Meet Lisa Perez. She’s still more than a decade away from retiring from her day job as a schoolteacher, but she has already started working towards another of her life’s goals.
At her humble Wallerfield, Arima home, she temporarily puts a pause to her efforts with her rows of students, as she begins her labour among the rows of PVC pipes that are taking shape at her hydroponics farm. The daytime giggling of her students gives way to the gentle gurgling of the water, as dedicated pumps aerate her massive – ten-foot-wide – aquaculture tanks in which hundreds of tilapia make random eddies and purls as they feed and flex, in a cycle that Perez intends to use to tackle food security and sustainable farming.
Her journey into this type of farming may have very well been by chance. When she was a traditional farmer many years ago, a bee slipped under her facemask while she was applying a chemical mixture to her crop. In her rush to remove the insistent insect she accidentally spilled some of the substance on herself.
Since that day, she has tried to stay away from farming that involves harsh chemicals.
A childhood love for aquarium fish took the lead, and Perez decided to investigate aquaculture.
“Since I was a youth, I tended to mind a lot of fishes. I had ornamental fishes, and trying to study to get out of the traditional farming, I wanted to get involved in smart farming whereby you’re using less land to produce more,” she said.
“So I started doing research in how to involve technology…and so I came upon aquaponics and I started doing that. I then attended the tilapia aquaculture classes at the Ministry of Agriculture Fisheries Division.”
Her start-up saw a few challenges surface; labour was one of them.
“I think that sometimes people don’t share your vision. At one time I had support from one of my brothers, but he has since returned to his job (post-pandemic). Off and on I would have a couple of people on to do extra labour, but I don’t think they understand the concept of the aquaponics.”
Another hiccup was the market.
“There is risk associated with everything, because the model came through the Sugarcane Feed Centre, which purchased all of the fishes. So we would rear the fishes and the grow-out, they would take every month.
"But once the model is successful and you have the market, it is a way forward. There are a lot of people out there with knowledge of aquaculture. It is easy if you have the money (to invest), but it took a lot from me, because I had to spend over $250,000, and the risk for me was not having that effective market, because I found myself having to market my produce on my own.
"Sometimes you hire someone to fillet, and they want to charge you more than what you feel they should get.”
Another issue she faced was her lack of training. She chuckled as she recalled, “Tilapia was really the model. I have tried crayfish, and that was not successful, because I did not have the knowledge with regard to that…because they walked out of the system.”
But those minor speedbumps P
