Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

It's not a guarantee of salmonella

If you are using warm blooded animal waste (including birds), there is a potential for contamination. Just something to be aware of and take precautions against.
Many consider this an unnecessary risk and avoid the potential, others may be confident in their precautions and feel comfortable with it.
I thought it was important to bring up so that anybody considering this method would be aware of precautions to mitigate the risks.

They are not claiming zero input. They are feeding the goats, the chickens, and the sun is providing inputs. It would be the same as claiming you are charging your batteries with solar power with zero inputs. The sun is an input. I raised some tilapia in a greenwater pool, without feed. That does not mean there where no inputs. Nature provided natural inputs.

I also have a tank of minnows right now that I have not feed in over 6 months. They are growing and doing great. No pump, no electricity at all. The only thing going in the tank is what falls from nature. The sun, and bugs, and such. Could I get better results with inputs? Probably, but I had this tank doing nothing, and I had these minnows I wanted to raise to feed my bass, so I just threw them in. Also the water is crystal clear, I can see the bottom and the tank is 6 feet deep.

Yes but the idea is to produce food for the family, so production needs to be at a level.

to grow fish and veg you will need to input something, I guess adding the chook poo is an efficiency.

When we had chooks at home the folks would always soak the manure or compost it because it would "burn" plants if we put it on directly.

So Helomech, how long before you get a feed of minnows?

What they (Asian Polycultursists) are doing is not AP but they do grow plant crops in various forms of poly culture. We need to be aware of disease risks but the level of paranoia in the west is a bit ridiculous. Plus there is a very good chance that such paranoia is going to increase disease problems rather than decrease them.

I can imagine one day in the future a class action against household disinfection product manufacturers for being responsible for creating a vareity of super bugs in our homes. All that marketing getting people to disinfect every surface killing 99.9% of germs. That 0.1% that survive will sooner of later cause problems.

[quote="Stuart ChignellI] can imagine one day in the future a class action against household disinfection product manufacturers for being responsible for creating a vareity of super bugs in our homes. All that marketing getting people to disinfect every surface killing 99.9% of germs. That 0.1% that survive will sooner of later cause problems.[/quote]

Places like child care aren't using sanitiser anymore, just regular spray an wipe. I think there have been a few studies that have linked things like nut allergies to over sanitised homes and areas.

I work in a kitchen, and the amount of forms/sanitiser/policies/hairnets we need to use is crazy, and only getting worse.

We're not allowed to let things defrost on the bench for a few hours, need to record the times it takes things to drop below a certain level. Somebody found a hair in their food once, and it was like the worst thing that ever happened, safety warning were sent out globally telling people they can transfer ringworm that way, and so on.

And don't get me started on the health and safety policies we need to comply with.

Oh dear....

On kitchens....

It has been well established that Stainless steel provides a more hygenic surface to prepare food on when its brand new.

It has also been well established that wooden chopping boards/benches are more hygenic in use than other materials like SS, glass or plastic that we could use to prepare food. However to get a commercial kitchen approved we are required to install SS benches.

My monthly audit we have to do, something I'm supposed to check every month 'Do you have any wood on site, if so, discard immediately'

We had a wooden carry tray, our internal auditor saw it and demanded I show her the audit I'd done where I ticked the box.

And don't get me started on our conversation when she said I couldn't use my $400 hand forged Japanese chef's knife, because it had a wooden handle.

Although I do have a nice collection of large wooden spoons at home when we had to throw them all out.

You have got to be kidding me

I have'n't looked at this in a while but the SS bench thing is a specification in legislaton (I think) but are other wooden objects mention in legislation as distinct from a check list drawn up by a crat?

Not that it matter much because you don't want to annoy the person doing the box ticking on you.

Oh, I'll argue it with her. But the auditor are just doing their jobs, and the company fears having any sort of bad publicity from food poisoning, and there are aged care sites that could be dangerous if the policies aren't followed, but they've got it worse than me (sanitising every piece of vegetable for example).

The best one I had was when the auditor expected me to throw out $1000's worth of food because I can't take temperatures at 12am-4am (people leave at 9pm) to check the cooling rates.

Get one of those USB temp logging things I got from China; can take a shitload of probes running on audio cables and record and graph temps.

I'm way ahead of you there

I had a whole arduino setup, with it all hooked into a website to log and graph everything (similar to the setup in my signature.

It wasn't approved by HSEQ, so we still have to take the temps normally. They all went oohhh, ahh, but not much more.

They have to be DAF, how do they think cold warehouses measure temps? Put some kid in with a fur coat and hope they are still alive when shift ends.

I am completely on the same page as you when it comes to sanitizers and such, Stuart. I even get on my wife's case when she gets super paranoid about salmonella in the kitchen. That being said, I think I am still not going to have chickens poop into my ap setup. Just not worth the risk to me. I am willing to compost it, along with human manure. Let it compost for a year, grow plants in it, and use those plants to feed the fish. I would even be wiling to let BSFL feed on the chicken manure, and feed them to the fish, as their stomachs are a sanitary marvel of nature. But chickens pooping directly into my ap system... No way. I suppose it is because there was a massive E-Coli scare around me when I was a teenager. The fast food chain Jack In The Box was called Crap In The Box, or Jack In The Crack, for years after that. At the time I joked that it is probably the safest place to eat after that. It probably still is as far as fast food is concerned. Now that I think about it, the last two times I ate at a fast food place, it was Jack In The Box. That was still quite a few years ago.