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It’s the first day of Spring, and Community First is celebrating the season with our first crop of aquaponic strawberries! Our team has been hard at work in the Cambodian countryside setting up the farm school and aquaponic systems at the campus. That work has paid off, and now we have over 100 strawberry plants thriving in the campus system. One of our students even had the chance to taste his first strawberry!! There are so many things to celebrate with us this year, as together we make it possible for people with limited water to provide more nutritious food for themselves and their families with the help of aquaponics!
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Since 2009, Community First’s projects have brought a better quality of life for the villages in Sen Sok by drilling water wells, setting up biodigestors, teaching sewing skills, and providing agricultural training. Now with our aquaponic program fully underway, we plan to continue providing the best practices of agricultural development by moving into our building in Smach village.
 Freshly pressed, red and sandy soil is finally laid into place after this year’s monsoon washed out a portion of the road. Driving down the bumpy surface, you can feel the tires further compact the soil beneath them. Stilted houses start to appear from behind rows of sugar palms as a herd of cows are guided past you. Lush fields of rice, ready for harvest, stretch all the way to the horizon as you travel the three kilometers from the main road to Smach village.
 Meet the Sim family! The first of five families to benefit from our off-grid aquaponics program.
Fish play a key role aquaponics. They are the first essential living element introduced when starting a new system. Aquaponics, just like any other ecosystem, depends on the nitrogen cycle to convert nitrogen into available nutrients. Ammonia, a bi-product of the respiratory and digestive processes of fish, is the catalyst that starts the “cycling” of our system. As the fish breathe through their gills and excrete waste from their digestive tracts, the ammonia will build up in our aquaponic system. In high concentrations ammonia will kill fish. Thankfully, the presence of ammonia attracts the nitrifying bacteria that we need to cohabit our aquaponics system. The first of which are called nitrosomonas. The nitrosomonas will convert the ammonia in the water into nitrites, which is still toxic to fish. No need to worry though. Good news is that these nitrites will then attract another nitrifying bacteria called nitrospira. The nitrospira is the bacteria we are really after because they are the ones to turn nitrites into nitrates! And plants love nitrates! Nitrates are quickly absorbed by plants, making the excretions from our fish the perfect fertilizer.
In an educational and inspiring podcast on Nick Night’s The Profit Ability Show, Pierre Mainguy describes his journey from being an Los Angeles finance student engaged in venture capitalism to leading an international development NGO, Community First, in Cambodia.
 For four years now the Community First had very productive relationship with the University of Edinburgh’s School of Engineering. As part of this collaboration, the students have helped us with sustainable and innovative projects like solar dryers, solar sanitation, and using risk husk for aquaponics, as well as helping us with some engineering and technical drawings. This year we are lucky to welcome a talented and enthusiastic group of young change makers. Here is a little bit about them and their thoughts on the program.
This week in Sen Sok the Community First team came to fix the greenhouse that shelters our first family unit aquaponics system. Due to heavy rains, the original frame and screws bent under the weight of the water. Thanks to our generous donors we were able to purchase an arch welding kit to build a stronger structure to house our system. It’s always a beautiful day of team building when the weather is 30 degrees Celsius and the humidity being up to 70%. With Pierre off to gather supplies, the rest of the team was able to deconstruct the greenhouse and take down all the broken beams. Next on the list was to weld the new roof pieces together. Our master craftsman, Romain, was able to find his groove and finished fusing all the beams for the roof by the end of the afternoon. It’s never an easy task working out in the villages in the hot sun, but our conversation lifted spirits and our team work kept us moving forward. Keep an eye out for our post next week as we look forward to finishing up the roof and finally adding fish to our system! Every dollar helps, and if you would like to contribute to our projects, please consider donating by pressing Donate below.
 This week at the Community first Siem Reap Campus we continued to expand our aquaponic production and bio-filtration system with floating raft beds. Taking inspiration from Cambodia's flooded rice fields and other techniques from around the world, these styrofoam boards will suspend all of our salad greens in the nutrient rich water of our aquaponic system. We are excited to get our seeds started so we can transplant them into our system in a few weeks.
We also improved and connected our plumbing to unite our fish tank and grow beds with the new raft system. Our in-house McGyver, Romain Rak , added a connecting pipe topped with a T to distribute the flow of nutrients that flow from the first bed into the second bed, as well as a pipe from the second bed to the IBC tote that holds our fish. Other improvements included installing pipes from our grow beds to the raft bed. Thanks to some smart thinking and zip ties we had all our connections water tight in the first try! Stay tuned for other developments and aquaponic innovation, as a team of volunteers from the University of Edinburgh come to Sen Sok to help bring aquaponics where most needed. Every Sunday, at the Community First Siem Reap Campus, we train our future trainers, a group of young, highly motivated ladies who have volunteered to learn about aquaponics under the sole condition that they teach their peers in the countryside. This past Sunday, we built the bell siphon for our first 100% off-grid village system. This training program is entirely free, and is composed of 10 orphaned young ladies, looking for sustainable solutions to live a better life by farming part of their food in the city while they pursue their respective studies. Some of them live on-campus at Community First and others live together nearby. Our most proficient students are our boarders, as they also help our field team manage current aquaponic systems onsite. This program is made possible by the ongoing support of the Rotary Clubs of San Marino, Sierra Madre and Pasadena, all located in the District 5300 of Southern California. As such, our team also gathers after the training for an aquaponic lunch and a presentation as a "Friends of Rotary" group. This aspect of the program has since then brought regular guests to our bimonthly events over time.  connecting changemakers and friends of rotaryEvery training session, we build a component of the aquaponic systems together. And our last element build is the bell siphon, a popular tool in designing aquaponic systems. This a key component as it is the one that uses simple physics to create a tidal effect in our growbeds, thus making sure the growing media provides both an aerobic and anaerobic environment to enable the bacterial life necessary to the aquaponic cycle to flourish. Checkout this video to see how it works:
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