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posted by CoolHand on Sunday August 09 2015, @08:57PM   Printer-friendly
from the whatever-it-takes dept.

three years ago, Stan Lyons, owner of Malamalama Farm in Honaunau, looked over his devastated coffee crop, lost to the cherry borer beetle, and asked himself, "What's next? I've got no water and no soil."

http://westhawaiitoday.com/news/local-news/no-water-no-soil-no-problem-aquaponics-provides-fresh-organic-produce

Seen the above the other day , in comments on the New Jersey article someone brought up Aquaponics .

Aquaponics is a specific arena of organic farming that is based on fish ponds and an enclosed hydro-circulation system. The foundation of Lyons' entire operation is a 5-by-10-foot fish pond that is 5 feet deep and built in cement and under cover. All the water for the system is from catchment, and fueled by 20 or so tilapia and koi that glide past in blends of orange, white and black. "In a true aquaponic system, you're supposed to eat the fish too," Lyons explained. "But we can't do that. These guys are our pets." In a typical aquaculture system, the pond water generates waste product from the fish. Aquaponics puts that by-product to work. Leading away by gravity feed from the pond, the water flows into a filter tank that divides the solid material and the water. That is the first stage of its nutrient breakdown. The bottom of the filter tank has a valve that allows the solid material to be collected. "This is incredible organic fertilizer. I put it directly on my raised beds and the results are phenomenal," Lyons added.


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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by hankwang on Monday August 10 2015, @06:54AM

    by hankwang (100) on Monday August 10 2015, @06:54AM (#220571) Homepage

    TFA explains that the fish poop does a good job as a fertilizer for his crops. But where do the nutrients (mainly nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium) come from? Is he feeding his fish with high-quality fish food? Do the algae and fish merely serve to concentrate the nutrients that are bleeding out of the soil somewhere upstream?

    And then this snippet: "What's next? I've got no water and no soil." -- I don't see any answer to to where he found soil and water.

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  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 10 2015, @07:54AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 10 2015, @07:54AM (#220579)

    Thank you for the on topic post. Nitrogen and phosphorus Are supplied by the fish, potassium is a bit more difficult and usually requires supplementation. Supposedly ground up banana peels can work. Regarding fish food, one common option is to use a bug catcher/zapper above the pond, the caught insects fall in to the pond as fish food.

    • (Score: 2) by caseih on Monday August 10 2015, @02:03PM

      by caseih (2744) on Monday August 10 2015, @02:03PM (#220680)

      No, the fish don't "supply" nutrients. They merely transform them from one form (food) to another (poop in the water) and concentrates them. Eventually if you run the system long enough without providing any of these nutrients into the cycle, you'll run out, particularly of P, and production will plummet. This is the problem with almost any current "organic" food production system.

      In fact, when farmers sell food they are not only selling mostly water, but they are also selling a good amount of N, P, and K, all of which have to be replenished. I've read recently of several organic operations that run with no fertilizer of any kind that worked well for a long time, maybe 20 years, and then had production crash as the soil ran out of P, particularly. Right now the only real good source of P and K comes from minerals mined from the ground. When that runs out, there is no other good source of these nutrients at present. Maybe in the future farmers will require the nutrients to be sent back to them after the food has been consumed. Human and animal waste will have to be returned to the farms and put back in the soil.

      I wish the article had more details on the complete nutrient cycle. From what I've read in most aquaponics at a certain point requires replenishing the phosphorous from mineral sources. N can be made from the atmosphere, but only by certain kinds of plants.

  • (Score: 3, Informative) by VLM on Monday August 10 2015, @12:08PM

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Monday August 10 2015, @12:08PM (#220641)

    Its a waste process vs primary process distinction. Aquaponics is solely a waste process flow.

    Fish can't mine P or K or fix nitrogen from the air. They can eat farmed grains, slaughterhouse byproducts, to a limited extent waste and compost-like stuff.

    Plants can pull carbon right out of the air, which is cool, but all the other "important" atoms do come from waste stream of primary processes.

    This is kind of important WRT the story... aquaponics is great idea for one dude in an area to set up, its a horrible idea for "everyone" to set up. Like biodiesel. Ten restaurants making grease and one dude making biodiesel works. Ten restaurants and ten thousand wanna be biodiesel makers doesn't scale. Ditto aquaponics.

    There's an aquaponics farm a couple miles from my house, in my county, only one in the state AFAIK. They get lots of press and give tours and I'll eventually visit. Lots of food safe, septic tank sized tubs full of fish and floating plants. From memory their niche is turning ag processing waste from corn into fresh basil and fish. I suppose its more interesting than just composting it and turning it into more corn.

    • (Score: 2) by jcross on Monday August 10 2015, @12:59PM

      by jcross (4009) on Monday August 10 2015, @12:59PM (#220656)

      I believe aquaculture is possible without importing fish food if there are sufficient algae growths or insects. Nitrogen can be extracted from the air, again by algae or in the form of insects, and phosphorous and potassium and such can be leached from rocks. I think that the carbonic acid that forms in bodies of water or moist soil is pretty good at breaking down rocks and clay particles to make those nutrients available, and that's probably where they come from in ordinary closed-loop land agriculture. In Hawaii you also have lava rocks with a lot of porosity to boost the surface area and speed up breakdown. Now I'm not sure if any of that actually works at this kind of small scale, but it can in theory.

      • (Score: 2) by caseih on Monday August 10 2015, @02:11PM

        by caseih (2744) on Monday August 10 2015, @02:11PM (#220687)

        Again though, we have to remember that any time we produce food that is hauled away to consume, those nutrients are taken away from the system and don't come back. There may be available nutrients in the system and some in the rocks as you say, but eventually those will be used up too over the course of years (may be decades but still finite). Still worthwhile to explore, but it's not magic, and it's not ultimate any more sustainable than any other form of agriculture in this sense.

        • (Score: 2) by jcross on Monday August 10 2015, @06:22PM

          by jcross (4009) on Monday August 10 2015, @06:22PM (#220799)

          Agreed. The only way I know of to solve the problem you're talking about is the way they did it in ancient China and Japan: collect human waste in barrels and carry it back out to the fields. One side effect was periodic cholera outbreaks, but that's not so hard to solve if you know why it happens, either by brief aerobic composting or longer anaerobic composting. But those people really knew how to do it sustainably after growing the same crops in the same place for many thousands of years, and the waste redistribution was considered essential to the point that it had a substantial market value. Not sure if my numbers are exactly right, but from what I've read something like four people living in a very small apartment in a Japanese city could pay their entire rent from the value of their excreta. I also hear it's still common for Chinese farmers with land near a highway to build a little outhouse by the road for passers-by to use for free. I would bet they even compete to have the nicest one in the area. If only modern gas stations had that incentive...

          • (Score: 2) by caseih on Tuesday August 11 2015, @01:34PM

            by caseih (2744) on Tuesday August 11 2015, @01:34PM (#221248)

            Human waste could be processed at waste treatment facilities into clean, healthy, compost or maybe into some granular or liquid concentrate form.