Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Bumity bump, are you there Karen?

Aloha, we are a young group of 9th graders from Mid-Pacific Institute which is located in Honolulu Hawaii. We are making an Aquaponics kit and we would like your support on our endeavors to be successful entrepreneurs. Our goal for this kit is to be able to educate people about sustainability, so instead of a big high scale model, it is just a small table that you place on top of your aquarium. Then watch the system run! Through collaboration we decided that an Aquaponics kit would be the most beneficial way to help raise awareness about the issue of sustainability. Our ultimate goal is to put our idea on Kickstarter and get funded! Thank you for taking time to read this and please get back to us.

Karen, What are you doing? Seems like your addicted to AP.

She went under didn't she? ( Not to imply that she went down under). Just seems as though she (unfortunately) didn't make it in her venture? Great thread, just read the whole of it, pulling for her the whole time, hoping for it to be a great success story and then nothing. Bummer anyway. Anybody know?

I fear that might be the case for the venture but sometimes it is hard to tell since actually getting it up and running and starting to sell the produce could actually take up so much of ones time that they don't manage to log onto a site anymore. So it could be a case of NO News is Good News.

We can hope anyway unless some one has heard anything about what has become if Karen.

Yea it would be great to find out how its going, I wonder if anyone is in the area?

I have tried to track her down a couple of times online, to no avail. I am really pulling for her. Really hoping thins are just very busy for her.

I would really like to see a few of us mainland aquaponic operations make it long term. It is just so hard to compete with the industrially produced food that is sold for so cheap that if you can't find a really good niche market and produce really top quality produce for that market, I don't see this as being a very easy option for farming.

I know several small operations on tropical or sub-tropical Islands that seem to be making a living of it but they have the advantage that most of the food (even the "cheap" industrially grown foods) has to be shipped or flown in at relatively high expense and by the time it gets to the Islands the quality tends to be degrading so being able to provide local food can earn the farmer considerably more on such Islands than it does on this "cheap food" mainland.

I think in larger cities there may be enough people willing to pay the extra for better quality to justify small coop arrangements which could make a go of it.

Part of the problem for AP is separating itself from the perception that it is Hydroponics with the chemicals. I like to think of it as soil gardening with very big rocks and lots of subsurface water movement

Well the way I've been describing it at market is...
Aquaponics is similar to Hydroponics but instead of chemical fertilizers in the tank, We keep Fish. It is also therefore even more Toxin Free than Organic since we can't even use many of the "organic" pesticides that would kill fish so we are growing more food for every drop of water and doing it as toxin free as possible.

And I like the thinking of AP as soil gardening, just with very coarse gravely soil, well and we contain the water and re-circulate it rather than loosing it down into the ground or by spraying it into the air.

Here's another way to describe it but this doesn't explain it.

Super-Organic, plant and fish farming with Sub-irrigation, Fertilization, Filtration, and Water Conservation.

Hi All;

I am so sorry I've been so out of touch that it looked like I fell off the planet. I got really sick there for awhile, but I'm back, and Howling Moose Gardens is in the process of starting up for the 2014 Spring/Summer season.

Some pipes and the like froze while I was out of commission, so I'm doing repairs and planting seeds. Wheee!

I hope I can make a go of AP here in the Twin Cities (Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota, USA), because local food is HUGE here. However, I just got some MAJOR competition. A large commercial AP set up has gone into an old brewery here. Brilliant, as breweries are designed to hold liquid on all its floors! But it's an inside-building job, so lots of lights, filtering and the like. Looks like an awesome setup.

Anyway, Urban Organics: http://www.startribune.com/lifestyle/homegarden/254406111.html?page=1&c=y

I'll post a note about them in the "other commercial AP setups"-ish thread if I can find it after all this time (unless they're already here?)

Glad to to see you back Karen.

Look forward to seeing the progress.

Glad to see you back!

Hi Karen, welcome back