Solar CITIES

Fat Beet Farm is the food service commissary and microgreen hydroponic and raised bed production farm serving the 5 Curci Family Noble Crust restaurants in Tampa. 

Located in Oldsmar near the bridge to Dunedin and the Race Track, not far from the University of South Florida,  Fat Beet Farm serves as a sustainable practice model for the Food Energy Water Nexus Zero Waste Initiative where Patel College Interns work for credit to put sustainable development theory into practice.

At the Tampa Museum of Science and Industry (MOSI) across the road (Fowller)  from my office at the Patel College of Global Sustainabiity I personally donated, and our students constructed, both a Solar CITIES floating IBC biodigester and my HomeBiogas digester from Israel.  We worked with education leader Ian Reed and high school students from his summer school team and now have a showcase for both the DIY method and the commercial system, side by side that is used to teach schoolkids and visitors every day.

In April of 2015, T.H. Culhane of Solar CITIES travelled to Tamera Eco-village in Portugal to meet up with the Puxin molds he had personally bought and had shipped there as a gift to the Global Ecovillage Network in honor of fallen comrade Paulo Mellett.  Culhane had announced his intention to make the Puxin molds available to all GEN members at the GEN 19 conference at Zegg Ecovillage in Germany, and followed up on the promise at Paulo's memorial service at Monkym Wyld Eco-village near Dorset England at teh end of 2014's summer.  

Piggybacking off of tantalizing and suggestive data from our experiments at Tamera Solar Test Field with a black IBC insulated on three sides and covered with two layers of clear stretch wrap plastic on the south and west sides, we decided to take one of our soy-based polyurethane foam insulated biodigesters up to Kathy Puffer's Homestead Ecosystem location in Tillson NY, cut out the foam on the south facing side, paint the IBCs exposed wall black and foam in a double pane glass window.