Reconsidering Aquaponics

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Current applications of aquaponics

If you do a quick web search right now, you will find thousands and thousands of articles, videos, and web sites dedicated to raising fish and produce in a closed system. On those sites and in those articles and videos, aquaponics will be touted as a means of water conservation and creating more robust, safer food systems.

I want to start off and say that I agree with those applications and those ideas are not spreading fast enough. Simply put aquaponics is the most ecologically friendly way to raise fish. It is also a great way to reduce pesticide and chemical fertilizer dependance. Not to mention, the amount of land we could return to a more natural state, if we were producing less of our food crops on it.

But I do have a bit of a problem with this view. It is a little limiting.

Looking deeper at the possibilities

What first drew me to aquaponics when I stumbled across the word on the internet once upon a time, was the fact that I had been keeping aquariums, and found that having live plants in the aquariums made it much easier to regulate the tanks chemistry and keep my fish healthy. So I did the obvious and started playing with feeding terrestrial plants with the water. If you have messed around with aquaponics at all, you are already familiar with how much the plants come to life in this system. The thing no one pays attention to is how clean it keeps the water.

To paint a clear picture: When keeping aquariums, even a well balanced tank needs to have small water changes at least weekly, with 25-50% changes monthly or quarterly with even average stocking levels. If you have a deep substrate, decent filtration, and some aquatic plants; you can get away with just doing a 10% water change once a month or so.

With my first 250 gallon aquaponic experiment (25 small tilapia), I did zero water changes in six months by filtering the tank on a 4 foot by 4 foot salad greens ebb and flow salad greens bed. There was never a measurable amount of ammonia, nitrates, or nitrites in the tank. When I expanded that by moving the tank to my greenhouse (and as the fish matured to the 1.5-2 pounders that tilapia do), I intentionally overfed to the point of leaving food visible on the bottom of the tank, I filled the greenhouse with tomatoes and peppers and ended up with identical results. The fish lived a flourished and the water was potable.

https://cernunnosfoundation.com/merch

Which leads to the purpose of this article, to encourage people to more strongly consider applying Aquaponics to environmental clean up. Our creeks, streams, rivers, ponds, lakes, seas, and oceans are all polluted with nutrient run off from our farms (fertilizer), cities (human waste), and suburbs (both). Aquaponic systems can utilize productive plants to clean that up and give us a healthier environment.

But that brings us to another problem. If we care cleaning up waste with aquaponics, do we really want to grow food with it? The short answer is HELL NO. A longer answer would be that we use worse things to grow food now and there are ways to make it safe, but I want to set that aside at the moment as stick with the idea that we should err on the side of safety. So no, we don’t want to clean our polluted water with food and turn around and eat it.

The problem is the solution

A basic principle in permaculture is that the problem is the solution. When we look to this one, we see immediately that there are a great number of non food products that are based on plants. While medicinal plants come to mind quickly, I discard them as something else I would rather grow in dedicated systems for safety reasons. So we can class them with food production.

On the other hand; textiles, building materials, decorative plants, firewood, and biochar products can all be produced with these systems. Some of them (like cotton, rubber, plant based pesticides, and biofuels) can be environmentally destructive when grown by traditional methods, so moving their production to aquaponic systems that are cleaning the river systems up will have a multifold benefit ecologically. All of them can be produced in an aquaponic system with design of the system made to consider the specific crops needs.

Summary

The moral of this story is win/win.

Aquaponics for food systems is awesome.

Aquaponics for ecological clean up is awesome.

Aquaponics for non food plant production is awesome.

Aquaponics is just awesome.

So keep pushing them, but lets look at some other options and applications.

We have a world to fix.

For more information on how to fix Dead Zones in the Gulf of Mexico and the mouth of other rivers, follow this link –>

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