Mezzacello Columbus

Ending food, water, equity, and energy insecurity
We accomplish this by doing the research, work, and failure and sharing our strategies online and for others to model with every goal framed in pre and post assessment interviews on the efficacy of our program

Empowering youth, families, communities, and leaders to take steps
We do this through public speaking, outreach and constant collaboration locally and worldwide as often as possible and we accomplish this through dynamic outreach via youtube, social media, and our website

Educating our communities through the application of traditional ag, applied STEM, automation and robotics
We offer a wide range of educational opportunities at our learning lab and urban farm in Columbus where we invite all the community to partner with us and apply our modalities, mechanics and methods

Entice others that our systems are scalable and easily replicated anywhere, any place, any planet
We create innovative content four four tiers of application: rural, urban, densely urban and off-planet through our Mezzacello on Mars programming and UrbanAgTech camps and workshops

Express hope and optimism in the minds and hearts of our youth and young leaders through action and effort
We bring young interns into Mezzacello and train them to experience and replicate our systems with the goal being that they find ways to improve or optimize that solution or better yet, take it back to their community and test it

Encourage mentorship (both peer-to-peer and near peer) and collaboration in our communities
All our camps are co-taught by middle-school and high-school interns with the goal of modeling and empowering young people to accept that leadership is a talent, not a position

Expand our vision so that other communities can prosper as well
We wish to expand our non-profit so that we can start building other sustainable food, water, animal, ecosystem, and energy oases in communities in need.

Continue to experiment and collaborate with foundations, communities and businesses to create an ever expanding, sustainable, and replicable model of ag and career tech from the soil all the way up to the rain gutters and wind turbines

Continue to pursue grants to help us maximize our economic and social impact

Investing in facilities that will allow us to expand our Mezzacello Maker events (where we invite families to an event, entertain the adults while we train the kids to teach their parents a new skill)

Investing in equipment that will allow us to jumpstart our Mezzacello on Mars events where kids, their families, and the surrounding communities can learn what the obstacles will be in creating enclosed sustainable ecologies on another planet

Establish and build a Mezzacello Market where community gardens and local farmers as well as families and neighbors can socialize and share their passions for sustainable options of growing, maintaining and sustaining food, water, and energy

Jim Bruner, Futurist Farmer and Alpha Animal is now employed full-time at Mezzacello to lead development and infrastructure requirements in building Mezzacello into a fully functional business, and not just a passion project

Mezzacello has applied for a vendor's license and cottage permit from the Secretary of State of Ohio and Public Health Department

Mezzacello has secured a loan to build out an additional classroom, kitchen and production facility, and a publicly accessible restroom

We have five interns scheduled to be on hand this spring and summer and a committed and dedicated 120 hours of internship

We have 4 student interns ready to help the owners and one teacher to teach and deliver our robotics, ag-tech, coding, drone and automation, electrical systems, and and biochemistry basics content for seven planned summer camps in partnership with the PAST Foundation.

We have built an entire facility out of scratch with four structures, a livestock shed and sterile chicken run (with an underground sewer system to collect, age and drain manure) and a pressure washer to sterilize the rubber mattes to provide sanitary and safe interaction with animals. Chickens, ducks, rabbits, fish, crickets, mealworms, snails, frogs, and native bees and other pollinator species.
We have integrated ecosystems that include seven enclosed ecosystems that all play some role in the health and vitality of the other. Formal gardens, pollinator gardens, aquatic ecology, parterre gardens, livestock and manure systems, food potager gardens, hydroponic and aquaponics systems, and compost as well as the house.
The entire farm is off grid with 1800 Watts of solar and 600 watts of Vertical Axis Wind Turbines located around the property. All of this is tied into three 12V 100Ah battery arrays wired in parallel that allow us to extend operation on cloudy or windless days.
Two of the VAWT systems convert wind energy from traffic into energy that we track and map to bus schedules to determine optimal power loads and production.
We designed and built a bioreactor designed to collect water from satellite locations of 1000 L rain barrels around the property. this central bioreactor automatically waters food gardens, and produces 400 Liters of accelerated compost every 45 days that we use to amplify our growing beds.
The bioreactor also has 300 Watts of solar and two 200 Watt wind turbines and its own dedicated battery array.
We built a state of the art mobile data lab and classroom with 5G and seven deployable raspberry Pi 400 computers and monitors that each have their own AC inverter that powers their data entry station and whose battery is regenerated at night by the classroom solar and wind array.
We built a 3M x 3.2M biodome with an airlock to convert waste gray water into fresh water using solar evaporation stills and installed three sterling engines with dedicated fresnel lenses to amplify ambient heat within the biodome and sunlight into mechanical motion which recharges batteries and mobile phones of our guests.
We built, groomed and maintained a beautiful formal garden on the east face of the farm to serve as a park and garden for our neighbors all from starts and cuttings and diligently produced and perfected fertilizer we produce on site.
Every bed is designed as a swale and requires zero watering as it is modeled after the forest floor so that when it rains, that water stays in that bed for weeks. We use zero city water except in cases of extreme drought (which we have only encountered once in 7 years).
Every food garden bed is double dug and augmented with an active lasagna garden and supplements produced on site (fertilizer, water, compost, dirt) and is watered automatically by the bioreactor robotic watering system.
Now we are seeking investment beyond the grant we received from the Ohio farm Bureau and the Columbus Foundation.