H2020 PoliRural project develops an innovative text mining application called SemEx – Semantic Explorer. SemEx pilot is addressed to analyse unstructured data which is related to rural development and rural attractiveness.
CITIES2030 implements System Thinking on City/Region Food System transformation.
CITIES2030 conducts a “literature review” on System Thinking, but not in a traditional manner, but using a text mining application which is developed at PoliRural project.
The STEM-center in Päijät-Häme region organized a StarT-festival 16.3.2021. The festival was part of the Start-program which introduces STEM project and good practices which are carried out at Päijät-Häme schools. The link to the StarT-programme is this one https://start.luma.fi/
The Blue Wings Composting – Toukkakompostori in Finnish – was one of the candidates in the group of “good practices”.
Look the video about Blue Wings Composting.
The experiment at Länsiharju school is finished. Children and the teacher feed most of the larvae to teacher colleague’s chickens and to the Vesijärvi fishes. Less than 100 larvae were bred from larvae up to black soldier flies.
The fourth fraction which is a result of the experiment is a glass bin full of organic fertilizer which is a composition of composted food, peat which was used as a bed of larvae and larvae poo. I will use this fertilizer in the garden in spring 2021.
PoliRural aims to model rural attractiveness system e.g. responses, factors, loops and weights. See below one well known situation of Häme (FI) based on the data from the years 2009-2019. What kind of policy measures are needed to change the trend?
Sources:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00220388.2020.1808199
https://www.wur.nl/en/show/Rural-transformation-through-food-system-development.htm
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221191242030095X
https://www.ifad.org/en/web/operations/project/id/2000002242
https://www.devex.com/news/how-to-put-farmers-in-control-of-food-systems-transformation-96285
In the third output of the project, black soldier flies were reproduced from larvae which are the research object for 4th grade students in Länsiharju. Children were very excited to meet newborn flies. It was very interesting for them to observe larvae transforming into black soldier flies because they were participating in each step of this project.
16th day of October
The children and the teacher of Länsiharju primary school grade 4B arrived at Pikkuvesijärvi lake at 9 am. By chance the day also was the UNICEF-walk day where students raise money by walking or running kilometers, so the class came to the lake by walking from the school. The day’s mission regarding the Blue Wings Composting project is to feed to the lake’s fauna the frozen black fly larva from the composting project.
The class had been feeding these larvae for 14 days and had been sad to let them go. The project introduces children to the cycle of nature and so at the end of it, larvae had to become food for other living beings. The children were divided into smaller groups and given containers of the frozen larvae which they then threw into the Lake for the ducks and fishes to eat.
The whole process went very smoothly and was over in a short while. The ducks seem to interest the children most.
After a successful finish to the project, the children continued their UNICEF-walk back to school.
Photos by Liisa Karlsson and Tuula Löytty
Black Soldier Fly larvae – based bioconversion at Länsiharju school in Lahti was terminated according to the plan.
The bioconversion by larvae was in operation for 14 days. Larvae ate with good appetite mixed school kitchen waste food that was served to larvae once a day.
The bioconversion was managed by the teacher of Länsiharju school and 10-years old children of the class. The forthcoming bioscientists were courage and curious, and they handled and monitored larvae daily basis according to detailed guidance and data collection matrix (see pics below).
The bioconversion produced value tor four different end-user groups. The first end-user group was the teacher’s home chicken farm. As you can see on the video the chickens really enjoyed to eat fat larvae which are full of protein and oil. Healthy diet indeed – for chickens.
Considering the fact that our project would be conducted indoors and in limited space, we did not have that many options for storage systems. Luckily for us, IKEA happened to sell usable storage solutions, what we could use for our project.
For our project, we had to acquire three different types of storage boxes, one for larvae, compost and bio waste. For food waste, we bought three boxes, so we could split different type of food waste for each box. This would allow us to feed larvae with different types of food and see how it affects them. Because the project would be conducted indoors, we also realized that we would have to have sealed boxes, so there wouldn’t be any problems with smell.
Smart & Lean