Category — Aquaculture

Meir Lazar is reflected in a tank he uses to raise tilapia at his home in the Baltimore suburb of Pikesville. Photo by Lloyd Fox.

Baltimore-area aquaponic farmers raise seafood and vegetables in a quest for self-sustainability and better health.

By Timothy B. Wheeler
The Baltimore Sun via LA Times
January 28, 2012

Excerpt:

The aquarium in the living room of Meir and Leah Lazar’s home isn’t just for decoration. The tilapia and bluegills packed into the 50-gallon glass tank are waiting their turn to wind up on dinner plates.

Out back, Meir Lazar is putting the finishing touches on a bigger new home for the fish inside a plastic-covered greenhouse. There, he hopes, the waste from the fish he’s tending will help him raise enough lettuce, tomatoes and other produce to feed his family of five year-round.

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Aquaponics is ideal for schools, community projects, household self sufficiency and if scaled up, for commercially viable mixed crop food production.

Charlie Price from the social enterprise Aquaponics UK, explores the role aquaponics can play in the future of our collective food supply. He provides an insight into both the applications for aquaponics but more specifically a new approach to urban agriculture, turning wastes into resources and transforming disused urban spaces to provide not only food, but resilient communities.

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Tilapia in the Bronx. Urban farmer Christopher Toole teaches children how to grow fish and vegetables at The Point in Hunts Point.

“Give a person some fish, and you start a self-perpetuating cycle of education and growth.”

By Jon Schuppe,
DNAinfo Reporter/Producer
January 18, 2012

Excerpt:

HUNTS POINT — Christopher Toole sees the future of urban farming at the bottom of a 50-gallon garbage bin in the South Bronx, where a pale foot-long fish does lazy loops in dark water.

The fish is one of dozens of tilapia Toole keeps in trash and recycling containers, “aquaponic” tanks and traditional glass tanks in Hunts Point, where he is conducting an ambitious experiment. His plan is to create a network of homes, restaurants and cooperative farms where millions of people in the metropolitan area will raise and eat what he calls Bronx Best Blue Tilapia.

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Volunteers Gary Jenkins, left, and Curt Millington, right, and microbiologist Dave Love, center, of The Johns Hopkins Center for a Liveable Future, are lining the holding tank for fish at an aquaponics facility under construction in a greenhouse at Cylburn Arboretum. Photo by Amy Davis, Baltimore Sun.

People interested in self-sustainability, trustworthy food sources turning to aquaponics

By Timothy B. Wheeler
The Baltimore Sun
December 26, 2011

Excerpt:

The aquarium in the living room of Meir and Leah Lazar’s Baltimore County home isn’t just for decoration. The tilapia and bluegills packed into the 50-gallon glass tank are waiting their turn to wind up on dinner plates.

Out back, Meir Lazar is putting the finishing touches on a bigger new home for the fish inside a plastic-covered greenhouse. There, he hopes, the waste from the fish he’s tending will help him raise enough lettuce, tomatoes and other produce to feed his family of five year-round.

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The founding partners of the Rid-All Green Partnership — Randall McShepard, Keymah Durden, and Damien Forshe — talk about their growing business.

Rid-All Green Partnership – An urban farm

By Dave Davis,
The Plain Dealer
November 28, 2011

Excerpt:

CLEVELAND, Ohio — It’s called The Forgotten Triangle, a sparsely populated no-man’s-land on the edge of Cleveland’s Kinsman neighborhood where the few remaining residents joke that the population doubles at night, when outsiders come to dump garbage, debris and tires.

It is in this most unlikely of places, on roughly an acre of land that itself had become an illegal dump, that three childhood friends came to form a business that is, as co-founder Keymah Durden says, more a “mission to transform the city of Cleveland.” They started a farm.

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1901 poster declares “Milwaukee Feeds and Supplies the World”.

International team recognizes Milwaukee’s ‘high potential’ to improve access to healthy food, revitalize neighborhoods and create jobs

By Karen Herzog
Journal Sentinel
Sept. 19, 2011

Excerpts:

Milwaukee could become more economically viable and help the world feed itself through urban agriculture and aquaponics – water-efficient systems that can transform abandoned factories and vacant lots into urban farms that raise fish and vegetables, a report released Monday says.

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Jason and Candy Fields net tilapia from the aquaponics system in their backyard. The tanks, which take up about as much space as an average living room, hold 1,000 fish. Photo by Jill Toyoshiba/Kansas City Star.

They were recently awarded 20 fruit trees through a grant sponsored by the Missouri Department of Agriculture

By Jill Wendholt Silva
Sep. 24, 2011
The Kansas City Star

Excerpt:

Jason and Candy Fields’ backyard in the Lykins neighborhood — one of the most blighted areas in Kansas City — is a patchwork quilt of urban farming ventures.

There are a vegetable garden fertilized with nutrient-rich fish waste and a lush swath of bamboo stalks waiting to be dried and used to stake tomato plants or to build a tree house or a lightweight bicycle.

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A Step-by-Step Guide to Raising Vegetables and Fish Together

by Sylvia Bernstein
New Society Publishers
Oct 1, 2011

Aquaponics is a revolutionary system for growing plants by fertilizing them with the waste water from fish in a sustainable closed system. A combination of the best of aquaculture and hydroponics, aquaponic gardening is an amazinglyproductive way to grow organic vegetables, greens, herbs and fruits, while providing the added benefits of fresh fish as a safe, healthy source of protein. On a larger scale, it is a key solution to mitigating food insecurity, climate change, groundwater pollution and the impacts of overfishing on our oceans.

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Milwaukee: An Emerging Model for Smart Water and Food Management

By Steve Hamm
Building a Smarter Planet
August 4th, 2011

Excerpt:

The IBM team spent the first half of their stay in Milwaukee interviewing government officials, scientists, community organizers and the leaders of the aquaponics outfits. They visited some of the test sites, helped harvest fish and ate meals at restaurants that served the fish and salad greens. “It was really good,” says Carey Hidaka, one of the team members, who is a water management specialist.

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Above the streets of Berlin

July 26, 2011 Reuters – Urban farming is a trend catching on in cities around the world and now residents of Berlin, Germany are embracing the hobby as a way of bringing calm to the hectic city life. Jim Drury reports.

The Urban Farmers box created plenty of interest in Zurich (Anna Tuson)

The Urban Farmers box contains vegetables grown in a glasshouse on top of a tank of fish, which provide nutrients for the plants through their waste as it is taken up with the water through the roots of the plants.

by Anna Tuson
swissinfo.ch
July 9, 2011

Excerpt:

Swiss entrepreneurs Urban Farmers are pushing the concept of local production and have come up with a pioneering solution to many of the problems of conventional farming methods.

Urban Farmers attended the International Federation of Landscape Architects’ World Congress at the end of June. The event drew around 850 participants from around the world to Zurich’s Kongresshaus to discuss issues including the integration of agriculture into an urban environment.

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Martin Schreibman with a few of his tilapia friends in his Brooklyn lab. Photo by Brent Baughman /NPR.

“The people I spoke to seven or eight years ago — their eyes used to glaze over — are now hearing me speak again and they’re saying, ‘Oh, I get it now,’” he says.

By Brent Baughman
NPR
July 3, 2011

Excerpt:

His utopian city is one with Jacuzzi-sized fish tanks on every roof, giving locavore owners more than 100 pounds of fish a year.

Schreibman further sweetens the deal with something called hydroponics. By tweaking his filtration system to leave a certain amount of fish waste in the water, plants can be grown in the same tank.

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This private research aquaponics farm in subtropical Australia is producing Pak Choi using raft hydroponics. The sole nutrient is waste from Barramundi table fish. The yield is 1.5 tons of vegetables for every one ton of saleable fish. The Pak Choi shown here is three weeks old. Photo: Geoff Wilson, Aquaponics Network Australia.

Conference to be held in Brisbane in 2012

Integrated Urban Aquaponics
Conference and Workshops
in Brisbane in July, 2012.

May 26, 2011.

The world’s first conference and workshops focused on integrated urban aquaponics in “protected cropping” systems producing organic food, will be held in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia from July 25 to 27, 2012.

The conference and workshops will be organized by the Aquaponics Network Australia (ANA), solely-owned by Brisbane-based Aquaponix Pty Ltd., in conjunction with the Green Infrastructure Network Australia Inc. (GINA Inc).

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See Video here. Take a tour of an aquaponics farm with Professor Alison Gise Johnson of Chicago State University and Frank Lockom of the Plant. Both help run research farms, growing leafy greens such as mint, basil, chard, and lettuce with waste water from aquaculture.

Aquaponics is an ancient idea. The Aztecs practiced a form of it.

Bu Emily Gadekand, Michelle M. Schefer
Medill Reports
Feb 25, 2011

Excerpt:

Snow falls outside a nondescript one-story warehouse on Chicago’s South Side. But inside, it’s the growing season. Hundreds of fish swarm and fight for food in tanks surrounded by beds of basil, rainbow chard, and mint. The scene may hold the key to creating a year-round source of fresh, local food in Chicago.

The warehouse is Chicago State University’s Aquaponics Facility, the first urban aquaponics farm in Chicago. The facility may be the first step in spurring a whole new type of urban farming in the city.

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Watch the video here. The photo above is by Emmanuel Audu. His website is Catfish Farming in Nigeria here.

Nigeria has to import fish to make up for the short fall in their domestic catch. But in downtown Lagos there is solution: farming lungfish, also know as catfish

Excerpt from: “Nigeria: Catfish Farming – a Reliable Investment”

By Taiwo Bernard
Vanguard
14 April 2009

Lagos — Many species of fish are farm produced all over the world, but Catfish is taking the lead because of its uniqueness.

Data available shows that 260 million kilogrammes of Catfish was produced compared to five million kilogrammes of Tilapia, 7.7 million kilogrammes of Crawfish/ Crayfish/Shrimp; 2.68 million kilogrammes of Trout; and 50 million kilogrammes of Salmon in the United States of America alone.

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Part 1 NBC Nightly News.

Aquaponics

Aquaponics, a method of growing fish and plants together, creates a closed loop system that some say could help to address food shortages in places without access to fresh produce. NBC’s Anne Thompson reports.

See Part 2 on next page.

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Wayne Wadsworth with his aquaculture tank in the backyard of the Reversing Greenhouse House in Goonellabah.

His 1000 litre tank can hold 10-20 perch or 40-60 crayfish

By Liina Flynn
Northern Rivers Echo
21st October 2010

Excerpt:

Wayne believes if more people can produce food in urban areas then rural land could be used for growing large-scale grain crops, or crops to make products currently made out of oil such as bioplastics, or hemp for clothes.

In the backyard in his 1000 litre tank, Wayne currently has a few perch, but said it can hold 10-20 perch or 40-60 crayfish. There are plant pots sitting in the pipes running around the tank, which are watered with the nutrient rich tank water. Deep-rooted plants are planted in the garden to pick up nutrients deep in the soil and are even used in the tank to filter the water. He has created a biological cycle where everything is used: from food scraps which feed the worms, which in turn feed the garden and the chooks.

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Aquaponics research at Chicago State University

By Hosea Sanders
ABC News
Sept 10, 2010

Excerpt:

Fish farming is making a splash with students at a South Side university. They are hoping it will inspire others in their community to eat locally grown, healthy foods.

Chicago State University is the newest home to an aquaponics facility. Administrators say it will not only provide a new teaching tool for students, but may also help ease the grip of a food desert on their South Side neighborhood.

Hundreds of tilapia are getting their daily feed at Chicago State University. The aquaponics facility features four 750-gallon tanks. There are also six hydroponic grow beds, where fruit, vegetables and herbs are planted in water instead of the ground.

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Sweet Water Organics, an aquaponics company in Milwaukee, raises perch and leafy green vegetables. Photo by Jeff Redmon.

Aquaponics — a combination of aquaculture, or fish cultivation, and hydroponics

By Genevieve Roberts
New York Times
September 27, 2010

Excerpt:

In Australia, where farmers have struggled with drought for the past decade, backyard aquaponic systems have grown in popularity. Joel Malcolm, who opened the world’s first aquaponics retail store, Backyard Aquaponics, in the Australian city of Perth, sells about 300 systems a year.

“With water restrictions enforced in almost every city around the country, people just can’t have their traditional vegetable garden,” he said. “Being able to produce your own chemical-free fish and vegetables in your own backyard not only saves money but also provides enjoyment and satisfaction. Lately there have been quite a few schools installing systems here as learning tools for the kids.”

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Agropolis combines hydroponic, aeroponic and aquaponic farming

By Alyssa Danigelis
Discovery News
Sept. 1, 2010

Excerpt:

There’s a big push lately for eating local. Restaurants like to promote menus with ingredients harvested locally and grocery stores advertise produce grown on nearby farms.

A concept for a grocery store that actually grows its own fruits and vegetables on site is taking the “local” adage to an entirely new level.

The do-it-yourself grocery store concept called Agropolis combines hydroponic, aeroponic and aquaponic farming to grow vegetables without soil in an urban environment. Shoppers will come in and see all the produce growing on-site and point to what they want. Nutrients from fish in aquaculture tanks goes to feed the plants, and the whole place becomes an ecosystem. A restaurant there will also serve produce from the urban farm.

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