Team Green Eggs and Ham
Motto:
Hunger amelioration and food security begins
with direct involvement in the food chain,
this means active investment in growing our
own food and educating ourselves on how to
do so, buying directly from farmers, and
cooking our own healthy base meals.
Who we are?!
4 Texas A&M Aggies
• Taylor
• Hannah
20 years old
Agricultural
Development
Passions: Youth
Development,
Art, and Music
24 years old
Public Admin & Animal Nutrition
Passions: Animal/ Human Health
4 Texas A&M Aggies continued…
• John
• Ana
20 years old
International Studies and
Pre-Med
Passions: International
Affairs, Health, and Politics
24 years old
Political Science &
Advanced Int’l
Affairs
Passions: Food
Security, Ecology, P
eace
Our Purpose
• We aim to influence positive and lasting sustainable change in the world through
exciting, hands-on education, especially that of kids and youth. Our kids and youth
will dictate the future of us as human species and the future of the world as we
know it. We want to promote proven sustainable ways to manage natural resources
while also enhancing the food processes, which will in turn, improve the human
health and nutrition, and significantly contribute in securing food and ameliorating
hunger! Our holistic approach on going about this revolves around our
Aggietarium:
Phase 1: Aggietarium (indoor and outdoor)
Phase 2: Worldwide Aggietarium Online Network Use 1 (tv show, database
and encyclopedia)
Phase 3: Worldwide Aggietarium Online Network Use 2 (real time farmville
social network)
Phase 1:
Aggietarium (Indoor)
Idea: Create a children’s museum of sustainable agriculture where
everything needed to know about nutrition, health, food, and use of
waste to ameliorate hunger while saving our planet will be learned;
infinite and valuable information concerning each community will be
shared with kids and caretakers.
How?
Interactive Daily and Weekend Educational Activities and Stationary
Exhibits
Teaching and Learning activities
Real community go-to places to make a difference!
Interactive Weekend Educational Activities
Weekend (main) Activities- Trips to:
1) farmer’s market to sell Aggietarium produce
2) food fairs to sell Aggietarium’s grown food
3) visit farms and interact with local farmers
Interactive Daily Educational Activities
• Daily Interactive Activities-
Human Health Games
sanitation- washing food and hands after a day
in the farm
Cooking- the wonders of cooking from a
biodigester + deliciously base meals from base
foods grown in the farm
Environment Health Games
Online- Plant 100 Million Trees (planting trees
in 3 forests and following of their growth, life,
and impact on environment and climate
change), etc.
Hunger Games
Online- Free Rice (get 1 word definition
right=10 grains of rice donated to World Food
Programme), Food Force (social media game in
which each crop and farm equipment bought
goes to real school meals in places where the
World Food Programme take place), etc.
Educational Stationary Exhibits
For the future of “change-making”
empathy is key. We will motivate
empathy by offering resources
where children will learn to CARE.
Aggietarium will have interactive
touch screen stationary exhibits (as
well as ipads and cell phones to set
kids up for existing games and apps
such as UNEP’s “Carbon
Calculator”- about terrestrial and
marine ecosystems and FAO’s
“Forestry”- facts, videos and
quizzes about forests) and books
such as “Score the Goals: Teaming
Up to Achieve the Millenium
Development Goals”-children’s
comic book about poverty and
development issues.
Kids respond well to
interactive games… This is no
ordinary exhibit!
Teaching and Learning activities
Nutrition is key to a human being’s fulfilled life-long
development, both cognitive and physical. Most
activities inside Aggietarium will concentrate around the
essentials of a healthy and proper nutrition, these
include modeling the “Learn, Grow, Eat, Go! Program”
and “Choose My Plate”
Real community go-to places to make
a difference!
• In every community there are groups of organized people who have set well thought
out programs, websites and apps that make a difference somewhere in the food chain.
Aggietarium staff will become familiarized in each of these and will teach children and
adults how to become involved. These are some examples in the U.S. :
– Where does our food come from? Realtimefarms.com
– What is in our industrialized food products? Openfoodfacts.org
– Am I buying/eating endangered species of fish App
– Programs You can get involved so food is not wasted and goes to our food insecure
neighbors:
• Food Cowboy @ distribution Level
• Zero Percent @ retail level
• FoodStar and The Urban Food Iniative @ consumer level
• Hidden Harvest @ famer level
• National Farm to School Program @ school level
Phase 1:
Aggietarium’s Backyard
Through our Aggietarium’s outside
component we aim to “practice what we
preach”= sustainability. We will base all of our
practices on affordable practices so they can
be easily replicated from the richest to the
poorest community in the world, as well as
sound and intelligent techniques. These
revolve around:
– WATER, PLANTS & SOIL CONSERVATION:
• AGROECOLOGY
• HYDROPONICS
• SYSTEM OF ROOT INTENSIFICATION (SRI)
(ALWAYS ADHERING TO EACH COMMUNITY’S
MICROCLIMATES AND SPECIFIC agriCULTURES!!)
– RATIONAL MANAGEMENT FOR SMALL
ANIMALS
(“Ewww” THE USE OF A BIODIGESTER!!)
WATER, PLANTS & SOIL CONSERVATION
By using scientifically proven, sustainable
practices (Agroecology, SRI, and
Hydroponics), our Aggietarium garden will
model Junior Master Gardener Program’s
approach and their existing gardening
educational games and education curricula.
Examples of existing JMG games :
1. Nature Web Game: Have a ball of
string and each child hold a part of that string.
Slowly remove parts of the web by describing
environmental or nutrimental issues. Describe how
everyone has a certain part in life.
2. Gas Gobblers: Place students in a
square. Have four volunteers and give them each a
bubble container. These volunteers are the “trees”.
Describe the environment at this condition. Provide
three minutes for the students to pop as many
bubbles as they can for “oxygen”. Continue to do
this until all “trees” are gone. Describe how the
importance of the environment and plants are to
human life.
WATER, PLANTS & SOIL
CONSERVATION
• This is what our Agroecological farm and fish tank and pond
(where we will combine green technology, aquaculture and
hydroponics to provide protein, vegetables and clean water
in a self powered environment) will look like:
RATIONAL MANAGEMENT FOR SMALL
ANIMALS
We will begin by raising: Rabbits, Chickens, Goats
More later (potentially)…
• We care very much for the animals who provide us
with our food, we aim to give them the life they
deserve and while caring for them we care for
ourselves and our foods!
Rabbits
Friendly and furry animals for a young child, and relatively cheap! They
are very easy to handle while representing minor investment compared to
a project involving larger livestock. In terms of nutrition, rabbit meats are
nutritious that are high in protein and low in fat, sodium and cholesterol
compared to other common meats. Raising rabbits activity will be an
educational experience for youth and it will provide rich manure for
gardening.
Fun Facts:
• Manure from rabbits makes excellent compost, rich in organic matter
and nutrients that can produce remarkable garden and flowering
results.
Special thanks to:
http://users.tamuk.edu/kfsdl0
0/rabb.html
Chickens
• They are birds used for production of eggs and (or) meat
for human food. Chickens eat
worms, insects, seeds, grains, snails, slugs, fruits, vegetab
les and many other foods. Raising chickens will provide
protein source and will generate income for people.
Chickens’ manure is known as one of the best animal
manure for fertilizer!
Fun facts:
• Hen does not need a rooster to lay eggs
Special thanks to:
http://www.almanac.com/home-pets-
family/raising-chickens-blog
Goats
• Many of you guys would know programs like a Farm-Africa provide
goats in Africa’s rural areas for many poor families to survive. Why
goats? Generally goat farming means rearing goat for the purpose of
harvesting milk, meat and fiber. Goat farming makes profits and provide
nutrition for families. For gardening purposes, goat manure is a real
asset. Goat feces are easily handled, stored or directly applied on
vegetables, trees, and flower gardens, as fertilizer. It also increase the
water holding capacity of the soil. Goat feces do not normally attract
flies or breed maggots.
• Fun facts:
• High producing, well fed dairy goats produce more and better feces
than other goats
Special thanks to:
http://www.dirtdoctor.com/
Goat-Manure_vq356.htm
Special Activities
Summer Courses
New business model-
This will be a “from farm to farmer’s
market” community simulation.
Children will use the crops grown at
the Aggietarium and act as important
players (farmers, cooperative bankers,
chefs, etc.) of the Aggietarium’s from-
farm-to-plate food chain in order to
learn how food integrates into their
everyday lives. (They will use a
fraction of goods grown throughout
the year that doesn’t go to the local
farmer’s market).
Special Activities
Special Seminar
These will be hosted throughout the year, at
various times and days to fit the community’s
busy and varying schedules. They will feature
speakers that will expand on topics related to
the weekly or monthly theme of the
Aggietarium.
Certification Sessions
Each month a Junior Master Gardner trainer will
train parents and children free of charge on how
to become a trainer of the Junior Master
Gardner Program (“train the trainer”) and gain
certification- hope for a multiplying effect in and
out of the Aggietarium around the community!
Phase 2: Worldwide Aggietarium Online
Network (use one)
Youtube channel of Aggietarium activities by children for children:
Children will broadcast a “mock tv” show about their time at the
Aggietarium. The shows will feature new recipes, animal projects, and
agricultural experiments going on in the museum. This mock tv channel will be
uploaded in the online network. This will serve as a visual and virtual
explanation of what potentially all Aggitariums are doing around the world-
“the more people that are empowered through connection technologies the
more abilities we have to collapse geographic distances so that an inequity--in
this case the inequity of HUNGER-- happening across the globe is not
perceived as so remote”. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1eIYZjzO7A
Community by Community Encyclopedia:
Each Aggietarium’s backyard will inherently be a scientific discovery
and experiment, as we will discover all specifics pertaining to each given
garden; it’s native plants, crops and microclimate’s weather, unique soil
composition and the role of water in this specific community (let’s remember in
many places of the world water is a scarce resource). These will be recorded by
each of our children scientists as a following activity in the garden- "there is a
kind of blindness to the fact that we really don’t understand these
communities we’re trying to help, it’s because we’re trying to fix things with
resources, rather than trying to fix things through understanding”.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1eIYZjzO7A
Phase 3: Worldwide Aggietarium
Online Network (use two)
The web based network is two-fold,
it will also serve as a way of
monitoring and evaluating what
projects within the Aggietarium
have worked effectively in different
communities. It will:
* upkeep statistics about each
community, tracing all community
improvements (improvement in
food security per community,
involvement with food processes,
amount of food wasted, and more);
* keep track of how many people
are creating their own backyard
farms and putting in practice what
they learn in Aggietarium.
“We are quickly becoming a global neuronetwork- The
power of a cracked idea in this interconnected age
spreads so quickly that scale can happen in a never
before pace”
“Once you get to a point where anybody in any
community is empowered to learn, design, and
participate, it will allow anybody to feel a sense of both
ownership and responsibility to each other and the rest
of the world”
Special thanks to:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1eIYZjzO7A