Clean Water

• All our water is collected from our green house roofs and stored on site. Its not taken from our rivers or countries dams that have been contaminated with sewer seepage and chemical discharge and overspills from factories on adjacent sites to streams and water courses.

• Contamination of countries water resources is a major problem throughout South Africa

• Only when needed, we top up from our onsite borehole water source.

• Water is and will always be our scarcest natural resource. Use it sparingly.

Valuable Land Conservation

• Aquaponic systems grow 4 - 6 times the amount of produce in a square meter than that of traditional farming.

• The Urbangro system can be utilized where there is no arable land where it is not practical or possible to farm.

• It also can be adapted to a vacant warehouse or abandoned structures that exist within an urban fabric, as was the case with our greenhouse.

• All these structures can be repurposed and put to good use, saving massive amounts of carbon energy and waste.

Reduced Carbon Foot Pint

• Our Gro-Lab was an abandoned nursery structure previously used to grow tree saplings. Our grow beds are recycled from the old sapling tables. Adaptive Reuse is one of our core strategies.

• When ready, our fresh produce and fish will travel mostly within a 20km radius with a maximum of 50km from the farm to the shelf, significantly reducing the amount of necessary “Food Kilometers.”

• Serving only the local communities greatly reduces harmful, toxic gas emissions and fuel waste.

Controlled Environment

• Working in our green house (“The Gro-Lab”), the likelihood of infiltration by pests is reduced dramatically which eliminates the need for harmful synthetic fertilizers and chemicals.

• We have an Integrated Pest Management (IPM) system to protect our crop from pest damage.

• IPM is a broad-based approach that utilizes all available techniques in an organized program to suppress pest populations in environmentally sustainable ways.

Crucial Water Conservation

• With water being a scarce resource in South Africa, it makes sense to use methods that reduce the amount of water used to produce the same amount of food.  

• Our water and nutrients are recycled through a Recirculating Aquaponic System (RAS) method which greatly conserves valuable water.

• As the water from the fish tank is recirculated, the amount of water lost in the system is minimal compared to that of conventional farming, where irrigated water is pumped out onto the land, only to be lost through evaporation, ground seepage or runoff.

No Harmful Pesticides & Chemicals

• In typical farming, massive amounts of fertilizers, pesticides and chemicals have to be used to manage pests, and all these pesticides and fertilizers eventually run off or seep through the ground eventually making their way into our rivers and waterways.

• These toxins result in countless harmful side effects and water contamination.

• The use of chemicals in an aquaponics system is not possible and is harmful to the fish.

Reducing erosion

• The problem of erosion in South Africa is immense, with many hectares of precious topsoil every year being lost to water and wind erosion that ends up in our waterways where they experiencing silt build-up.

• With the use of Aquaponic Gravel beds, Deep Water Culture beds, Dutch Buckets and NFT Systems , there is no need to plant in the land, further reducing soil erosion.

• The effects of long-term ploughing have been detrimental ripping out what was once natural nutrients in the ground and densely compressing everything below it.

Valuable Energy Conservation

• We have designed our system as a gravity fed system, specifically to reduce our energy consumption. All our water and air pumps use less than 1 KvA of electricity.

• Our greenhouse has been designed to use natural forms of cooling and heating.

• We have embarked in an off grid power solution and produce over a third of our energy requirement through clean energy with the aim to create all our energy through sustainable renewable energy solutions.

Healthy and Nutritional Fish

• Aquaponic fertilizer comes from a cold-blooded fish that does not carry the toxic and even deadly Ecoli or Salmonella often found in fertilizer from warm blooded animal waste.

• Healthily grown aquaponic farmed fish are the quickest converter of plant proteins to animal proteins. Aquaponic grown fish have zero growth hormones, contain no mercury, contain no antibiotics and no Polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs).

• PCBs are highly toxic industrial compounds that build up fatty tissues in fish and other animals in high concentrations.