Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Wow, somebody cares! Hi guys. Yep, I've been working at my primary profession (well maybe not primary) this last year in a city 550km from home so managing the hatchery long distance has been a real chore. I've only been able to come home every second weekend so I made a recent decision to dispose of my brood stock (which has served me very well) and re-design my home AP system.

I've spent the Easter Weekend transporting the brood fish to their new home, just 20km down the road, cleaning everything in the greenhouse and setting up a smaller, more manageable system for the Child Bride to take care of while I'm away "hunting and gathering".

I've still been pretty active in AP, selling my book online and posting the occasional entry on my blog, which despite the neglect, is currently ranked at #10 in it's category in the South African Blog Charts.

Hope everyone at Backyard Aquaponics is keeping well.

Cheers

Synaptoman

So are more ap plans in the future? How are the systems that you built for people going?

Oh, there are always future AP plans. As far as the systems I've built,

One is being run as a training school and still working fine,
The second is producing a steady stream of fish and veggies for a Guest House,
The third was shut down when the farm was sold,
The fourth is producing plenty of veggies but disappointing growth in fish and is now being converted to a hatchery.
My home hatchery system is now being downscaled and converted to an ornamental breeding system.

I have recently immersed myself in the whole Permaculture movement and am trying to find out where AP fits in as a component of Permaculture.

Cheers

Synaptoman

Hey... welcome back Synaptoman.... were your ears burning or something...

That is a shame that AP has gone to the wayside, at least for now. Could you share your insights into why yields were not as expected and why financial viability was not obtainable?

Yep, good to hear you're alive and well !

Man, if you can't make AP economical over there, then I certainly wouldn't hold out a lot of hope for other systems in the developed world. There has to be some fundamental shift in the way we approach it before reproducible, commercial systems are viable. What that shift/approach is constitutes the AP holy grail.

I'm not questioning the feasibility of commercial AP per se. It was actually personal circumstances that dictated. I just didn't see a sufficient, sustainable, long-term return for me as a designer/installer of commercial and home AP systems.

As to its feasibility, I think that there are two formulaes that will work;

Firstly a small system producing top quality fish and specialised herbs and veggies sold through an on-site shop or farmers market.

Secondly, a very large system supplying product through normal supply chains.

Unfortunately, in my humble opinion, no medium system in between these two will be sustainable. Economies of scale and the "factory-farm" systems will always prevail.

I certainly haven't quit AP, just gathering my breath, selling a load of copies of my AP book and currently researching mixed systems, vertical farming, permaculture and plenty of other cool things.

And large.. means large.... $million+

Funny thing; I did just the opposite. I was an IT manager making plenty of cash. Now, I'm home for good as a working retirement

In learning what it really takes to produce 100% of our food I came to the conclusion that its prohibitively expensive to build a large enough system to do the job. Also, I love the idea of planting my food once and it making its own fertilizer and producing food for generations vs yearly plantings! Permaculture is the way to go for low to no input growing.

Currently we have some swales and 48 fruit trees planted with nurse trees and deep rooted plants to mine deep nutrients. Our kitchen garden consist of our 39 square meter AP growing bed, a 12 foot pond, and 74 square meter of deep sheet mulch beds using the 60/30/10 grow bio intensive method to make its own mulch. These are watered from the fish pond and have produced amazing crops even in poor soil. So this brings me to my current project to create a irregular shaped pond with maximum edge and shallow marsh growing area around the fish pond having a gravel bottom which is the bio filter for the pond. This mandala around the pond is a series of 20' grow beds that rotate chickens and crops with fruit and nut trees in between giving me maximum reachable growing area and minimum path area. This area will use the pond water from the center for added nitrogen.

A DWC test showed me that 6 banana peppers use 30 gallons of water on a hot day. I think it may be possible to make an AP that wicks enough water away that a float valve could keep fish water clean, but using a axial solar pump to move water from the pond through the gravel under the growing area the water will be filtered..

Hey, DanDMan, I don't suppose you'd supply a link to a high-res version of your mandala diagram, would you? Looks great!

I dont have a better version on the puter. I will start a new thread and post all the details with redrawn diagrams for the new permaculture AP system. I've got some pretty neat tricks up my sleeve this time. Hopefully I can get them all incorporated.

looks great Im subscribing