Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

It will be interesting to see how this goes. It seems they subscribe to the idea "go big or go home".

http://www.ecotechenergygroup.com/index.php?mact=News,cntnt01,detail,0&cntnt01articleid=20&cntnt01origid=103&cntnt01returnid=109

I've really got to question this one....

There Facebook page has an entry dated Oct 29 2011... organizing an open day... where they



From which they claim the "McBride facility will be capable of producing over $50 million in food sales annually"

"with profit margins expected from 30-40%, and returns on investment of 23% (hydroponic greenhouses) and 32% (aquaculture). "

To get that sized project up and running.. and producing enough to supply the new contract.... between Oct and now... bullocks...

Reckon they're a long way away from supplying that contract yet...

Still trying to work the figures... in one place they claim 22 acres of aquaponics... which doesn't seem to match the above...

If you add the square footage figures for the facilities... (150,000sq ft).... I only get the equivalent of about 3.5 acres...

Anyway they also claim out of the above...



Just all sounds a bit too much for me...

430,000 sqft... that's less than 10 acres... i've been running numbers for a budget plan or a guy and my best case scenario for a system with the growing space of 15,360 sqft i just over 1 million heads gross, not counting waste product or unusable heads... even at $1 a head, it'll be quite hard to to get just over half way to $50 in sales... and i chose lettuce heads because if you fun the logistics properly you can maximize spacial efficiency and produce 50% more on top of you regular harvest doing things the standard way, and you can get close to 17 harvests a year using lettuce in this way.

if they're looking to make up the difference with fish sales... they'll be looking at turning over around 5,000,000lbs of fish annually to make up for the produce short fall... well, i guess the fish weight could be slighlty less depending on what fish they are planning on using... but my guess is they'll use tilipia, and their market price is steadily dropping because of stripe bass facilities raising them in the bass waste water... really just about every dfish farm raises tilapia as a side product in the dirt water of their fish farms...

im just not seeing how they plan on making $50 million a year... they'd need a farm easily 2-3 times the size of the one their planning, and demand a premium for their produce...

i just can get enough of how people think aquaponics is best suited for raising fish than for raising produce... even with a fish like tilapia, you're looking at maybe turning over your total fish weight every 12-18 months instead of turning over your total produce weight 8-17 times in just 12 months, depending on your harvesting logistics... just the shear amount of growing area alone that would be necessary to filter out $27 million dollars worth of fish sales would be insane. i mean i'd love to see a facility of that size... but we're talking a grow out area big enough to filter the wastes of millions of lbs of fish... i've seen the size of a commercial farm that was only holding just under 15,000lbs of fish... and it was only 2.5 acres... can you imagine how much trough area you need for 3,000,000 lbs of fish? i chose 3 million lbs, because tilapia's market price the last time i checked was just under $7 /lb in america... but like it said, it's slowly slipping with its perforation into the market. and 3,000,000 million lbs is just the sellable product for the year, you'll need a bit more to maintain a rotating fish stock and breeders.... im thinking a farm would need to be the size of like, Rhode Island... we're talking a farm measure in square miles and not sqft at this point...

here's the math.

to filter the water properly u need 1sqft for every 0.3lbs of fish...

their estimated money made from the fish sales will be around 32% of $50 million with is 16,000,000.

i'll give them the benefit of the doubt and say tilapias market price is $7 USD, that mean 2,285,714lbs of sold fish.

it's close enough to say that fr ever 1lbs of fish you need 3sqft of growing area... thats 6,857,223 sqft of necessary growing area to filter the fish water. thats about 158 acres of just growing area. which is 1/4th of a square mile. and that's just the necessary growing area. that's not counting the walk ways in between the troughs wich are usually half the width of the troughs, or the amount of area necessary for all of the fish holding and breeding tanks, or the amount of space necessary for the fish harvesting or the plant harvesting facilities... just the amount of necessary growing troughs necessary to generate those kinds of incomes is larger than the size who their whole projected facility... total area of the farm would rival small countries...

sounds like someone grossly underestimated their spacial needs....

They indicate that they are using the following folks for the greenhouse and fish setups. http://www.hydronov.com/10-Aquaponic/Hydronov_10_E.htm

If nothing else, they really know their lettuce growing, and have designed and installed many hydroponic raft systems.

Installing and successfully running DWC hydroponic rafts is one thing... operating DWC aquaponics is another... and has specific requirments...

especially running that many rafts to accommodate the fish mass...

im just wondering when people are going to realize that plant weight output potential is always going to be larger than fish weight output potential...

that commercial farm i was one produced over 20,000 lbs of sellable product, another 10,000 of edible product that couldnt be sold due to imperfections but could still be eaten, and around another 15,000lbs of veggie waste product... they only produced maybe 1000 - 2000 lbs total of fish at a sellable size in the same time frame...

and these numbers arent even counting what grew in the waste product compost pile on accident, or what plants grew that were watered regularly with system water outside of the aquaponics system...

the growing power of aquaponics is clearly in plant production, and not in the production of fish... producing fish just looks like a sexier idea because fish demands a higher price by volume, but the shear volume of plants at a lower demand price will just about always trump the amount of money made by selling the fish...

... +1 Damon ...

The only other viable option IMO... is a full scale RAS operation... with effluent treatment utlising NFT...

i mean i guess it's possible the genetically engineer some super germ or bacteria that is incredible efficient at metabolizing ammonia... but adding GMO's to aquaponics is just a filthy idea i think. lol. it ruins the "all natural" selling point.

I may be wrong but I could swear I saw this EXACT parcel of land in McBride listed for sale. Guess they couldn't raise the capital after all. Either that or couldn't get Gov. approvals for it. I was looking for land prices for a business plan here in BC when I came across it.

I believe there is a 100% natural bio-digester enzyme mix available that they claim is NOT GMO. It is used in the water damage restoration industry to take care of fecal loads in sewage spills. The "claim" is that it breaks down the ammonia's and nitrites and leaves behind the nitrates and clean water. They have even used this product to clean water supplies for small remote villages that have been overcome with Ecoli etc. I think I will contact them (as I have direct access to their lab reps) and ask a few questions. Maybe conduct a small test in my 20gal tank when I move my fish out to the big system in the spring. I'll let ya know what I find out (if anyone is interested).