Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

I know a few people who worked in a charity hospital in some of those famine-prone areas in Africa. They said their worst memories were when children were carried in on the brink of death due to starvation . . . and the parents carrying them were fat. They said they had a very hard time trying to convince the parents that eating until they were so stuffed they could barely move, and then giving the kids whatever was left over, might not be the best way to raise healthy kids. A lot of the parents didn't want to hear it.

I'm not saying this is how every parent in Africa behaves, just that there are those who do, and it happened often enough in the charity hospitals my friends worked at, that they became so disgusted they couldn't work there anymore. I've seen this here in the US too, people on welfare who buy big screen TV's, fancy sports cars, and designer clothes, then complain that the government doesn't give them enough to buy food for their kids or to pay their heating bills. My dad was installing a cell phone tower near a food bank once, and watched people take more then half the food they'd been given and toss it in the dumpster the minute they walked out the door.

Just a few observations to think about.

Maybe those fat Africans have just got big bones Ellendra. My bones seem to get bigger the closer I get to a packet of salt and vinegar chips.
But seriously Ellendra--with the greatest of respect to you--I would ask you to consider the following possibility: You’re a chubby African dad and things in your community spiral quickly and lethally out of control; your slim-to-average-sized children have to flee with you on a 2-3 week fun run to the nearest refugee camp; several of your family have just been murdered; you’re not sure how far you have to travel to safety or how long it will take; you have to carry some of your kids a good deal of the way and some of them get dysentery (children have weaker immune systems than adults); you know you must eat and drink enough to stay strong and alert to fend off the hyenas and bandits along the way—because if you don’t your entire family will certainly DIE. Under these circumstances, you might arrive at a refugee camp with very skinny, very sick kids and you may not have lost sufficient weight along the way to appear deserving of the sympathy of western volunteers who don’t speak your language and have never experienced what you have just gone through.
And I find it hard to believe that refugees that have to travel such long distances to get to the refugee camps are really “eating until they were so stuffed they could barely move”…surely quite a lot of movement must have been required or they’d be stuck at home, on the couch, with a bullet through their head.
Regarding your welfare beneficiaries in the US: I question whether very many of them can afford “fancy sports cars, and designer clothes”: Can your welfare payments really be so generous when your minimum wage is around $5.00/hour with no health insurance? And can you be sure that the folks your dad observed from the cell phone tower--the one’s wasting food—are the same ones that buy the big screen TV’s, fancy cars, and designer clothes?
If only those welfare recipients owned big merchant banks, then you could spend billions on them and be confident that the money was well spent--and nobody would challenge their dietary preferences.

Sorry, Ellendra, if my preceding post was a bit forthright--I didn't mean to be unkind.

BACK TO THE THREAD TOPIC

Some factors that give me confidence that AP is relevant to the Third World “food task”:

1. Some development aid projects have successfully cross-subsidized the provision of electric lighting systems for off-grid or poor villages from the profits of linked enterprises e.g., by linking the installation of solar PV panels and village lighting systems to broiler production (the broilers require around 20 hours of light per day for fastest growth). If broiler production can fund community lighting, I don’t see why AP fish/fruit/vegetables production couldn’t do the same with enough energy to spare for AP pumps?

2. Water availability need not be an issue in most cases because water harvesting earthworks (usually swales) have been shown to be very cost effective for most food production systems where reliable irrigation water is not available. Such earthworks can allow most of the water to infiltrate the soil but distribute some of the water to underground storages (tanks/cisterns/wells/aquifers) or small farm dams.

3. There are some very cheap methods for building ferro-cement tanks in third world conditions which means the affordability of fish tanks and growbeds should not be an impediment (failing that there’s always IBCs and blue barrels).

4. The availability of very forgiving, fast breading, omnivorous fish species like tilapia (at least in Africa, Asia and parts of the Americas).

5. The integrated culturing of various cheap, fishmeal-independent fish feeds (such as BSFL, compost worms, duckweed, azolla and spirulina); and the ability to utilize pest insects and some crop wastes for feed.

In summary I think we have in AP a low/medium tech food production system using known, low-cost components that has modest requirements for other infrastructure. It does not necessarily rely on external feed inputs and although it doesn’t provide the best production system for many staple foods it can be integrated synergistically with permaculture/other organic systems that can produce these staples. We see members of AP and related forums (e.g., byap and byfarming) further refining this integration of AP with other systems all the time e.g., BSFL and duckweed is very commonly used not only for fish feed but also for other stock (such as poultry); and the nutrient inputs for these feeds can come from the AP system or from waste products of the other linked systems (e.g., chook house, orchard, wicking beds, standard dirt-garden beds). So in view of this demonstrated potential for hand-in-glove, synergistic integration of AP with these other systems I don’t think it is drawing a long bow to evaluate the food production potential of AP systems in tandem with those other systems.

TANGENT FOR PERMIE DIEHARDS: For anyone who remembers the Indian segment from Mollison’s “Global Gardner” TV series (or was it “In Fear of Falling Food”?? one or the other, anyway) you might recall the remarkable Dr Venkat who featured in that segment; he was/is from the Deccan Development Society and those films and documents at the links given in my above post, plus this summary:
http://permaculturewest.org.au/ipc6/ch0 ... index.html
provides an update on what the Society has achieved since Mollison’s film.

It was the Society’s permaculture demonstration project shown in Mollison’s film (a 3.25 acre property at Pasthapur, Andhra Pradesh) that convinced me that permaculture design principles (or similar approaches) can not only come to grips with harsh Third World environmental and economic conditions but can also interact synergistically with local farming knowledge and culture. Then along came the Greening the Desert project (as above) which, for me, proved the same point even more persuasively and in a more challenging context.

And I think that when a permaculture design includes a semi-intensive AP enterprise--as would happen if you substituted an AP system for the broilers referred to in point 1 above--then the system has an enhanced capacity to provide people with a healthy balance of food self-sufficiency and participation in the cash economy.

A heartrending story, Fishtopia, but that's not the one the parents were telling.

Please check your facts, the minimum wage in the US hasn't been $5 an hour for a long time, anybody who walks into a hospital gets care, and there are SEVERAL special health coverage programs for people who can't afford insurance.

And yes, I am sure about the people wasting their food bank food and then buying new cars, because if you stand outside the food bank you can watch them drive away in those cars. I also know several people who work for the Social Security Administration investigating these abuses of the program, and they say that between 70-95% of the people who recieve these entitlements are frauds. If I was going to post the stories they tell, I would be typing for a month.

I realize you don't mean to be unkind. We wouldn't be having this discussion if you didn't have a heart But I'm afraid I've had my kindnesses abused a little too much, it's made me cynical. I still give generously to assorted charities, but I choose the ones like Heiffer International or Kiva.org, which require the people recieving to prove they aren't just looking for handouts first. I'd rather help people help themselves, but they need to show me they want to help themselves anymore.

Well yes, and no... it was only a few years ago it changed...





Frankly... I'd be ashamed to live in a country that enshrines poverty.. or disguises slavery and servitude.... into law...

Hello Rup,

When I hit "post" on this it told me that you had since posted your figures; I'll leave in my response to Ellendra about the minimum wage because it has to do with Joe Bageant and that may still be of interest to APers for other reasons. Always grateful for some facts & figures.

Are you out there EB?...Glad you liked the films...Did you ever hear anything more about that IRES aquaponics project (that was based on a design from your first manual) in Aceh after the tsunami?

And I seem to recall reading that there was a project that went ahead in East Timor…might do some digging.

Hello Ellendra,

I sincerely mean you no disrespect, but I have to ask/state/ponder:

As a result of the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) the unemployment rate in the US went up from 5% to 9-10%. Presumably the number of welfare recipients followed a similar trend. You say that 70-95% of your welfare recipients are frauds but roughly half of them must have been working prior to the GFC. Are you saying that there has been a mass movement of folks that all woke up one morning in 2008 and decided to sack themselves and go on welfare so that they could afford to buy things like big-screen TV's, flash cars and designer clothes? Excuse the “woke up one morning” hyperbole but the point stands that there is a causal link between the level of welfare dependency and the level of economic activity which makes it difficult to understand how 70-95% of recipients could be frauds.

Where does all the money come from for this lavish welfare lifestyle? How much do you pay your welfare recipients in the US?

This Australian Institute of Criminology report:

http://www.aic.gov.au/documents/4/9/3/% ... ndi421.pdf

states that:

"In the United States in 2008–09, the Social Security Administration Office of the
Inspector General (2009) received 129,495 allegations of fraud and closed 8,065 cases,
with 1,486 criminal prosecutions. These activities involved over US$2.9b in
‘questioned costs’; with US$23.3m in recoveries, US$2.8m in fines and a further
US$25.5m in settlements, judgement and restitution orders. If fraud is so prevalent why are there so few prosecutions?"

If your contacts who are investigating welfare fraud really have facts that implicate 70-95% of recipients in fraud then why are there so few prosecutions?—only 1,486 in 2008-9??

I mentioned the minimum wage figure of "about $5.00 per hour" because that, to me, is a fair indication that life on welfare is no bed of roses. If the US has a problem with the working poor—and it does—then the unemployed are likely to be poorer still.

In September 2010 US author the late Joe Bageant, (author of Deer Hunting with Jesus, and Rainbow Pie: a Redneck Memoir) stated that the US minimum wage had recently risen to $5.25.

By the way, if anyone is interested in a colourful and challenging account of what globalization did to the living standards of "Joe’s people" the Scotts/Irish subsistence farmers from Virginia then you might enjoy this video interview:

http://www.abc.net.au/tv/bigideas/stori ... 027543.htm

or this audio:

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/bigideas/stori ... 049921.htm

I think Joe's picture of the high standard of living of those subsistence farmers—despite their low cash income—and how they (over the entire US a cohort of 20 million people) were coerced into becoming inter-generationally poor factory fodder in post WW2 America will resonate with many APers.

If Joe's figure for the US minimum wage of $5.25 (in 2010) is wrong then could you tell me what the correct figure is Ellendra?

Regarding the US health system, every piece of information that I have seen from here in Australia, from mutliple US-based sources, over many years (going back to Hillary Clinton's attempt at health care reform) suggests that the US health care system is a mess, with about 50 million Americans still without access to health care. What I hear is that you're still not safe from financial ruin even when you have health insurance: e.g., if you get cancer, you can still lose your house because the charges not covered by insurance can often run to over 1 million dollars. But you say, Ellendra, that the US effectively already has universal health cover?

Why has there been all that political upheaval in the US, over so many years, over the need to cover Americans that don't have health insurance if the problem is, as you say, already solved?

What do you think about corporate welfare Ellendra? American taxpayers had to pay out gazillions in bailouts to companies in 2008/09 that privatize profits and socialize losses. And quite apart from the money that these ”too big to fail” companies have made off with, they’ve plunged your entire economy into a deep recession and it seems to me that it’s the ordinary citizens, many of whom lost their jobs and are now on very modest welfare, are the ones who are bearing the cost of all of this. These very same corporate interests wage a continuous libertarian campaign to whip voters into a lather of moral indignation about the miniscule problem of welfare fraud. It seems to me that this is a classic scapegoat strategy devised to make sure that the voters never notice who is really stealing their money.

All the best mate, and like you said/implied we can disagree without being hateful about it. You deserve credit and respect for all the things you do to help people but I have a feeling we are going to have to agree to disagree on the significance of welfare fraud.

Interesting figures Rup,

Unfortunately Joe died of cancer in March this year so I can't ask him what he had in mind when he made that statement about the US minimum wage at the Brisbane Writer's Festival in Sept 2010.

But looking at your chart it appears that Joe had in mind the $5.25 rate that lasted almost a decade starting in 1997 or 98. Jeez! nearly a whole decade on about 5 bucks an hour--if some of them are/were doubling-up with welfare payments I wouldn't bloody blame them.

The more I look at those figures the more amazed I am. In 2009 dollars it shows a 50% decline in wages for the society's most disadvantaged workers from 1968 to 2007--when the CEOs were tossing up between buying their third yatch or their second jet.

Looking at the nominal dollar figures, it can't have been much fun to go from 1968 to 1975 on $1.50 (no raise in 7 years) or 1981-90 on $3.30 (no raise in 9 years). I could almost swear there is a correlation between fat horizontal parts of the graph and the Nixon, Reagan and Bush presidencies.

How many times have I heard it said that America prospered for most of the 1990s and up to the 2008 GFC--doesn't seem like much of that prosperity trickled down to the great unwashed masses.

I wonder what all the illegal workers make?

If I was a US citizen I'd be considerably more concerned about the above trend toward growing social inequality and division than a bit of welfare fraud.

Isn't part of the spirit of aquaponics to depend less on other people and government to provide food (self reliance/food security)? It seems like people trying to grow some of their own food as opposed to relying on the government to grow/distribute the food has got to help some. I have no idea if AP is a good fit for that, but any steps toward food production for themselves could only help, right?

location appropriate permaculture and the integration of some aquaponic or bio-ponic systems along with it can grow lots of food and repair eco-systems and go a long way to a family or community providing much of it's own food.

However I fear many people in those places have gotten a bit used to hand outs (and when you are starving and dislocated that isn't necessarily the time you want some one telling you if you invest money and time and labor into this project in 7-10 years you will be harvesting food) But I suppose what I'm trying to say is some organization coming into some 3rd world area and setting up an aquaponics system or any other technology doesn't necessarily mean the locals will embrace that technology as their own. After the organization leaves, only rarely does the project continue under the locals. They must embrace it as their own if it is likely to prosper and help them prosper. Hauling in solar panels and batteries might work sometimes but what happens after a few years as the batteries age? Are they going to have the resources to replace the battery bank? etc.

To have aquaponics really go into 3rd world areas, you need some one there who is excited about it and able to share that with their neighbors and then you might find a community that will really benefit from some one bringing in an aquaponics system.

Africa is a continent, like Oceania, Americas..................
They got it all, Oil/diamonds/gold/fertile soils/clean water/hydro power..................
Universieties/education/legislation/................
They got higly developed thecnolegy/factorys/car production/agriculture/aquaculture and belive it or not they have integrated agri/aqua culture as well as Aquaponics, some ap'ers from differente african countrys participate on this, and the other ap forums.

Sadly there is in parts of the African continent on going genocide, civil wars for differente religous/political/economical reasons.

I'm sure a lot of you guys allredy knew, but I get a feeling that some here, lack a general knoledge of Africa as such?

How would you/any implement AP, in big refugee camps with rape killings violence as a big "normal" amongst people cramped by the dusins in to tents, and with a total lack of scivilian authorety, police nurses, doctors.....................

The post about how these fat parents starvs their children realy disturb and disgust me, really I read it as a arogante/ignorant and uneducated piece of shite.

Let me ask could AP save the Americas, there is some realy big problems with
powerty/starwation/drugwars/lack of education also within the US in the Americas or?
Same with Eurasia we also got it all so could AP save Eurasia ? you tell me?

All this can be solved the famine crisis in Africa and blabla in .................. but I doubt AP is the key

cheers

Yes! I think a big step is just making information available (like here). If I was in a third world country and I had internet access, I just might find my way here, learn something and everything would suddenly look like a FT or a GB. Pumps, solar panels are probably hard to come by but... necessity is the mother of invention, yes? Maybe the 1st world would end up learning something from the third. Just talking out loud. I don't have any knowledge on the subject, but I'm interested.

Can AP solve the famine crisis in Africa??... NO...

Unreliable, or no, power supply... a solar system would be enormously expensive)
Unreliable, or no, water supply
Unreliable, or no, ownership... (TCL)
Unreliable, or no, civil authority... (Soltun)
No knowledge base
Cultural factors... family, extended family, tribal (sharing) customs/arrangements
Theft, dislocation, violence
Dietary factors

As yet AP can barely be said to be able to sustainably provide for a family... let alone a community....or a nation...

The scale required to solve a famine crisis, associated water/power requirements, production lead time... management, labour etc... would be a 1000 times more involved that of just supplying grain, water, shelter etc...

And grains are the staple diets of most third world countries... not lettuce and other greens....

Well the grains being the staple is actually to a large extent the curse the western world has passed on to many of those areas and it isn't helping them. But as noted, the person being taught to fish has to want to learn, if they drop the pole and walk away it won't help them.

There are some areas where such things have helped in small ways but each situation will have to be evaluated carefully since each will be different. There is no single system design that will work for everything and there is no single solution that will solve all the continent's problems.

I should probably have said "cereals" rather than grains...

But typically the most prevalent staples are maize, rice, sorghum, millet, barley and lentils... with some yams, soybean etc....

Not your typical aquaponic crops...

Chickens and goats......

Lets face it, many of these areas we are talking about are suffering from poor or unreliable rainfall, so growing fish is not necessarily the most efficient method of producing protein. Integrated chicken/fodder/vegetable/fruit systems have a far better chance of being able to produce more for less input in most 3rd word environments.

You get protein from chickens almost every day with eggs, and their carcass is useful at the end of their productive laying life as well. They fertilize/manure, eat almost any scraps, cultivate and control pests and weeds and breed easily. Far more self sufficient than fish when given the right environment and generally most places have their own breeds already reasonably well adapted to the local environment. It's just a case of optimizing the systems that you use them in to best suit your environment.

We are setting up an area of about 150sqm out the back here where we'll be trialling a rotational cropping system using 4 separate growing areas with lots of vine crops grown on fences and over the chicken house, along with normal ground grown crops.



We'll also be using grain sprouting as a large percentage of their food requirements. Perhaps local restaurant scraps as well to help provide their feed. Hoping to make it reasonably self supporting .. Will be built using a lot of second hand materials including an old shed for the chicken house. I think this style of integrated growing is a far better option for for most 3rd world situations.