Urban Farming Courses: Online Aquaponics Training Classes
Here is one of the best online training classes you can take to learn about aquaponics. The course also offers other types of gardening training as well if you decide aquaponics isn’t for you!
It is no surprise that more and more people are clamoring to try aquaponics, which combines the best of aquaculture and hydroponics in a single system.
Aquaponics is not new: it has been around for decades now and it is only in the last two decades that urban farmers are becoming increasingly drawn to the idea of cultivating both fish and plants.
The great news here is that you can actually start learning about aquaponics and other great dimensions of urban farming with the help of urban farming courses.
Urban Farm U & The Urban Farm
The Urban Farm specializes in training up and coming enthusiasts the key essentials of urban farming. The online courses are wonderfully planned out and complete, and you can study different aspects of urban farming from the comfort of your home.
Regenerative Design: As Nature Intended
The first course is all about jumpstarting your urban farm. Everyone needs a boost and a leg up, and this part of the course will help close the knowledge gap between what you thought farming should be and what farming can be when you apply the right principles.
You will be exposed to lectures on permaculture, sustainability, challenges to urban farming, and the works. There is a total of five, 1.5 hour sessions that you can study at leisure.
There is also a great section on the first online course about regenerative design, which is modeled after what Mother Nature really does. Regenerative design is all about sustainability, reducing waste, reducing the need for chemicals, etc. If you have ever wanted to be a sustainable grower, then by all means, open the first course from The Urban Farm.
Seed School Online
This is such a great part of your education as an urban farmer because if you are really serious about growing different kinds of crops for personal consumption and commercial use, you definitely have to know more about seeds than what you did before.
Why? Because using seeds for agriculture (any type) is actually a science, and the more you know about seeds, the better off you will be.
The Seed School Online was meant to be studied for a total of seven weeks, with a gap of one week per slice of the lesson. But, if you are a fast learner, you can dive into the different modules on your own and get all the information you need on seeds fast.
The seven pre-recorded online classes will talk about the history of seeds, the magic of seed use, the modern seed industry, the role of genetics in determining seed quality in modern applications, how pollination works, breeding plants, the proper way of harvesting seeds, processing them to preserve them longer, and the absolute best ways to preserve seeds for future use.
As a grower, it is imperative that you know how to process and store seeds – because what if you hit upon a jackpot batch in your aquaponics system? You can’t let all those seeds from that champion batch of crops go to waste. You need to preserve the seeds so you can sustain the genetic line of the superior plants or crops.
And finally, the course will also tackle the exciting world of wild seed collection. Can you actually get superior seeds with great traits while hiking about in the wilderness? Can you collect these seeds and cultivate them at home, potentially bringing forth hydroponic awesomeness to the world? Enroll at the Seed School to find out!
Growing Food, The Basics
Growing food by itself sounds so simple – until you sit down and try to do things yourself. It is usually at this point in time that people realize that instruction from experts will really speed things along, and the more you know before you start anything, the better off you will be. There will be fewer mistakes, and you will be going in with superior knowledge. Trial and error will be greatly reduced, and that will translate to lower costs and fewer frustrations on your end. Now isn’t that something to look forward to?
What’s in this great course? You will be learning plenty of neat tricks that you can put to use immediately as an urban farmer, including: the role of sunshine and shade in cultivating different plants, how to position your plants for maximum exposure to available light, and when to apply shade or frost protection to your precious crops.
You will also be learning about the role of water in creating the healthiest plants, and what to avoid so your plants do not succumb to common diseases that are caused by too much watering or exposure to moisture.
This is really helpful for aquaponics and hydroponics practitioners because crops in soil-free systems are basically submerged in water all the time, and that causes some problems especially if the grower has not prepared sufficiently for the possibility of mold and algae.
And then there are the seasons. How do the different seasons affect plant growth and what do spring, winter, summer and fall have to do with the development of different kinds of plants?
How can you prepare your hydroponics or aquaponics systems when the seasons begin to change? You can derive this information by taking a close look at the available data that the general urban farming population use to guard their farms from the negative impact of changes in season. This is just something that we all have to get used to because there is no stopping changes in season.
The fifth section of the course makes us really excited because we get the most number of questions from folks who have no idea how to handle seeds and transplants.
In this part of Growing Food, The Basics, you are diving headlong into intricacies of seed collection, preservation and application, as well as the basics of transplantation so you won’t kill the seeds that you worked hard to germinate to transplantation size. With enough knowledge, you can germinate an entire batch of seeds to healthy-sized seedlings that can be brought back to your aquaponics setup.
And finally, there’s Urban Animals. The Urban Animals course takes use straight into the heart of raising livestock in a more modern and urbane setting. In just four, full-length classes, you will learn about the intricacies of producing your very own meat, dairy, and eggs, and how you can integrate regenerative design into everything that you do as an urban farmer.
This is an exciting time for anyone who believes that growing food is a better alternative to depending on the large industries. Sustainability and lower carbon footprint are both planet-savers, and they also happen to be what the focus is of urban farming.
What will you learn from what could well be the most exciting part of The Urban Farm family of courses?
You will learn about what organic really means and how this actually applies to you when you become the farmer producing the food. What does genuine organic produce and meat really entail and how can you get there? What do you have to do, and what do you have to avoid? Next, you will learn how organic farmers create environments that are completely self-sustaining and do not require massive inputs just to keep things going.
Before large farms controlled by big industries, people did things organically and naturally – this was the old and better way of doing things! Now we are winding back time and making sure that you learn what our forefathers did – because it turns out that they really knew what they were doing. And finally, the course will teach you how to raise and grow food more cheaply than before – because with sustainability comes lower food prices. Food security-wise, this makes plenty of sense to us!