Reducing carbon footprint with hydroponics
Danielle Dozier, grew up in Bella Vista and her company is located here, but she doesn’t spend much time in the city.
She’s busy working on projects including sustainable hydroponic farming and lowering the carbon footprints of her clients.
“I’m driven by a purpose,” she said in a recent phone interview. “Purpose” is a word she uses a lot.
Dozier went off to University of Arkansas knowing she was going to be a farmer. Her family operated a hog farm in Gravette when she was growing up.
“I always knew I was going to be a farmer because my grandpa was a farmer,” she explained.
She was never a great student. She explains that she has too much ADD — attention deficit disorder. In college, she started making friends with the international students — people from places she had never been including Kenya and Ethiopia. From her international friends, she heard how the economies in Africa are growing and that’s not all good. If Africa goes the way of China — embracing the Western norms — their carbon footprints will be formidable.
“We’re screwed,” Dozier said. “These are the things the Lord puts on my heart. He tells me I have to do may part,” she said. So Dozier started her own business, GSS Group LLC. The initials stand for Grow, Supply, Sustain.
Her company has several facets. First, she trains farmers to comply with Good Agricultural Practices and Good Handling Practices certifications. Although not all farmers are even aware that the certifications exist, they are always helpful and sometimes required.
She also runs training on food safety, another topic that farmers aren’t always up to date on.
As a consultant, GSS can advise farmers on how to expand and where to sell their products, she said. She shares lean-farming practices to help farmers reduce waste and maximize products.
But her true purpose might rest in research and development.
“Agriculture is a big part of our carbon footprint,” she explained. “We need to find ways to feed all these people in minimal space with minimal cost.”
She was working as an intern with Ozark All Seasons in Winslow, a farm that produces salad greens and spices using green energy and hydroponics, when she began working on a hydroponic system that would make better use of the greenhouse space.
Hydroponics is a way of growing plants without soil. Sometimes the roots are suspended in water, but sometimes a growing medium — such as sand or plastic — can be used. The plants get their nutrition from the water.
Because the water can be recycled, hydroponics actually uses less water than traditional farming. It also means the products can be handled less and have no contact with soil, making it cleaner. It’s not necessarily organic, because nutrients have to be added to the water, but it can be. For crops —strawberries, for instance — that are sensitive to soil-borne fungus and bacteria, hydroponics can work better than traditional growing methods.
With the help of Arkansas Small Business and Technology Development Center based at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, GSS received a $100,000 grant to work on her vertical hydroponic design. Rather than long rows of plants growing hydroponically, her system utilizes towers that utilize the space from floor to ceiling.
She hired a mechanical engineer to help design the product from her concept. It will be manufactured out of recycled materials, she said, but there’s still work to be done. She’s working at North Arkansas College in Harrison because she can afford to rent their greenhouse space, and she’s still doing training and consulting work.
She just applied for a second grant to set up the manufacture of her system which will be a vertical hydroponic garden.
“If the towers do what I predict them to do, we’ll have a launch plan and products will be available in 2021,” she said.
Some towers are already in place in Ethiopia, she said.
The system will be especially important in urban areas, where people will be able to grow food in small spaces with a reduced carbon footprint.
Although there’s still work to be done, Dozier is on her way to fulfilling her purpose.