Where did the idea come from?

How did I devise this plan to fix the dead zones using aquaponics?

Its a fair question really. I have already admitted that I don’t have any particular business savvy. I am not formally educated. I do not have a ton of resources available to me that would give me advantages. What I do have is a naturally curious mind, eclectic interests, and an internal drive to solve problems.

That’s the short answer. A longer one has a history.

My interest in aquariums goes back to childhood. Like most kids, when I saw my first aquarium I was fascinated. While my parents never really had the resources to let me have one, a couple of my friends did. I would sit and watch them for hours and when I first got out of the Navy and had a place of my own, one of my first major purchases was an large aquarium. Over the years I kept a wide variety of fresh water fish in it and experimented with different types of filtration and maintenance methods. Eventually I had it down to the point of a near zero maintenance system where my fish were happy and healthy and I was doing little more than keeping them fed, doing infrequent water changes, and enjoying watching them swim in circles.

Fast forward to the mid 2000’s. Like a lot of other people, I became aware of how broken our food system is. This coupled with being a bit of a tree hugger that enjoys spending most of my time out in nature lead me to stumbling across Bill Mollison’s work in Permaculture. I dove into it head first. I read everything I could on the subject. I took a design course. I turned my HOA neighborhood backyard into a small forested farm complete with chickens, fruit trees, herbal spirals, and kitchen gardens. For a while I even hosted a podcast called DIY Food Supply that you may or may not have run across back then.

During my exploration of Permaculture, I also ran across aquaponics. I conducted a few in house experiments starting with a 10 gallon aquarium with a few plants and then a 500+ gallon greenhouse grow out that had remarkable success. Over the next couple of years I helped design and build systems for other people with similar interests, but I never really built a business out of it and eventually moved on to some of my other hobbies.

Then at an HOA meeting I was sent into a rage because while they were complaining about how expensive the common area upkeep was, the neighborhood voted to pay the same guy that dumps fertilizer all over the grounds to pour a chemical treatment into our retention ponds because of algae build up. I didn’t make any headway trying to convince them (one of the reasons I prefer this system to trying to change farming practices is the immovable object that is the inertia of human habits), but it did cause me to think long and hard on better ways of doing it.

And then the Horizon Oil disaster happened in the Gulf of Mexico. The story around that and its clean up brought the ecology of the gulf into my view. Well you can’t look at that long before you see the damage that is being done to the gulf and our oceans at large because of nutrient run off from our farms and residential areas.

It didn’t take much of a leap to realize the benefits of growing products by utilizing the waste that causing the crisis that is the dead zone at the mouth of the Mississippi river (and every other large river in the world). So this plan developed.

For a little over a decade this idea has been bouncing around my head and I finally came to a point that I think it needs to get out there. It is a simple solution. It is effective. And best of all it doesn’t do other harm while having the potential to be extremely profitable.

All I need to make it happen is money. And if you don’t want to throw money at me for me to do it, I am putting it out there for you to do it without me. Hell if you want to steal the idea, I encourage you. I would even come help you do it for a consulting fee. Its a world changing system that is based entirely on existing technologies that are already proven on small scale by every plant filtered aquarium in the world. As always, we would love your donations or purchases made in our support store.