ANZA Scouts Attend StorHub’s Fun-filled and Informative Aquaponics Workshop

StorHub recently played host to one of our CSR partners, the Australia and New Zealand Association (ANZA), and invited children between 6 and 13 years old who belong to three of ANZA’s sections, their Joeys, Cubs, and Scouts, to join us at an information workshop held in our aquaponics garden at StorHub Toa Payoh!

As part of our ongoing efforts to build a sustainable environment, StorHub operates an aquaponics system that is currently able to produce 400 pieces of vegetables every month including Romaine lettuce and Kailan. Aquaponics is a sustainable food production system that re-circulates both aquaculture as well as hydroponic vegetables and herbs. With aquaculture, we can now make use of a re-circulating system to grow edible fish in our fish tank which contains nutrient-rich water, while hydroponics makes it possible for us to grow plants in the growbed without soil, additional fertilisers or pesticides. It uses 90% less water than traditional vegetable farming while still providing the essential nutrients that vegetables need. The nutrient-rich water gets pumped into the vegetable growbed from the fish tank and subsequently dribbles back into the fish tank through the growbed.

The combination of aquaculture and hydroponics creates biological processes that occur within both processes to create an environment that helps the fish and plants thrive together. All the children from ANZA who participated in the workshop were fascinated by the entire cycle of growing vegetables without soil! They had a great time placing seeds into the foam holder to let the seeds grow into seedlings over the course of around one week. These seedlings can then be transferred to the growbed after taking about one month to grow and be ready to be harvested. All the kids from ANZA had lots of fun learning about how aquaponics works and also got to taste freshly harvested vegetables from our garden!

ANZA’s scoutmaster felt that it was an inspiring session and parents of the kids enjoyed themselves too. Our Group ESG Director and Head of SG Facility Management, Geoff, shared his thoughts on the workshop as well, “StorHub values the partnership that we have with ANZA and had a delightful time teaching the Joeys, Cubs and Scouts how to plant seeds and harvest vegetables from our aquaponics system on the rooftop and we look forward to working with ANZA on other fun and meaningful activities in the future!”