Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

It depends what you mean by "works". We know aquaponics works so we know the concept works. What needs to be done and is being done is the next step of showing how AP can be used to grow food and make money.

The business plan I'll be working is going to focus on the fish side of things and irrigate most of the water to field grown crops. Setup costs are smaller and it will make getting started. As we get going I'll gradually increase the hydro side.

On the tradition side, America has a huge tradition of enterprising people gathering togehter people to support their ideas with funds. In Australia we don't do that so much.


That would be investing. You would be investing your most valuable commodity, time. I'm not comfortable with the intern model. I can see the obvious attraction for employers (free labour) and I can see that it can work for people if their employer looks after them. I'd much rather have people work for equity. Check out the employment page if you haven't already.

http://www.fishfarmers.com.au/employment/


Thanks for the compliments and faith. Its the old story 99% perspiration.

If only perspiration could be used to pay bills....

Please take this constructively, but, I've read through everything on the site and through these discussions and I find the whole thing very confusing.. I think you really need to try and separate the ideas and websites of Fish farmers, being your side of things with fish/AP, and then the cooperative farm.

If the push is for the cooperative farm, then that's what you need to brand and push at the moment, give it a name, have a website solely dedicated to it, and push for "XXX farms" whatever it's called, sell that dream.

Reading through the site i find that when trying to look at it as a pleb, without knowing all the background things I already know about the situation it just doesn't seem clear.

If you take all the "farmers coop" off fishy farmers into it's own site, it helps to make it a bit clearer.. "come and join XXX farms, we have one business already joined up "fish farmers", come and join in to create a cooperative farm, where we help and support each other, integrating and working together etc....



So are you buying the land yourself as fish farmers or will it be as a coop? Hence why I say it's all a little confusing.. Point 3, either one way or another? Be concise, we are doing this...! if you need to change direction further down the line and go a different way, fair enough, but 2 out of three points are indecisive? Firm vision and goals...

I realize that this would mean it's a bit like starting two businesses/projects at the same time, but in reality isn't this the objective? Is the idea to have the cooperative farm marketed as such? Will it have a name, will it do combined promotion for all leaseholders? Or will the whole "land ownership company" side of things be a silent thing in the background and am I think about it in the wrong way?

Stuart, I'm going to tag onto some of Joel's comments here. I think I see how what he is saying is partly related to the concept, and partly (primarily?) related to the presentation.
You tend to present things in a very precise, detail oriented fashion, at least in this forum. I expect that this is a characteristic of your nature, and certainly understand it. However, you seem to be attempting to do the same thing on the company website, and there it may not serve you as well. At least in north america, the general public is easily confused, and prefers their information is small, digestible, bites. Ideally without choices, either/or, or if/then statements. What Joel has helpfully shown above is that your attempt at full disclosure of the details important to you (eg. add hydro or add AQ to a hydro) would probably be better presented as a simplification (perhaps 'Combine broad hydro style growing with the successful AQ start-up to harvest the full benefits of integrated AP'?) There are may ways that you could combine the two, including but not limited to the two options you have listed. GenPub (or non AP investor type) is not concerned with exactly which paths you have on your map, but with the significant waypoints and destination that those path lead to.


nb. A couple of comments on vagaries of language. Target your language to your audience. In the suggestion above, I initially used leverage where you now read harvest. GenPub knows what a harvest is, and it is good. Venture investor should see an 'invest in our future' page, where he would understand leveraging the power of the pure, natural AQ system with the synergies of the hydro growing to drive an integrated food production powerhouse. And lastly, where I typed simplification above, I initially missed the a. As I read the word, simplifiction, it seemed to be a pretty accurate summary for a lot of the 'presentation writing' that is necessary in business start-up.

I really appreciate your comments.

I'm a bit snowed this weekend because of the Deep Winter Agrarian Gathering.

Yesterday went really well with some really good discussions.

Last night the food was awesome with the Jonai pork being guzzled with gusto. The half a dozen smoked fish I brought along received rave reviews and I was left picking over the bones and digging out the cheeks. After all the food our mulled cider was especially welcomed and warmed a more than a few hands and fortified a few bellies against the cold.

Hi Stu, I have fairly much read your website front to back and came away not totally convinced at what you are wanting to do.. so the previous comments from earthbound /gingerbread are well worth a very serious look at..

standard solution, issues, the project, our solution. !!! what does all that mean.?? sorry, I don't understand..
it seems you are trying to promote fishfarmers AP & HP by telling us of the doom and gloom of farming.. I run 3 websites and have learn't one very important thing, get to the point real quick, don't talk about crap, and include lots of very good quality photo's.
(you have about 2 seconds on any home page to get the interest of someone to go to a second page.)

besides that
you mention that your plan is to use the water 3 times, but I can only see you using it once. you take it from the FT which could also be called any local river or stream where fish live, you pump it out of there onto plants and crops at several different locations.. then you get some more water and do it again..

I thought that was the problem in the first place.!!

there's no mention of 100% recycled water from a commercial sized AP system.

Yeah good points. The thing is I wanted to focus on Fish Farmers and have others come along and "own" the cooperative farm with me. So I could have done a website for it, named it and all that but I wanted that to be more collaborative.

From the feed back I'm getting its looks like I should just do it. Name it, descirbe it, paint a clear vision and ask people to sign up.



Yep as I said this is the direction we a re going. Damien has even volunteered to do the website so there goes the main obstacle to getting another website up and running

I'm going to start working on the cooperative farm site which will paint a clear vision of what we will do and what we will offer.

Its always hard to respond to feed back like that. Really what it boils down to is if the message hasn't gotten across then it hasn't gotten across.

When you integrate aquaculture into an irrigation operation you use the water:
1. to grow fish
2. to grow plants
3. to distribute fertiliser to the crop

Often 2 and 3 are thought of as just one thing but they are separate even if they are done at the same time by the same equipment. The fact that the nutrients form the fish are in the water means that the farmer needs to spend less on diesel spreading fertiliser. This won't be a 100% saving but it is a saving and therefore represents a 3rd use.

Re 100% recycled water I thought I had done that when talking about drought proofing growing operations. Obviously not. I think sometimes my need for accuracy gets in the way of my story telling

Explaining all that in response to comments just isn't good enough. I need to either not tell that part of the message or explain it better in the first place.

Sigh.

And people reckon writing a thesis is hard

Hmmm, the old addage of "if you cant explain it to your grandmother, you dont understand it" comes to mind.

Maybe get someone who is good at marketing to rewrite the text with a focus on making it easy for people who visit the site to explain to thier grandmother what you are doing and what the site is about.

I'm getting a growing list of supporters and volunteers so its working to a degree. No one who has volunteered to do that though

id volunteer, but i live in melbourne.... by the time i get to move to the country, *frack* knows where ill end up.

its great you managed to find people in the area who can volunteer.

Most of the volunteers don't live in the area.

The best proof reading and editing has been done in Tassie and Canberra. Obviously still need to work on it but its a lot better than it was.

Come on... work harder then...

It's nice being able to sit back and watch someone else go through the stress of getting stuff up and running...

A friend I worked with for over 12 years gave me only one piece of advice when I started up BYAP.. Don't employ family or friends, keep everything above board, professional and paid for, no favours..

After many years in business myself, I now find myself repeating this to many others.. It's very hard to demand certain standards, efforts and work levels of friends, family or volunteers. When your paying, you can demand and expect certain things you can't from the others. Make it, and keep it professional...

Yeah I know, all very well when you are on a shoe string budget and rely on volunteers to an extent...

Yeah I hear you.

Funny thing is that the guy we were paying to do the website dropped the ball. Damien volunteered and pulled us together in about 2 to 3 weeks.

I've worked with volunteers on many different projects and it has its challenges. In my experience the most common reason for cooperative projects to fall over is differences in expectations on what was required, what was provided and how it was all valued. Time after time I've worked for free in the expectation of a return. Time after time I haven't got much back. Once I did get a guy to work with me after I had helped him build sheds, bits of his house and a bunch of other stuff. Problem was I also got an invoice for the work he did

I might not have much cash to pay people but anyone who does work for us I'm encouraging to keep records on what they do and what its worth commercially. At various times during this project I've said to people that I wanted to formalise arrangments so I had a fair idea of what they thought they were worth.

So far the only person I know who has done this is my Dad but he is a project manager/accountant so its kind of second nature to him. Every now and then he gives me a balance

lmao, oh come on Stu,
so if you use the first 2ltes of water is only to wet the soil of the soil grown crop, the next 4ltes of water is full of fertilizer and is used to get to the roots and the last 3ltes has fish waste added and is used because its a damn hot day and the plants really need it, are you suggesting you have used the water 3 times.??

So we agree on the first use?

A field grown crop needs a lot of water. 95% of that water is not used by the plant to grow but if you don't provide it the plant doesn't get the 5% it does need to grow.

The alternative to using the water to "fertigate" the crop is to separate the waste stream, process it and then distribute it from a spreader behind a tractor.

There are a number of operations that indeed do this. A standard AQ system processes the ammonia and removes the nitrogen using standard AQ components. Solids waste is processed in a range of ways from mineralisation tanks to de-watered and composted but is then distributed by spreaders behind a tractor.

I'd agree the third saving is small relative to the other two but it is a saving.