Hump Day

Ruthie* - Most of the morning I stayed inside working on typing up an operations guide for guest house that Dominion is going to build. There are always people that visit the farm and take tours but the closest lodging is about 2 hours away, thus the need for a guest house (basically a bed and breakfast type deal) I randomly got placed on this project- little did they know my background with B&Bs. When I told them they were thrilled! Hopefully I can be a big help. Calvin the CEO of Dominion really wants visitors to experience the farm first hand. So the visitors will be encouraged to work right along side the Dominion workers. People can work with the ladies in the rice fields, spend the day at the rice mill, help with the fish ponds, the banana trees, chicken farm, or even at the machine shop. Its going to be a great experience for anyone who comes. I included a picture of the ladies working hard in the rice field. Friday our team gets for join them for the day! It should be a lot of fun!

Nate*- This morning Kevin and I went out to the tilapia breeding ponds. There they were draining a pond to retrieve all of the baby fish (fry). For Kevin and I this meant standing around in the sun taking pictures and notes. The workers had a lot more to do. They had to wade out into the very muddy pond with nets and encircle the pond. They did this to get all of the tilapia parents out of the water. Once the pond drained enough they used volleyball sized nets to scoop out thousands of baby fish that were as long as a finger is wide. The most important part of my days tends to be the conversations had with the workers. I think Kevin and I are really growing on them. After lunch Kevin and I started putting our biodigester together. We are using this plastic bag tube stuff that is about 3 feet in diameter. For the first digester we cut out two 30 foot lengths of the tube stuff. We had Ginsey crawl through one bag with the other bag to double it up and Ruthie followed to straighten the inner bag. We made a real homemade gas outlet and slurry inlet and attached those to the bag as well. Then we went to bed asap because we knew we had to wake up at 4:30 the next morning.