Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Here's a link to some extreme high density yabbie culture http://www.blueyabby.com/Farming.htm.

Something about it makes me feel a little uneasy about the super high density, a little like battery chicken farming.. And it looks almost a little 'Matrix' like

Yeh, i'm not ultra impressed with the mineral water bottle size house for the poor bastards. Especially the pic where it looks like he's sitting squashed up against his last moult.

Economics and animal friendly don't often mix.

I designed a 3D yabby breeder once, no where near that sort of return and "efficiency" but it was a little more roomy

I'll try and find my drawings and scan them if any one is interested. Just don't laugh, i flunked graphics and art

I quite like the idea but as you guys point out a little 2 intensive.
Also I don't like the manual aspect of the feeding process. If that could be worked out it would be worth looking into.

YUCK YUCK AND DOUBLE YUCK!
I'm with you guys. Those photos are sickening. This is just another intensive battery farming system. fabulous. Lets always encourage people to try and mimic nature wherever they can in their systems. The best and most stable systems are the ones with theoretical simplicity ( based on sound ecological principles) and structural complexity - meaning multiple environments for multiple organisms all living interdependently. Its more complicated, messy, and chaotic and it takes effort and patience but its also long lasting, beautiful, and benefits all the critters involved - not just our tummies and our wallets.
Please, anyone out there thinking of setting up a system like this - have respect for the creatures in your care and give them a life as close to nature as possible for as long as they have one. I BET stress free happy yabbies would taste MUCH better than matrix yabbies!

Mmmm, gotta agree with you there Aeon... One of the very strange things I read was that they also suggested that you put a couple of predatory fish in the same tank as the yabbies. That way the fish tries to chase the yabbies, giving the yabbies excercise........

Oh well, I must admit that when I looked into my tank the other night and watched the 130 odd, large silver perch swimming around in the reasonably confined space they are in, a felt a little guilty at the crowding they were experiencing.

While I'm not unsympathetic to the anxieties expressed toward intensive farming of any kind, let's be clear that it's emotive rather than rational.

Which is the bigger issue for a yabbie - living in a plastic container or being eaten by its relatives? The simple fact is that we'll never know because yabbies tend not to talk much about such things.

And Aeon, I wouldn't bet too much - you'll lose your shirt. Blind tests reveal that people can't consistently differentiate between free range eggs or battery farm eggs. Organic vegetables don't necessarily have more vitamins and minerals than those grown with chemical fertilisers In fact, depending on the circumstances under which they were grown, they may have less. Free range broiler chickens don't necessarily taste better than battery farm chickens.

What you feed livestock (rather than how they live) has the greatest bearing on how the meat (or eggs) taste.....and fish would be no different.

Incidentally, recirculating aquaculture systems (including those used in aquaponics) are arguably the most intensive farming systems of all.

What makes aquaponics acceptable to me is the biological leverage that it invokes - making it cost effective and sustainable.

I'm not suggesting that we should ignore animal welfare but simply suggest that most of our beliefs about what animals want or think is based on our own limited perceptions rather than empirical fact.

Aeon, I respect your beliefs but I don't share them.

Joel, I value the opportunity to exchange opinions and to learn from others.....thanks for making this forum available.

Fair commentary on the subject.
I smiled at the "being eaten by relatives"

As logical as i try to be its human nature to be biased

Steve

Hey Gary,
Interesting viewpoints and I appreciate your thoughtful reply. In the words of Voltaire - I may not agree with what you say but I will defend your right to say it!
Whilst often dissmissed in the past, emotional intelligence ( as defined by the Myers Briggs team) of the human is becoming more and more recognised as a valid way of approaching information. Having just graduated in the top 15 percent of the state with a Bachelor of Social Ecology from UWS I can proudly advocate the use of emotion and personal bias within an empirical scientific context - ands its fun too! All the new sciences such as chaos, complexity, fuzzy logic and second order cybernetics-even old school stuff like Heisenburgs Uncertainty Principle and quantam mechanics (all units in my degree) are revealing the flaws in the modern era of 'rational observer' science. At the height of the modern era, scientists unable to act on their feelings of revolt and disgust wiped out millions of lives in the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear strikes and think of all the people killed in the Nazi concentration camps. The nazi camp system is recognised by economists as the epitomy of efficient modern rationalisation and scientific reason - but not too much fun for the occupants of course. What I'm getting at is - we have emotions for a reason - maybe if we expressed them more as scientists we'd have a saner world. if you're still dubious you should also check out a popular new form of research known as 'autoethnography' which seeks to concsiously place the researcher's bias and feelings right within their own methodological processes and results. Its great stuff as it recognises that EVERYTHING in science has bias and prejudice -why pretend otherewise? we arent computers - we're just fuzzy little beings with complicated hearts and minds trying to find our way in a very big scary universe - those white lab coats and clip boards sure do make us feel safer though. Gary, I hope to hear more from you in the forum - your mindful and careful approach will ensure 'balance in the force' so to speak! Great fun to debate with you, and forgive my mischeivous betting on the non-matrix yabbie- just trying to advocate for the poor dudes!
Aeon.

Aeon,

Congratulations on the achievement of your Degree. While I thought the ethical linkage between the holocaust and nuclear strikes and animal husbandry practices was a bit tenuous, I share your view that, what the world doesn't need any more of, is bad scientists.

My comments on animal welfare weren't meant to imply that people who keep (and eat) animals. birds and fish should deal with them unethically but rather that the whole debate on animal welfare should reflect greater balance.

Mulesing is a cruel practice to some people but anyone who has ever had to deal with sheep with severe flystrike will have a different point of view.

Some people object to debeaking day old chicks but what the kid's story books forget to mention is that the dear little things tend to be cannibalistic in certain circumstances.

Intensive poultry and pig farming is despised by some people who wax lyrical about the freedom associated with free range. Freedom to do what? Freedom to be exposed to predators or to weather extremes and to be exposed to parasites and diseases which are communicated by wild birds and animals.

As it turns out, most of these practices are not my personal cup of tea because, as a micro-farmer, I can access different strategies. I acknowledge, however, that I have the luxury of choice. The same choices may be denied to other food producers and consumers.

I do farm semi-intensively and I exploit appropriate technology to ensure that I do it effectively.

I acknowledge that, regardless of the approach, farming animals, birds or fish will be unaccpeptable to some people. Vegetarianism (like all of the 'isms') has its fringe lunatics and my attitude to them (and their insistence that no-one should eat meat) is that if they are not playing the game they shouldn't attempt to make the rules.

Remember the 'ashes to ashes' stuff that they trot out when we die - all living things (including us) are part of the food chain. Some of us tap into the food chain at different levels - some will eat meat, some will eat plants and some (like rabbits) will eat poop.

What this means at a practical level, is that while you're advocating for yabbies, I'll be busily eating them.

Aeon, while our destinations may be different, there's no reason why we can't enjoy the journey together.......and now I'm keen to hear your rationale for aquaponics - arguably the most intensive of all farming systems.

Tis a lot of big words in here....

Garry,

I'm a little scared to weigh into this one, but a genuine question from me;

How is aquaponics "argueably the most intensive" when by design the maximum quatities of fish kept in a given voulume of water are striclty limited buy the amount of plants grown in a grow bed? Airation can push the limits a little as far as dissolved O2 goes, but the ammonia and nitrates are the real limiting factor and are goverened by growbed and plants. As far as i understand this is the reason that AquaCULTURE requires such large volumes of water flow/change.

This is all assuming that you don't have a 50,000 litre grow bed to your 1,000 litre fish tank (exagerated for the point). I guess then the system would be balanced to the point of extreme intensitiy fish stocking.

Steve

Here here Gary! -
and i'll be eating the yabbies too- just hopefully not the ones grown out of coke bottles.
I'm all for small scale intensive systems where
1) much of the land/area can be used efficiently & thoroughly and
2) the site is able to be kept under control re the following:
in a small scale system this is no problem however on larger sites like huge aquaculture dams, monoculture crop farms, and battery chicken farms ( ands often free range as well) the sites are too large and the time, enegry and resources it takes to manage them make them inneficient energy wise.
I am very aware however these ( large scale intensive) systems are not about producing food, they are about producing money, of course.

Theres a great ABC doco called "fear of falling food" which at one point compares battery chook farms to small sustainable free range farms. I'll always remember this cause its so incredible - in a standard battery farm set up it takes the energy of 8 hens eggs to produce 1 yes ONE hens egg - that's insane. sorry I cant be more specific about how that works - I would have to see the film again. I think Peter Harvey was the narrator.

Small scale intensive systems on the other hand can be highly efficient whilst also meeting the needs of the animals, or flora involved. I prefer systems where as much of the enegery inputs are produced by the system itself.
And I absolutely agree with you that leaving animals vulnerable to extreme climate, disease and predators is (almost) as cruel as growing a pig in a cage or a yabbie in a bottle. This however is really a design issue and there is a solution for all of these challenges. Some of them are obvious- if there are more than about twenty chickens in a flock they cant remember each other and get territorial and fight - hence the need to debeak - so i would have to argue that its not sustainable OR ethical to keep more than 20 chooks together in a flock.

Remember I am interested in systems which exist for the purpose of creating food ethically- not money- so small scale remains the best option for me.
Wind brakes, shelter, good fencing, a marrema dog perhaps- all these can ensure the livestock are in a safe free range environment where they can express their natural behaviours which if the design is right will strengthen the system ( bird flu however is a vexing concern for free
rangers of course).
Natural animal behaviors can become inputs ( like manure as nitrogen for soil, diiging and scavenging to aerate earthworks and clean dam water) and they become the farm workers - not just meat products, and i know you already incorporate this multifunctionality into some of your systems as you suggested to me with the quail poop etc.
I'm all for meat products particularly from culling when there is a surplus of stock . Like you I respect very much the right to choose vegetarianism however I like to get my B12 direct from meat, but I am happy to hear their arguments and views about the meat game - they are involved wther they like it or not- plants are covered in 'fleshy' organisms - they are just real tiny! And lots of plants are carnivors eating nematodes etc So no matter what you do you can't avoid eating meat.

What about aquaponics?
I prefer a system that has a polyculture- fish, plants, microorganisms, insects, crustaceans perhaps - where unlike the intensive yabbie coke farm - these elements can interract and perform many functions and the organisms involved can express their natural behaviours to the benefit of themselves and the system.
Its never the number of elements in a system but the number of connections between them that strengthens and stabilises the system- which is why a complex system is always better than a simple one. If for example, the yabbie coke bottle farmer is absent for a period of time - each yabbie would perish, unable to access food, but in a polyculture pond there is food present - even perhaps in the form of relatives if the farmer doesnt show up for an extended period of time.
When you have a self regulating system where each important function is supported by many elements ( various sources of food, protection, habitat) you have sustainability. Its certainly not fast food though.
Nature' s not jacked up on caffeine like I often am so I have to learn the art of patience and value long term stability versus short term economic gain.
Even if I felt that yabbies have no inherent rights to express their natural behaviors, i would rather have them scavenging in the bottom of my pond doing some work - than languishing in a coke bottle where they can achieve bugger all except grow big.
Having said all that, I reckon you and I have probably more in common than not with our obvious interests in animal husbandry, food production and goals to create viable technologies for the future - I would guess we are probably products of our generations as well - with you having had at least twenty years experience in the field and me just out of uni ( I was a very mature age student though!).
I am however replacing my bets on the taste issue! And promise to get back to this thread very soon with a counter argument regarding battery meat versus free range meat.
Until then my friend, and what do the rest of you aquaponists think about these things? To coke or not to coke?
Aeon

Well this is getting interesting....... And just when they go and change the links on their website, so my original link doesn't work any more.... Here is a link to their new revised version http://www.blueyabby.com/en/Products/EDU%20Cells.htm.

I feel that an important aspect of food production is - quality of life, for the food that is being produced, and the degree of external artificial influences that the 'food' has undergone during it's growth cycle. Hormone induced growth of pigs for example, that spend their whole lives in a crowded concrete and steel pen, is a poor example of a sustainable ethical method of food production.

But when a debate becomes based on ethics, then I guess that it's rife for strife, as every person has a different value systems. Here we end up on a slippery slope where no two person's ethics are going to be the same, and there will always be conflicting opinions. I guess in saying such, I don't particularly want to enter the ethical debate about general food production, but I would like to bestow the virtues of aquaponics.

I feel that aquaponics, although very intensive in some of it's many forms, is a well balanced form of food production when taking the welfare of the animal that's being produced into account. It uses no artificial means of growth promotion, it allows the communal interaction and schooling instincts of the fish to take place, within an area where they have free movement. The stocking levels are controlled by natural means, of only what can be filtered from the water using biological methods. It promotes the use of a non-sterile more natural environment, in so far as the water quality and microbial activity are concerned. And most importantly, compared with other food production methods, it's relatively sustainable, with reasonably low energy inputs vs output, for an intensive method of protein production.

There are very few methods of intensive protein production for human consumption that can stack up to aquaponics, in terms of energy usage vs. outputs, water usage, foot print (area used), waste or pollution production, and animal welfare...

But anyway, back to the point about the intensive yabby culturing, personally I'm going to go to their website and buy a couple of their yabby enclosure things, and do some experimenting with how their growth compares with some more free ranging yabbies in half drums.

One last comment though, I feel that any animal should have the right to be able to go about it's natural, instinctive actions. A chook should be able to scratch, a pig should be able to sniff and dig with it's snout, a fish should be able to swim, a cow should be able to eat pasture, and a yabby should be able to lift it's claws up, in these enclusures, it can't.. Still, it will be interesting to give them a go as a comparison... I wonder how I can tell if a yabby is happy or not..?

If you analyse everything closely, we're all saying similar things which suggests that we like a debate.

Steve, the common thread that binds us is our interest in aquaponics so my comments on recirculating aquaculture systems should be read in that context.

My interpretation of 'intensive' refers to an increased number of animals (or birds or fish and even plants) that are kept in circumstances which very different to those that they'd encounter in their natural state.

In recirculating aquaculture systems, we keep larger numbers of fish in a smaller space than would occur naturally. We keep the fish in tanks which are very different to the natural watercourses in which they'd normally live......and we attempt to manage all of the parameters (water quality, pH, temperature, nutrition, etc) so that their health and growth are optimised.

That's what I meant when I spoke about 'intensive.' Because I am (like everyone else here) interested in aquaponics.....and because I'm in the process of setting up my own system.....I use the term as a matter of fact rather than a value judgement.

I'm a systems designer by nature so I love the way that aquaponics functions almost as a turnkey food production system.......you put the various components together, manage them according to a set of predetermined principles and this amazing machine pumps out clean fresh food....consistently and cost effectively.

What makes aquaponics acceptable as an intensive system (where conventional aquaculture and hydroponics are less so) is the biological leverage and the sustainability.

On their own, conventional hydroponics and aquaculture can be just as polluting and wasteful as any other monoculture.....and just as unsustainable.

It's the ability of aquaponics to take the ammonia (that is otherwise toxic for the fish) and to convert it to a form that enables it to be used by the plants which means that there's no water that has to be replaced (other than that lost to evaporation) and no spent nutrients that need to be dumped.

That makes aquaponics acceptable and sustainable.....and intensive.

Garry,

I'd agree it seems like we all do like a debate, and as i've seen quite often with other friends a 3 hour debate usually end in us realising that we all basically agree. Its just that we all had different definitions of key words or phrases!

In this case i took intensive to mean extreme number of specimens per area unit.

As a side note i think that aquaponics is probably the least "foreign" as in least different from nature BECAUSE of the biological leverage.

I'll admit that i have no idea of "natural" stocking densities of fish in natural water bodies. But the fact that we are really not trying to control many (any?) water parameters as the synergy of the systems closely mimics nature. The only real parameter that comes to mind that i will be adjusting is the natural downward ph shift. but by using calcium carbonate in the form of sea shells sort of keeps this under its own control as it would in a stream running over kms of rocks and sediment.

Anyway its been refreshing to see people converse so......intelligently Many of the boards i've stopped by would have had people at each others throats.

A refreshing change.

Cheers
Steve