Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Super Job!

I've been calling on the client every couple of days to check on temperatures and the fish. We introduced 1500 x Tilapia fingerlings of 20g-50g last week and they've settled in nicely. I did a water test today and attached the image of the results for anyone who can interpret the results for me please (I'm colour blind)

.1, .5, 50, 7 in that order.
Great work!!!!

Hum, Ammonia looks fine, 0-trace area
Nitrite looks to be reading a bit higher .25 to .5 on my computer screen.
Nitrate, I've always had trouble reading Nitrate but probably 50 ish.
pH a bit hard to tell in the picture but I'm guessing somewhere in the middle 7s.

Not too bad I would venture, a little more cycling to do to bring down the nitrites.

Keep up the good work!

Thursday saw us finally introduce chickens to our commercial Aquaponic site. Chickens are the missing link, that will provide the much-needed nutrients, reduce the feed bill for the Tilapia and yield eggs for consumption or sale. We had a few choices. namely day-old chicks or fully grown fowls and broilers or laying hens. We eventually settled for laying hens, but the obvious question arose. How many chickens?

From a brilliant publication entitled, “THE VERTICAL FARM, Food Production of the Future” by the Columbia University Department of Environmental Health Sciences, I discovered that a laying hen poops 40 lbs per annum. This is 18kg per year or about 50g per day. In the pond we have 1500 fingerlings of say 25g each. 25g x 1500 fish = 38kg of fish. If I want the “poop” component of their diet to be 1% of their body mass per day I then need 380g of poop. Divide this by each hens contribution of 50g and we could use 380 / 50 = 8 hens.

I “chickened” out of this number and used 6 laying hens to try out the system. What concerns me is not so much the chicken dung which I know will be eaten, but all the other debris, feathers, feed etc clogging up my system and fouling the water. I am also concerned about dissolved oxygen (DO) levels. This is what the chickens look like suspended above the Tilapia pond.

I worked in a battery barn for a few months a year ago last. it was impressive, providing nearly one million eggs a day, and chicken poop galore. It did allow me some insight into how the industry is and provided me with free poop for my BSF experimenting.
So wrong in many other ways though. Is there any chance you could let the hens free range and just collect the poop when you need it? That would take care of your feed and feather question.

We've got 40 hens (all free-range) and they all have to have a turn doing "toilet duty" for a few hours every week

okay, so they're taking turns, good

Most excellent. Now you just have to recoginize the look in their eyes when they have to go?
Any chance of a salmonila(sp) problem with the hen setup?

gotfish,,this sytem has been used for centuries in china ,SE Asia ,,they seem to be ok.

except when they go crazy and try to take over the world

A shot of the growth as of today. The client is starting to harvest veggies daily and supply to local restaurants. The addition of the chickens seems to have turbo-boosted plant growth.

What are you doing about feathers etc?

Not many to talk of. We scoop them out while they're still floating. Some end up in the 20mm spraybars which we clean out every second week anyway.

Paid a follow up visit to the site on Thursday, and I was amazed by the plant growth. Fortunately the top of the greenhouse is over 4m, because at the rate the vegetables are growing, I think it will be only a matter of time before they reach the top. Cucumbers, tomatoes, basil, carrots, mint, lettuce, spinach, squash, herbs and flowers, they're all running wild.

Two images attached.