Fly Fishing Insider Podcast
The Fly Fishing Collaborative builds aquaponics farms - fish tanks paired with produce beds - for safe homes and villages in poor communities, then hands them over. The farms feed residents and sell the surplus, creating income that lowers the vulnerability traffickers exploit. Fly fishing auctions, film screenings and donated flies pay for the builds.
Bucky Buchstaber founded the Fly Fishing Collaborative, a nonprofit that mobilizes the fly fishing community to fund aquaponics farms for orphanages, safe homes and villages exposed to human trafficking.
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What is the Fly Fishing Collaborative?
The Fly Fishing Collaborative is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit started in 2014 that raises money through the fly fishing community and spends it building aquaponics farms in communities exposed to poverty and human trafficking. The founder's premise is that anglers do not have to give up what they love in order to do something for other people - the fishing itself becomes the fundraising vehicle. The organization takes its name from the collaboration required: donors, fly tyers, fly shops, film hosts and volunteer build crews.
How does an aquaponics farm reduce the risk of human trafficking?
An aquaponics farm grows fish and produce together, so a household or a home for rescued children can eat from it and sell the surplus in the local market. Traffickers target vulnerability, and the single most common form of vulnerability is a family with no resource and no income, which is why children get handed over to strangers offering wages. Giving a community a steady food source and a small income stream does not eliminate the risk, but it removes the specific lever traffickers use most often.
How many aquaponics farms has the Fly Fishing Collaborative built?
In its first seven years the Fly Fishing Collaborative built 12 farms across 10 countries. A typical build is roughly a 1,500 square foot greenhouse farm, enough to feed something in the range of 30 to 50 children and support a job or two. The stated ambition is larger commercial-scale farms that generate real employment in the community, so the work itself becomes an alternative to the trafficking economy, with builds lined up in Belize, Peru, Uganda and Honduras.
How do traffickers actually recruit children in poor villages?
In hill tribe villages with no economy and no schooling, traffickers arrive posing as educators or factory recruiters. They tell an overwhelmed guardian - often an aunt, uncle or older sibling caring for children after a death in the family - that the children will be educated, paid a wage and able to send money home, and sometimes hand over money up front to make the offer look legitimate. The guardian signs the children over believing they are going to school and a job, and the children instead disappear into brothels.
What is a safe home, and why does it need a farm?
A safe home is a secured residence that takes in children rescued from brothels and prostitution rings, run in many cases by a couple of people in the community who started feeding rescued children on their own money. Security is not incidental: one urban safe home visited in Mexico City housed about a dozen girls behind a walled compound, because traffickers lose significant income when a girl is rescued and will work to get her back. The Fly Fishing Collaborative builds farms at these homes so the house parents running them are not dependent on donations to keep feeding the children.
How does the Fly Fishing Collaborative raise money?
The backbone of the Fly Fishing Collaborative's fundraising is an annual auction and banquet held every March in Portland, which in 2021 ran virtually and drew donors from states that could never have attended in person. Beyond that, fly fishing film tour screenings in theaters around Oregon and Washington act as local fundraisers, individual supporters host their own events at fly shops and theaters, and a recurring giving program was being launched to replace one-off donations with steady monthly income. A line of leather and canvas fly wallets and rod cases, made with a Texas leather company, adds product revenue.
How can an angler support the Fly Fishing Collaborative?
The three routes the Fly Fishing Collaborative asks for are sharing the work, recurring monthly giving at whatever level a person can sustain, and joining a farm build as a volunteer. A group of fly tyers created one of the more successful income streams on their own by tying flies, donating them, and letting the organization sell them - an initiative nobody at the nonprofit planned. Volunteers travel with the build crews and construct a farm in two or three weeks before handing it over to the community.
Key takeaways
- The Fly Fishing Collaborative has built 12 aquaponics farms in 10 countries since 2014, each averaging around 1,500 square feet of greenhouse.
- A single farm is sized to feed roughly 30 to 50 children and to create one or two paying jobs in the community.
- Traffickers target vulnerability rather than poverty alone - lost parents, no schooling and no community connection matter as much as no money.
- Recurring monthly donors are worth more to the organization than one-off gifts, because farm builds are scheduled a year or more out.
- Fly tyers created a working revenue stream simply by donating tied flies for the nonprofit to sell, with no involvement from staff.
- Volunteers can join a build crew and construct a farm on site over two or three weeks.
