Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

See this vid, i think he is claiming that this system is completely self sustaining, i.e. no or minimal outside input.
Find it hard to believe whats your thoughts?

http://www.takepart.com/video/2014/03/2 ... 2014-03-26

Gardenpool has been around for a while.. I was never quite sure exactly what their whole idea was exactly. It's a novel thing to do to your useless below ground pool, an interesting little ecosystem experiment, but as far as being very productive? I don't think so..

There aint no escaping the fact that if you have outputs you must have inputs.. There's no free lunch.

My point exactly, they suggest that the plants produce enough to feed the chooks and the goats, and the chooks produce waste for the algae and water plants to grow which the snails and the fish feed on that create waste for the rest of the plants to utilise that feeds their family, the goats and the chooks. Just doesn't add up and to be honest is ugly and i imagine quite smelly.
However i still applaud any type of sustainable living including this one, i just question their claim.

They never claim their system is fully self sustaining.

Introducing warm blooded animal waste brings up potential issues with salmonella

+ 1 on the Salmonella. I don't generally get all up in arms about it, but I certainly don't want to tempt fate.

Did you watch it??? I may have to watch it again but i remember them claiming no or minimal input.

He did say during the clip that "we don't really have to buy food for our fish or food for our chickens because we grow then within the system". Not actually stating no inputs, sort of implying it perhaps...

have to admit, similar systems were an inspiration for my project.

However I was concerned about the chicken poop going into the FT, is that healthy?

It is done in Asia all the time.

I was about to say that. They have chicken coops over aquaculture tanks (or ponds), and they want as much chicken poop as possible, and feel the tilapia off the algae blooms.

I don't hear about mass outbreaks of salmonella in asia from eating fish.

It's very possible they have stomach's of steel from growing up on that sort of diet though. I went to Egypt, drank a small amount of tap water in the shower and was squirting from both ends for a week. But they seem to get by alright on it.

ive also heard that some commercial fish feed had chicken manure in it?

Sure, in strait aquaculture, where the fish are cooked. But we eat the vegetables out of our systems raw. I prefer my chard without salmonella, thank you very much.

Has anyone actually been sick from integrating chickens into AP though that we know of?

If you're foliar spraying its obviously a problem (who would do that anyway).. but irrigating the vegies only direct to the the root zone, I don't know?

Out here in rural australia, my neighbours often dig in raw sewage sludge into their paddocks

and for centuries farmers have dug in chicken manure, horse manure etc into the soil to fertilise food crops

There must be some kind of biological barrier between the soil and what the plants ultimately uptake.. which I don't know enough about admittedly

You can have input free production but it will have a large labour component attached to it. Something that makes 'sustainability' in Australia very difficult to achieve whether it is fish, chickens or plain old wheat.