Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

The stories about duckaponics and bioponics have given me a few ideas for other types of systems. You see, I've been dreaming about having a self-sufficient farm since I was a kid, but my neck, back, and shoulders have a tendency to give out, so I'm trying to design a system that would let me raise my animals while minimizing the amount of lifting required. So, here are some of my ideas, constructive criticism is invited:

For rabbits or other small caged animals, have a shallow water tank built into the floor of their hutches with the water constantly circulating through a grow bed to filter it. (sorry I can't include pictures, I don't have the software to draw it out) Essentially, the bottoms of their cages would be suspended an inch or so above a slow-moving river, with of course some means of dealing with excess solids built in, before it was run through the grow beds.

For larger animals, have a water channel built into the floor of the barn, with grating over it small enough the animals could walk on it but large enough to allow wastes and debris to fall through. That way, cleaning the barn would just mean using a shovel to scrape everything into the channel, where the constant flow of water would carry it to Stage 2: solids filtering. The solids filter could be along the lines of a mesh on rollers, so that twice a day the solids could be moved to a worm tank nearby, just by turning a crank. After passing through the filter the water would go through several grow beds before being pumped back up to the beginning again.

Since there would be no fish in either system, the amount of oxygen in the water wouldn't be as big an issue, so the grow beds could be put at the same level as the water to cut down on the amount of pumping power needed.

These ideas are still in the rough stages, so I'd welcome any improvements you guys can come up with. Or any other ideas you guys might have about how to run a farm with only half of a shoulder working.

Cowaponics batman! That would be one super sized system!

i think it could work with rabbits actually. It would remove 90% of the problems with power outages with aquaponics. You could also have a "floating" raft on one side growing lettuce that the rabbits can't get to until they get large enough (or something like that).

With some of the other larger animals u'd have a problem in that their waste is sometimes bigger than their feet so they wouldn't fall into the water.

I could be wrong, but i heard somewhere that if rabbits aren't able to eat their own "waste" they become malnutriented (whatever the right word is). They have to process foods twice . That could be totally wrong in which case i don't see why it couldn't work.

actually, rabbits re-ingest their poop - the process is called caprophagia.. so the rabbit will poop "soft" feces and reingest it through their butts..
fascinating stuff..

Now I use duck-a-ponics to help keep the water for my birds nice so I don't have to dump and re-fill their "pond" every day, I'm not using the duck-a-ponics system to grow any people food.

why, well warm blooded animals can share pathogens with us and therefore we don't want to be using their waste for bio-ponics to grow food. And using water to transport waste is generally rather wasteful. They do make poop movers for barns where you essentially scrape the poo to a trough and there is a chain with paddles that travels around the trough to essentially conveyor belt the poop up a ramp and out into the poo wagon for spreading on fields or into a pile where it can be mixed with other carbon materials and properly composted. I would not add excess water to this mix.

With the bunnies, yes their digestion is so poor that they need to eat much of their food twice. but as a way to improve the waste management for rabbits, they often do a method where you have an angled screen under the cages so the bunnie berries will roll to the side and into a worm bin while the urine can fall straight down into a bed of absorbent carbon material that can then be scooped out every so often to the compost bin. Now I suppose if you had a tray below the screen with a flow of water through it to catch the urine you could circulate that through gravel beds and grow fodder for the rabbits and avoid the shoveling out of the urine soaked bedding while saving on the cost of bedding.

Then again, instead of going to a lot of effort to pump poo around the place, I rather like the way polyface farms does things.

It would lesson the need for oxygen but not eliminate it. You would have to be very careful with heavy waste loads that you ensured that the bacteria had enough oxygen. Having the bacteria run out of oxygen would mean the system would crash and at best would need to be re-cycled.

W H A T ?

My grandfather had one of those, but he seldom had less than 100 head of cattle. I was thinking smaller than that, something like 3 pigs, 4 sheep, and 2 donkeys (roughly, with more during the summer). At that scale, I'm not sure the mechanized poo-mover is worth the expense, they are very pricey! But maybe I could design a smaller version.

Good point about the parasites, though. I wasn't planning on growing vegetables in the critterponics beds, but something like flowers, or bamboo for stove fuel, or maybe non-culinary herbs.