Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Hey all,

So my wife and I have been thinking looking at land to purchase soon for our home. We've found some decent farmland (about 1000m2) for pretty cheap so it made me think of building a fairly large dream system.

I just started playing around with designing it and was thinking about developing a staggered system where I could harvest once or twice a month.

I attached the picture of what I'm currently thinking. I want it to be a fairly open space as I also teach so having students come over and learn about aquaponics would be pretty cool.

My idea is essentially a 20 m3 pond. 16m3 would be used for fish and 4m3 would be used for a sump tank. In the middle would be a little 4m x 4m patio area. Overflow from the fish tank will flow into the sump tank. Water from the sump tank would be pumped into 1 line of grow beds every 15 minutes, all 4 lines could then be watered within 1 hour. The water from the grow beds would then flow into a raft system (not sure what size makes sense right now). where overflow would go back into the fish tank.

Would something like this work?

I was thinking about building out the pond area fully first, and then slowly adding grow beds as more fish are added to the system.

I'm thinking of raising different kinds of fish eventually, but probably starting with tilapia. How does raising redclaw crayfish affect the system? From what I read, in 1 sq meter I should be able to easily have 10 or so living?

Hey , looks great . I had 4 x redclaw at first with 20 goldfish when I started but the redclaw ate all my goldfish one by one, They may be suited to co habit but maybe when the fish are bigger than 50mm. ( I thought the redclaw were vegetarians ). Good luck

It should work in theory..