems consist of two parts: fish and plants. We raise tilapia and catfish in ponds, we pump that water into finely calculated bioreactors, we grow vegetables out of the bioreactors, and then we send that water back to the fish. We then pair that with an external terrestrial garden where we can add more growing space. We use our systems as a tool to teach STEM, Agricultural, and Career Education. All the food grown goes to the cafeteria, and whatever is left over goes to local shelters, A Second Harvest Food Banks, and other community organizations fighting food deserts and food insecurity. We build our systems in Juvenile Detention Centers, Title I Schools, Commercial Institutions, Low Income/Food Desert Communities, Private Backyards for Individuals, and Commercial Scale Farms. Over the years of building these in educational facilities, our director Michele Madison has written and developed a hands-on STEM curriculum that meets Florida State Standards. FTF provides people the opportunity to save money at the grocery store, provide an enriching environment for children, and healthy, nutrient dense food by installing low maintenance fruit tree kits in Tallahassee backyards! Our ultimate goal when combining aquaponics, foodscaping, and education is to bring all of this back to where it belongs: the people and especially the future. When kids have access to fresh, nutritionally dense food, they are able to stay healthy and spend more days growing. We want to make this future a reality for Tallahassee as we continue to develop into a leading city in the state of Florida and nationwide. We're not farming the past, we're farming the future.