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.

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. ​

​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.

Every 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: