Trailer: The Aqua Culture

The Aqua Culture

In this episode of the Potcast, we dive into the world of sustainable farming and cannabis: aquaponics. Combining hydroponics and aquaculture, aquaponics uses aquatic animals like fish to create nutrient-rich fertilizer for plants to grow in an environment without soil. It’s an inland, symbiotic farming system that yields two products. Host Ross Rebagliati speaks to Rudi Schiebel and Justin Henry, a couple of guys behind Habitat Life, a craft cannabis producer from Chase, British Columbia that uses decoupled aquaponics to grow both healthy coho salmon and really good cannabis. 

This circular, closed-loop system is sustainable and natural, reducing the need for chemical fertilizer and minimizing water waste and pollution.

Innovators in the cannabis space do it because they have a real passion for it. There’s science involved, but growing cannabis is an art.

About Habitat Life (https://www.habitat.life/)

Human beings are not separate from nature or somehow outside of the natural world. We are members of a global ecosystem and share our habitat with an estimated 8.7 million different species of organisms.

The fact we are a part of this natural system is becoming more difficult to ignore as the effects of human caused climate change continue to increase in severity and frequency. 

Being a farmer means balancing environmental stewardship with profitability. In rethinking aquaponics technology, Habitat has combined the production of salmon with the cultivation of plants in a way that achieves both.

Habitat has identified aquaponics as a farming approach that, through nutrient and waste recycling, can aid in protecting these resources and meet the sustainable development goals of food production. Habitat’s proprietary know-how and technology connects aquaculture waste streams to integrated hydroponic greenhouse infrastructure inputs resulting in an environmentally sustainable and economically profitable aquaponics system

Habitat Life produces organic coho salmon, fresh organic produce, and premium organic cannabis.

About Ross Rebagliati

Winner of a gold medal at the 1998 Winter Olympics in Japan, Canadian snowboarder Ross Rebagliati is also an entrepreneur and advocate in the cannabis industry. He is the founder and CEO of Ross’ Gold, a medical marijuana business.

Hosts: Ross Rebagliati & Don Shafer

Guests: Rudi Schiebel (CEO and Founder of Habitat Life), Justin Henry (Aquaculture Advisor, Habitat Life)

Producer: John Masecar

Writer: Jordan Wong

Episode Transcript

(00:02):
We have a fish system and then we have a plant system and in between is sort of where themagic happens and that's how we grow the plants and it can be pretty much any plant
really.
Growing cannabis has always been a marriage of old school cultivation and new wavetechnology.

(00:23):
Hands in the dirt and high-end LED lighting.
It's only gotten more creative as time's gone by.
We use a technology called recirculating aquaculture systems.
Two products from one farm.
We can put it up against any sort of wild salmon that people bring forward and we have.
The quality of coho salmon that they produce is the best that I've had.

(00:44):
Mind-blowing is the word I use a lot when talking about habitat life.
I'm Rudy Sheeble.
I'm the CEO and founder of Habitat Life Sciences.
My name's Justin Henry and I'm a fish nerd, I guess.
They're focused on responsible production because we're using up resources like freshwater and energy and nutrients quickly.

(01:04):
More than the global generation rate allows.
So we brought him on, we designed the system, we spent a few years.
developing that, killing a lot of plants, trying to get that whole program to work.
During Prohibition, most people didn't want to invest a lot of money into their facilitiesfor obvious reasons.
I'm always looking to try to capture nutrients that are lost.

(01:30):
So I don't want to waste anything.
When those restrictions ease up or go away.
we get to see some real creativity.
Salmon are very sensitive to the environment that they're in.
So we need to have essentially perfect parameters to grow salmon in a closed system.
If you think back of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, for example, they're using aquaponicsthere, or the Aztec chinampas, or rice fields in China.

(02:01):
For thousands of years, people have been
carrying out aquaponics.
We really refined it down to where it's at now in producing really high quality and reallygood cannabis.
You got to be pretty brave to jump in and start growing the way he did.
We're always trying to improve and find that next level of how can we make this moresustainable.

(02:22):
This is the podcast.
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