Jacob's Farm

Chuck and I headed north from the airport yesterday and arrived at Tony's Resort Inn on the bay in Corozal at about 2:30. We immediately met Mac Kelton of the Belize Project in the parking lot. After a quick lunch, we wasted little time before taking a trip to Jacob's Farm. This is an alcohol rehab work program that the Belize Project is nursing into life. I don't know how it got its name, but I think there's a story behind it. I first met the director, Ismael, last August. He tells me that so far about 60 men have come through the work program at the farm. One of the activities on the farm has been an attempt to raise tilapia for market. It's been a frustrating learning experience so far, with limited results. Our goal was to test the water from a solar powered well, for possible use as drinking and cooking water for the farm. We ended up frustrated as well. Our TDS (total dissolved solids) numbers were a very reasonable 150 ppm or so. But when we tried to titrate for hardness, we couldn't find the end point. It seemed like we'd discovered infinite hardness. Finally after squirting several droppers full of titrant into the solution we forced a color change, but had totally lost track of how much we'd added. We were confused. It's a chemical impossibility for hardness to be dramatically higher than TDS. After we got back to the hotel, I turned the bathroom into a wet lab and started testing tap water and Crystal bottled water. I needed to prove we weren't crazy and defend our honor as upstanding experimentalists. As expected, the Crystal tested near 0 for both hardness and TDS. The tap water was about 800 for TDS, and about 700 for hardness. That's pretty high, but not surprising for what we know about the area. Convinced that our measurement technique was good, I emailed Living Waters hoping someone might have an explanation for our weird numbers in the field and went to bed with no answer. By morning someone had suggested that I hadn't noticed the little blinking '10x' warning on my TDS meter telling me to multiply the reading by 10. Chuck suggested we test the seawater in the bay to prove that it worked. Sure enough, the meter read 433 and the warning was blinking. Seawater has a TDS over 4330! Returning to the farm Monday morning, we repeated our tests. We duplicated our TDS readings of 160, and yes, the warning was blinking. TDS was really around 1600 ppm -- extremely high. We diluted a water sample fivefold with Crystal water and measured hardness at 370, which meant 1850 ppm, also extremely high. We had solved our water puzzle, but didn't like the answer. We told Mac that it wasn't feasible to treat that water. After googling around later today, we also discovered that the water was probably way too hard for the tilapia farms too. A good thing to know but not a positive result. Mac was grateful for the information, even though he's not sure what to do with it yet. So grateful that he treated us to dinner! - dan