Explore ‘Hydroponics Farm Day’ with Arlin and Janene Van Gorp, members of the Midwest MAshup IMPACT team! Learn about Driftwood Farm’s unique hoop building farm, growing tomatoes, lettuce, and more. Experience community joy as the team harvests, learns, and contributes to local food with chickens and a fish farm.
We were excited to meet Tracy Kelly and learn how to farm in a totally new way. Being from Iowa, we are used to large fields of corn and beans. Tracy showed us the hoop building with 3 tiered pots of tomatoes, beans, lettuce salad, and arugula and peppers. She also had sweet potatoes in raised beds and strawberries in pipes over the fish farms. Some of our group was able to help harvest the lettuce, cherry tomatoes and a few peppers grown in coconut husks. Then others “flipped” the rows to get rid of dead plants and re-purposed the coconut husk soil.
There are no nutrients in the “soil”, so she adds nutrients through the watering system. She also showed us the start of a fish farm, two pigs, and about 150 chickens in portable pens able to move around the farm to eat grubs and bugs. They produce about 90 eggs per day which she is able to provide food to a farmers market and help feed people on the island. She shared her story about the hurricane with us. We also learned that they are teaching hydroponic farming in the school programs.
We appreciated her passion for helping people on the island, and we brainstormed what we could do to help. While we harvested, we were able to talk and learn deeper stories from teammates and grow deeper in our knowledge of God’s faithfulness. Seeing different team members come together to accomplish a “mission” and help others while growing ourselves brought us all joy. We have a number of younger children on our team and they work hard while being entertaining for us adults. God’s family is present all throughout the world and we want to be a living representative of God’s love wherever we are.
In Christ’s love,
Arlin & Janene
