Golden Grove inmates startMicrosoft-powered food project

Nine years ago, Den­nis Mc­Clung had a run­down swim­ming pool and an am­bi­tious goal, to plant a gar­den that would pro­vide a self-sus­tain­ing food sys­tem for his fam­i­ly.
Mc­Clung and his wife trans­formed the emp­ty ce­ment pit be­hind their home in Mesa, Ari­zona, in­to a closed-loop ecosys­tem teem­ing with life, from veg­eta­bles to chick­ens, even a pond with tilapia. The in­no­v­a­tive ur­ban farm was soon pro­duc­ing enough food to feed the cou­ple and their three young chil­dren, cut­ting their month­ly gro­cery bill by al­most half.
But what Mc­Clung ac­com­plished af­ter that is even more re­mark­able. With no for­mal train­ing, just plen­ty of in­ge­nu­ity, hard work, and re­source­ful­ness, Mc­Clung is now help­ing peo­ple around the world build cli­mate-re­silient and high­ly pro­duc­tive food sys­tems. Since launch­ing his non­prof­it or­gan­i­sa­tion Gar­den Pool, in 2012, Mc­Clung’s back­yard ex­per­i­ment has bloomed in­to a mul­ti­fac­eted op­er­a­tion that is col­lab­o­rat­ing with for­eign gov­ern­ments on food sus­tain­abil­i­ty, op­er­at­ing pub­lic seed li­braries, of­fer­ing class­es and work­shops, de­vel­op­ing a so­lar-pow­ered wa­ter ster­il­i­sa­tion sys­tem and most re­cent­ly, work­ing on a HoloLens ap­pli­ca­tion de­signed to help users build cus­tomised food sys­tems.
Though Mc­Clung’s farm­ing meth­ods might be low-tech, the tech­nol­o­gy he us­es to pow­er his or­gan­i­sa­tion is not and dri­ven by Mi­crosoft. He us­es Win­dows 10, Of­fice 365 and a Sur­face de­vice for graph­ic de­sign, re­search, pro­pos­als, and mar­ket­ing; col­lab­o­rates with em­ploy­ees and vol­un­teers re­mote­ly via Mi­crosoft Teams; and us­es Skype to teach a 3D mod­el­ling course to in­terns.
Work­ing with Chaney St Mar­tin who is based in T&T, the Gold­en Grove Prison be­came the site of his lat­est im­i­ta­tive where in­mates had been tend­ing an en­closed gar­den in a field by haul­ing wa­ter­ing cans back and forth in the blaz­ing heat. Mc­Clung set up a self-ir­ri­gat­ing wa­ter col­lec­tion sys­tem and a fish pond and added ver­ti­cal grow­ing, rais­ing plants in stacked lay­ers in­stead of in the ground to boost the gar­den’s pro­duc­tion. Prison ad­min­is­tra­tors were so ex­cit­ed about the changes that they asked for their own train­ing ses­sion.
“They said the project served as a mod­el for them to do the same thing on their own farms,” says Chaney St Mar­tin, an in­ter­na­tion­al spe­cial­ist in wa­ter and soil man­age­ment for the In­ter-Amer­i­can In­sti­tute for Co­op­er­a­tion on Agri­cul­ture (IICA), which part­nered with Gar­den Pool on the Trinidad project and sev­er­al oth­ers in the Caribbean.
There was al­most no bud­get for the Trinidad prison project, Mc­Clung said, so in­stead of us­ing a pre­made lin­er for the fish pond, he made one by mix­ing ce­ment and sand. He built the pond’s pump from spare pipes and used some old ce­ment blocks to cre­ate raised gar­den beds. “We re­al­ly had to be Mac­Gyver on this one, be­cause the prison re­al­ly didn’t have any bud­get,” Mc­Clung says, laugh­ing. “We just looked at what they had, and we got re­al­ly cre­ative.”
St Mar­tin, met Mc­Clung at a con­fer­ence a few years ago. The two got talk­ing and re­solved to work to­geth­er in the Caribbean. When Hur­ri­cane Ir­ma raged through the re­gion in Sep­tem­ber 2017, dev­as­tat­ing sev­er­al is­lands, they seized the op­por­tu­ni­ty to help. Mc­Clung, un­en­cum­bered by the bu­reau­cra­cy of a large or­gan­i­sa­tion, and his da­ta quick­ly mo­bilised re­sources and ar­rived on the ground to work with the IICA, St Mar­tin said.
“It was a tremen­dous ef­fort. If you un­der­stand the Caribbean con­text, peo­ple tend to be sus­pi­cious when out­side or­gan­i­sa­tions come in,” he says. “But Den­nis was able to come in and blend in very eas­i­ly with the cul­ture. Peo­ple re­al­ly loved the work that he did.”
Mc­Clung is turn­ing to da­ta col­lec­tion to val­i­date and quan­ti­fy his mod­els for sus­tain­able farm­ing. He’s work­ing with gov­ern­ments in coun­tries where Gar­den Pool has con­duct­ed projects to col­lect da­ta on farm yields, pro­duc­tiv­i­ty, and costs, and is part­ner­ing with Joel Cuel­lo, a pro­fes­sor of agri­cul­tur­al and biosys­tems en­gi­neer­ing at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Ari­zona and an ex­pert on ver­ti­cal farm­ing, on the HoloLens project.
With his first in­ter­na­tion­al of­fice based in Trinidad, us­ing datasets from their work, Mc­Clung and Cuel­lo plan to de­vel­op a HoloLens app us­ing Mi­crosoft AI and oth­er ser­vices that will al­low users to se­lect a food sys­tem mod­el and scale it to a par­tic­u­lar space. The app will tell them how much the project would cost, what ma­te­ri­als are need­ed and how much it would pro­duce. The goal is to have a pro­to­type by the end of next year, Cuel­lo said.
He sees in­for­ma­tion shar­ing as crit­i­cal to Gar­den Pool’s ul­ti­mate goal of pro­mot­ing glob­al food se­cu­ri­ty. “No one on this plan­et should be hun­gry with the tech­nol­o­gy avail­able to us right now,” he says. “It’s just a mat­ter of us­ing it ef­fi­cient­ly and spread­ing it to those who need it. “The fact that we’re chang­ing the world is more im­por­tant to me than be­ing rich or tak­ing the fame and the glo­ry for it,” Mc­Clung says. “I’d rather share the knowl­edge so that oth­ers can do for them­selves.” 
Source:  Trinidad Guardian, Dec 2018