(intense music) - [Narrator] Throughout the country people are planting the seeds of innovation, harvesting a of bounty of ideas to help care for the only home we have, planet earth.

With billions of people on earth, it is more important than ever to open our eyes and minds to alternative ideas, both new and old about food, energy, resources, health, housing, and more.

The core of sustainability is meeting the needs of today's society without compromising the world for future generations.

In this series, our field reporters will explore eco-friendly ideas and lifestyles that help to make our world a little bit better.

Welcome to My World Too.

Short stories of sustainable living and earthly innovations.

If you want to expand your knowledge of organic farming and get in the dirt, there is a program called WWOOF where you actually work hands-on and learn organic practices.

Let's join My World Too correspondent Tom gray in Oregon, to seeing what's growing.

- Tori, we're here at one of the WWOOFing farms in Oregon.

And tell me about WWOOFing.

What's the history behind it?

What does it mean?

- WWOOF actually began, it was founded in the United Kingdom in 1971 by a woman named Sue Coppard.

She was a London secretary working in the city and her goal was to get her family and friends and coworkers out of London on the weekends into the countryside, get their hands dirty and help people learn where their food came from and how to grow it themselves.

And so it first started, WWOOF stood for Weekend Workers On Organic Farms, and it currently stands for Worldwide Opportunities on Organic Farms.

It's now in over 130 countries around the world.

Each country operates its own WWOOF program.

And WWOOF USA was founded in 2001.

- The numbers, how many people are a host in this country and how many different members do you have?

- We currently have over 2,300 organic host farmers that are a part of WWOOF USA, and we have right around 17,000 WWOOFers that are a part of our organization and are looking to visit farms this year.

(serene music) Tom I'd like you to meet Dennis.

He's one of our WWOOF host farmers.

- Dennis, good to see you, brother.

- Tom, nice to meet you.

- This is a little piece of paradise you have here, huh?

- Yes, three acres.

You're in Willamette Valley, Salem, Oregon.

We have a little bit of everything.

We have some wine grapes, we have some animals, we have a garden.

So yeah, we just kinda grow as much food as we can.

We've had about a total of 40 WWOOFers over the past four years.

We usually do, since me and my wife work, we usually do about one week a month is what works best for us.

It gives me enough time to create a big list of projects and then I let the WWOOFers choose, based on their interest level, what they wanna work on.

So whether it's pruning the grapes, it's taking care of the animals, pulling weeds, planting a garden.

So it's just a plethora of projects they can work on.

- And how many hours a day are they allowed to work?

- We usually do about five hours a day for five days a week is the ballpark.

We try to encourage our WWOOFers to go out, see the area.

We've got some great Silver Falls Park, it's close by.

Yeah, our goal, when we moved here, we were both working full time.

And my personal goal is to see how, if we could get the farm self-sustaining.

So we could move here if we wanted, we could both quit our jobs, pay all the bills, break even, and yeah, just enjoy our retirement at an early age.

We haven't done that yet, but it's definitely an option which is good to have the option.

- There's a very wide variety of farms.

They offer everything from beekeeping to construction, building straw bale homes, of course, planting, seeding, harvesting, you name it.

We like to tell our WWOOFers.

If there's anything specific you're interested in learning chances are one of our hosts can teach you about it.

(intense music) Dustin, can you tell us a little bit about this place where we are?

- You are at the mushroomery.

Here we have actually the largest selection of certified organic mushrooms throughout the year, 35 varieties all in all.

And yeah, we're crazy about mushrooms here.

- [Tori] And how long have you been hosting WWOOFers for?

- We've been hosting WWOOFers since 2008, I think.

Yeah, so a nice bit of a stretch.

- [Tom] And those WWOOfers are coming year round to help you guys?

- Yeah, 'cause we do a lot of mushroom foraging too.

And so there's not always stuff to do but the mushroom farming as you see is indoor and we create our own environment.

So it's a year around gig.

(serene music) All right, guys welcome for the spawn room.

This is one of the more interesting rooms in the building where we're storing our mushroom cultures.

Generally with mushroom cultures, you're culturing things out, starting from a Petri dish.

But since they're expensive down here in the country we just use mason jars, they're great.

We're just mixing up agar and malt extract and the culture actually grows on it.

The agar is a seaweed that just makes it real firm like jello and malt extract's just the sugar, as you know, for beer brewing.

The mushrooms love sugars.

(serene music) - Hey Jennifer.

- [Jennifer] Hi.

- How are you?

Tom.

- Jennifer.

- This is Tori.

- Tori, nice to meet you, Jennifer.

- Nice to meet you.

Thank you for having us.

- Thanks for coming.

- So, we just had a great tour of the, up in the buildings and the mushrooms with Dustin.

So, what do you do down here?

- So down here we grow all our own vegetable crops.

And one thing that I utilize, one of the main ingredients that I use is from the mushroom barn.

It's all the spent substrate we're done growing on.

I mix that into our homemade potting soil.

- Jennifer, what's the benefit that you guys see with having the WWOOFers come to help you out obviously with organic was a lot more labor intensive.

So it's pretty good benefit for you guys?

- Yeah, we get lots of help from them.

I love sharing my knowledge and trying to educate people on what we do.

So empowering other people to go out and do great things in the world and know how to farm organically and how to use different vegetables they've never used before, different products, mushrooms, the benefits of mushrooms.

- WWOOFing at the mushroomery, I learned all aspects of mycology.

I was able to see the beginning stages where we took mycelium or basically the the roots of the mushroom and allowed it to grow on a food source, called a substrate, and then put those in a fruiting chamber to allow the mushrooms to grow the area parts you would eat or harvest for medicine.

And then I got to learn harvesting, how to harvest different types of mushrooms, how to store them, dry them, powderize them, to then take to market to sell.

(serene music) - And it's a non-profit, correct?

- Yes.

WWOOF USA is a nonprofit organization and our mission is to help connect anybody who is interested in learning about organic farming or gardening with experienced farmers across the country.

And we promote an educational and cultural exchange with the goal of really building a global community that's conscious of ecological farming practices.

- That's amazing.

And if a WWOOF has a really good experience at a farm, can I go back time and time again to that same location?

- We have WWOOFers who return to the same farms every single year, over and over.

We have some WWOOFers who visited farms and never left, or decided that that's the community that they wanna start their own farm in and have done so, and are now hosting WWOOFers of their own.

So absolutely, we have people who've created lifelong friendships through the program.

- [Narrator] As a graduate of horticulture, Ashlee Skinner with My World Too focused her research on improving urban food systems, which is a critical issue in many cities.

Let's join Ashlee in the heart of Kansas City at a non-profit facility, growing herbs, raising fish and inspiring inner city youth.

- Hi, Dre.

- How are you doing?

- I'm so excited to get to come here and volunteer.

- Welcome, welcome.

- So tell me about Nile Valley Aquaponics.

How did it get started?

- Well, Nile Valley Aquaponics, we've been here in three years.

So the location that we're at is on 29th and Wabash, one block off the famous street, Prospect Avenue.

It's a blighted community, lack of economic development.

And so we wanna bring some economic development to a area that's been disenfranchised for a lot of time that the residents been here.

- [Ashlee] So this essentially is the urban core?

- [Dre] It's right in the heart of the urban core in Kansas City, Missouri.

- [Ashlee] So what are the challenges in the urban core when it comes to food security?

- One of the challenge is having access to healthy food.

When you think of food, what is food we have, in this may be two mile proximity, liquor stores, fast food places.

So we don't have access to healthy food that's gonna help our bodies and be more nutritious for us to eat.

And so that's pretty much the main issue, is having access to it.

And so getting back to getting grown in the dirt is what we're trying to accomplish here in Nile Valley.

- So what is the educational goal of Nile Valley?

- To empower and educate as many kids and people as possible on understanding where their food is coming from and understanding how to grow food.

And it got away from learning how to grow our own food, and with the global warming and the lack of water that's gonna be in the future, I think this is gonna be key.

Getting as much education out there and growing the most nutritious foods you can possibly grow.

It's economic development, it's economical freedom and it's also been health beneficial as well.

- So I noticed you have a lot of produce out here.

So what is the purpose of these raised beds outside of your property?

- It's free for people that live around the area.

So they get off the bus stop, they live around the corner, the neighbors, they come here and they're able to pick free food, healthy food that you might have access to in other places.

So it's more of a community type aspect.

We don't have to worry about anybody breaking in because we have free food on the outside and acts as a double shield, like a security system.

We have green beans, we have jalapeno peppers, we have regular bell peppers, we have a cilantro, cabbage, lettuce, and some other things we have here.

- So I'm very, very familiar with raised beds, but I really wanna get to see the aquaponics facility.

Can we go?

- Yes, let's go check it out.

(intense music) - Wow, I would never expect to see this in the middle of the city.

- Right, neither does anybody else who comes here.

- Wow, so this is it.

- Yes, this is our aquaponics system where we grow fish, tilapia, and vegetables inside of our system.

- So what's the difference between hydroponics and aquaponics?

- Hydroponics is usually vegetables and some kind of liquid fertilizer.

Aquaponics is fish and vegetables using the fish waste as a fertilizer.

So there's the difference between the two.

- [Ashlee] I see you have a lot of yummy basil.

- Yes, we have the basil here in our floating rafts.

And so these are actually floating on the water here.

And their root system is able to drink the water from the fish waste.

So we pumped the water up to the top level up there and the water comes down on that section there, and it goes down there, it comes down to this section and then back to the fish as a cleaner water.

And so there's a whole nitrification process where all of this takes place at.

We have about 50,000 gallons of water in here.

Our tanks are six feet deep, four foot wide.

We have two 20,000 gallon tanks and one 10,000 gallon tank.

So, we have close to about 25,000 tilapia inside of this tank here.

And so we feed our fish, the fish poops and pees, we have to clean the water up, the water gets pumped up and as it goes through the gravel and it goes to our raised beds, we have floating rafts.

It provides nutrients for our vegetables.

Our vegetables are able to grow, and the water comes back to the fish as a cleaner water.

So it's a self circulating system using 90% less water than traditional farming.

So I'll show you my patented system here.

So we have an integrated system to feed our tilapia.

One of the first of this kind to feed our fish naturally.

So inside of here, we have a space for breeding and rearing black soldier fly larva.

Black soldier fly larva is about 40% protein, 30% fat.

It also has a natural antibiotic that the medical industry uses for certain illnesses.

So inside of this bed here, we have close to maybe a million and a half black soldier fly larva inside of here.

So it was one of the largest black soldier fly facilities in the country.

- [Ashlee] So you are really innovating the food system because I've never heard of using black soldier flies in a hydroponics system.

- Yeah, this is one of the first of its kind was an integrated system.

Not only is it being able to reduce our cost on fish feed, which is mainly about 60% of your cost anytime you're growing chickens, cows, pigs, whatever it is you're reducing that cost, and you're also reducing the carbon footprint by growing your own food, your fish food and people know where the food is coming from that they're feeding their fish.

And so it's a lot of education, information, science, biology, chemistry, all built in.

And so this is part of the education that we do right now at Nile Valley Aquaponics.

- You should teach one of my classes.

(laughs) - I don't know about that.

(intense music) So the big vision is to create an urban franchisable model that can be duplicated and implemented in other cities.

And so we wanna have that model that we're doing here, create economic development, access to healthy food and health education.

- [Ashlee] So what inspired you to name this Nile Valley?

- So looking at some of my history and my culture, I did a lot of research and reading and found out that in the Nile River, they did a lot of cultivation with vegetables and fish.

That's where tilapia comes, from Nile River.

And so reading into that, I got the name Nile Valley Aquaponics.

And so a kind of history and cultural thing where we're getting back to building, learning our history and our culture.

- I think that's so important.

And that's one of the reasons why I'm so excited to have you as my mentor.

Being able to teach kids about the history and how food is just a way to build a community.

And I love that you're doing that here.

So thank you again for deciding to be my mentor.

- Thank you, I appreciate.

We have a lot of work for you to do.

Let's get to work.

(water babbles) (intense music) - [Narrator] In the heart of America on large scale farms is the birth of a technical revolution in the way weeds are controlled without the use of chemicals.

Let's meet up with Nick Schmitz, My World Too field correspondent at Greenfield Robotics.

- I'm Clint Brauer, and we're at Greenfield Robotics.

We're at Cheney, Kansas, which is in South Central Kansas next to Wichita.

And the goal of this company is to remove chemicals from farming and food.

- All right, Clint.

Well, here we are, the world headquarters of Greenfield Robotics.

(chuckles) This is great.

I get a real Wright Brothers' vibe.

- Yeah, it's our elaborate world headquarters, but no, we're hoping to have an impact like those guys and make farming chemical free.

- How are you doing it?

How does this little machine, how is this the future of chemical free farming?

- Yeah, I mean, it does it in a, it seems to appear to be a very simple thing.

Of course, it's very complicated how we do it, but it is basically going through fields and replacing chemicals with mowing on this particular machine.

And that's what we're doing.

They're going through and they're cutting weeds repeatedly in corn, soybeans, milo, crops like that.

There's 250 million acres in the United States alone of those crops.

That's what it does in a very simple way, it's just mowing the weeds repeatedly.

- Why is this a better option than using chemicals?

- So chemicals are being used in a way, I think a lot more than intended.

It used to be you could maybe spray one chemical to control your weeds.

Now you're spraying five, six, seven.

And the costs are getting out of control, one, for the farmers.

So it's becoming a highly variable cost at a time when margins are pretty thin for farmers.

The second thing is when you're spraying all these weeds, they're chemicals.

They're not good necessarily for the environment long-term, they're not good for the wildlife that may be is in that field.

And if they get carried through and in some cases they do to the actual food that we're eating, they're certainly not such a great idea for us.

And so our view is there's no reason to take these risks anymore.

We can do it mechanically.

- And how does this machine work?

When you let this loose in a field, what's it doing?

- Letting it loose is right.

They do, for the most part drive themselves.

And it essentially will take, we have 10 of them right now and we can take them and we'll put them in a field.

And they steer themselves between the rows of soybeans, corn, milo, cotton.

And they cut those weeds as close as we can get to the actual crops and they do it repeatedly.

And so an example of a weed is pigweed.

A pigweed can grow very quickly to be this big a diameter.

Imagine putting that through your harvester, right?

It doesn't work very well.

So that's problem one that we solve.

Problem two is if they're about a foot tall or more, chemicals basically don't work.

You might think they work, you spray them, but then they come back out of it and they start regrowing.

- What technologies are being applied here?

How does it know where to go?

How does it know the difference between a weed and say stock a corn?

- Yeah, so there's three things that happen here.

One is we go to the edge of the field and we have a mobile station and this thing we create our own internet.

And so we can stream video back onto a laptop or tablet, whatever it is, and we can watch what's going on.

It streams the video back through this camera of what's happening in the field and we can control it.

So the second thing we added is this is RTK GPS.

So that means it can be precise within two centimeters.

And so we fly a drone and we capture those images using RTK GPS, coordinate it with this, and basically we know where those rows are at that point.

That tells it where to turn and it also is a backup thing in case the machine vision fails, which is the main thing.

So this camera right in here has a processor built in and we've written a ton of code.

Steven has written most of it, our CTO.

And that code basically has learned, and Steven's taught it, how to recognize those rows and what to ignore and what to pay attention to and drives itself.

So it's making every second 10 to 20 decisions on where to steer.

- So is that similar technology to like a self-driving car?

- Self-driving car is a lot more complicated, right?

So one of the nice things we have and the reason we thought we could start with something very simple and build from there was fields are pretty standard in farming.

So you have sort of rows and they're planted mostly a certain way.

It's not like driving down a highway and who knows who's doing what and cones and weird construction sites and all this weird stuff.

Those are very, very hard problems to solve.

Our problem is very hard too, but not quite that elaborate to start with.

And so we had those structured rows, until we can look for very specific things to make it work.

Let's pop this hood, see what's going on in there.

- All right, let's do it.

Sounds good.

I'm gonna need your help though.

This lid is pretty heavy.

Here we go.

- It is heavy.

I take it that's the batteries.

- Yeah, that's right.

There's about 30 pounds of battery there.

- And how long does 30 pounds of batteries get you?

- About eight hours?

It's a three kilowatt hours battery powers, it's slot.

- Okay.

And how much can one of these bots do in a day?

- The goal is, we're not quite there, but about 10 acres a day per bot in about 10 hours.

- Okay, excellent.

And what's going on?

That looks like a pretty big brain.

- Yeah, all kinds of stuff.

Actually the brain is up here.

So the brain is sending the signals down here and these things basically modulate the signal and decide how fast various things are going.

So how fast does it turn, how quickly does it react, and it's monitoring where it is in relation to other things and the speed of the blades.

And then it's sending signals back to us letting us know when things break.

It's never the things you think that are gonna break that break.

- Right.

Well, that's why you field test.

- Yeah, that's right.

Speaking of, you wanna check it out?

- Yeah, absolutely.

- All right.

- All right.

- Sounds good.

(intense music) - All right, Clint.

So there they are.

- Yeah, they are running.

- That's pretty amazing.

So if I'm understanding correctly, these bots are driving themselves right now?

- Yeah, that's right.

They're using that orange camera at the top and the processor in there to read the rows and tells it how to steer autonomously.

- Wow.

Now are they being monitored by anybody?

- Yeah, definitely at this early stage in our company, they're being monitored.

- All right.

- Absolutely.

- Where does that happen?

- Edge of the field.

We put a air conditioned trailer that we built.

And so they're in there with computers and stuff to monitor.

- All right, can we take a look?

- Yeah, let's do it.

- All right, awesome.

(intense music) All right.

So this is the future of farming?

- Yeah, that's right.

So this is mission control.

So this is where we're monitoring what they're doing out in the field.

- All right, so what are we looking at right here?

What are on these screens?

- Yeah, what you're really watching here is machine vision, right?

So Steven Getner wrote all this software from scratch.

He spent about a decade teaching robots how to see.

- So, we're basically asking a robot to do essentially what a human does with your own eyes.

When I ask you, how do you identify something?

How do you know a dog is a dog or a car is a car?

That's something that we're so good at.

We're so subconsciously able to deduce that answer without understanding the millions and millions of things that go on behind the scene.

When you're teaching vision to machines, there are many different cases which you will never think of.

So what you're doing is you're trying to look at what is the simplest, easiest, most basic way to accomplish what I need to have happen, because simple is always better.

- What this is doing, these lines are trying to find the rows and they're using all sorts of math that I'm not capable of to figure that out and then drives and follows.

Now, these guys are basically watching and monitoring in case something goes wrong, not just with the machine vision, but with the bot.

And if they wanna make some adjustments and so on and so forth.

- So it's utilizing GPS as well as the machine vision?

- Yeah, aha, so the machine vision is the primary thing while they're driving down a row here, but the GPS we also can tell, if you look at the corner up there of that screen we can see overhead where they are normally in a relative to the rest of the field, because you don't have a lot of perspective here.

You're in it.

So then you got to know above where you're at.

- Well, I can't wait to see these in every field in America.

- Yeah, me neither.

I think it's the future and we're really excited.

- Well, thanks so much for showing us this.

This is great.

- You bet.

- What we're doing is to change farming, period.

Across all sectors, but starting with the one that has the most acres, broad acre.

And broad acre are your big fields.

When you think of a farm, you think of the corn farm, you think of the soybeans, huge open spaces.

That's where we're starting, because that's where the biggest impact is.

- This is what's gonna be the future.

This is entirely robots will be in every field in every country, all around the world.

There's no question.

The question really is, is when.

- And this is not just in grains, not just in legumes, we wanna do this across all forms of agriculture.

(intense music) - So Kyle you're at the compost, the food waste composting operation now.

So this is where we do about 300 tons a week at this facility of material just like this.

And we figure in Kansas City, we're only doing somewhere between five and 10% of that food waste that's out there.

- That's incredible.

- Yeah.

- This all comes from local grocery stores?

- So this is all coming from local grocery stores, restaurants, cafeterias, just about, well, we got about 250 customers all together.

So we're collecting in trucks on routes source separated food waste.

- We are at Juniper Gardens Training farm in Downtown Kansas City, Kansas, home of the New Roots for Refugees program, where we work with 16 families every year to grow on 1/4 acre piece of land and then grow and sell that to the Kansas City area.

Here at Juniper Gardens Training Farm we focus on growing following organic standards.

We aren't certified organic because there's a lot of financial barriers, and then also barriers in terms of record keeping.

But all of the produce that's grown here is grown following organic methods.

Can you tell us a little bit about the plastering process you guys use?

- We start with a earthen plaster which is essentially sand, clay, straw.

It's just like cooking.

You have to have the right ratios.

(intense music) (air whooshing) (chimes ringing) (intense music)