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Kettering to get $50,000 grant from Ford
- Details
- By Dawn Hibbard
- Wednesday, October 12, 2011
- Hits: 369
For the second year in a row Kettering University has won a $50,000 grant from the Ford Motor Company Ford College Community Challenge (Ford C3) to help Flint's Harvesting Earth Educational Farm.
The Ford C3 is a national challenge grant competition that recognizes colleges and universities that use a school's resources to address a community need.
"Winning proposals have a distinctive student perspective on what it means to have a sustainable community," said Mike Schmidt, director of education and community development at Ford Motor Company Fund. "Each year, we select five winning proposals to receive this award. It is unusual for a college to win it two years in a row."
The new $50,000 Ford C3 grant will continue the work being done at Harvesting Earth Educational Farm by Dr. Matthew Sanders, of Kettering University, and his senior industrial engineering students. The urban farm, in one of the poorest communities in Flint, teaches local residents horticulture and commercial food production skills. Sanders and his students also won a $50,000 Ford C3 grant last year.
The new project will develop an irrigation system for the farm using solar energy, rain collection and well water.
"The focus of this capstone project was to take all preliminary steps necessary to get a well installed on the property that meets the needs of the greenhouses," said Sanders, a professor of industrial and manufacturing engineering at Kettering.
Students researched irrigation alternatives at the urban farm's greenhouses by determining ground water levels, rainfall measurements, necessary horsepower, water needs and well installation costs. The project offered several options for the installation of a well at the property owned and operated by Jackie and Dora King, founders and co-directors of the nonprofit Youth Karate-Ka and Harvesting Earth Educational Farm.
"The students designed an automated system to monitor soil moisture levels for more efficient water usage," said Sanders. "Through the newly designed automated system, they will collect data for tracking temperature, sunlight intensity, ventilation fan usage, irrigation usage and geothermal pump usage," he explained.
Harvesting Earth relies solely on water from the city of Flint for irrigation. Next to heating the greenhouse and labor costs, watering crops is its largest expense. By using rain collection cisterns, which will gather rainwater from the roofs of the greenhouses and storage shed, and by supplementing this with a well, the farm could remove its dependence on the city's water resources.
The water project is expected to be completed by May 2012.
(Note: This report is provided as a service to our readers and a service to the group or individual mentioned in the release. Usually, only minor editing is done. The group or individual is responsible for all information provided.)
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