Category — Aquaculture

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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Johanna (Jo) Hearron-Heineman checks the water lines on hydroponic butter lettuce, grown in a Racine industrial building on the fourth floor. The water for the lettuce comes from the tilapia also raised on site. Hearron-Heineman operates the business with her husband Joe Heineman, doing business as Natural Green Farms. Photo by Kristyna Wentz-Graff.

Old factory now home to tilapia, lettuce

By Karen Herzog
Journal Sentinel, Milwaukee, Wisconsin
July 15, 2010

Excerpt:

Racine – Imagine raising vegetables in an abandoned, four-story manufacturing building. And doing it without soil.

An old JI Case building once used to manufacture plows for farm fields is being transformed into a dirtless vertical farm where fish and lettuce are grown in a symbiotic system.

The farm, in a part of the city that once was an industrial hub, potentially could produce the same amount of food as 40 acres of land without the use of pesticides or fertilizer, according to the entrepreneurs behind Natural Green Farms at 615 Marquette St.

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For a few weekends this spring, perch-lovers lined up to buy whole fish for $5 each. It takes three or four perch to get a pound of fillet. More fish should be big enough to sell by late summer. Photo by Jon Lowenstein. See more with the article.

Perch, Loved in Milwaukee but Decimated in Lake Michigan, Find New Life in an Old Factory; On the Side: Fresh Produce

By Joe Barrett
Wall Street Journal
May 14, 2010

Excerpt:

MILWAUKEE—Josh Fraundorf remembers when yellow perch were so plentiful in Lake Michigan that people pulled out all they could eat with just a bamboo pole and some worms.

Now, they have to come to places like this old factory south of downtown.

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Student Melanie Christion, 17, tends to the fish farm at Chicago High School of Agricultural Science, which is raising 1,000 tilapia. The school’s farm operates at commercial grade, but not on a commercial scale. Photo by Zbigniew Bzdak, Chicago Tribune

Raising fish in an urban areas

By Lisa Pevtzow,
Chicago Tribune
April 16, 2010

Excerpt:

The idea of a fish farm in the middle of the city can seem quirky. Sometimes when 6th Ward Ald. Freddrenna Lyle brings up the subject, “people look at me as if they thought I had two heads,” she said.

But raising fish in an urban area is a clean, organic way to grow food, proponents say. It puts vacant lots and old industrial buildings to good use, which is why another alderman has become a proponent, and creates jobs. If done right, advocates say, there’s no smell and no pollution, since the fish wastewater is recirculated to irrigate vegetables and herbs.

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Why aquaponics may be the future of urban farming, and one solution to our local food problem.

Adam Starr
GOOD Blog
January 12, 2010

Excerpts:

Cityscape hopes to launch its first farm in the first half of 2010. Their aquaponic greenhouses would be built in vacant lots and on rooftops. To start out, they are considering sites in San Francisco’s sunnier southern and eastern zones to capture plentiful solar energy. To monetize, Cityscape will serve as a wholesaler to local distributors and restaurants as well as operate a weekly farmers market. Yohay says there is interest from Bay Area restaurants enthusiastic about hyper-local and organic produce like strawberries and tomatoes being produced even in the off-season. That’s another advantage of hydroponic farming: the changing temperatures and seasons do not limit the indoor growing cycles.

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Part 1. The Sweet Water Organics fish vegetable farm is in a 10,000 sq. ft. old Milwaukee factory building.

Sweet Water Organics

“Sweet Water Organics is the first major commercial upgrading of MacArthur genius Will Allen’s aquaculture methodologies, i.e. a three-tiered, aquaponic, bio-intensive fish-vegetable garden. Sweet Water is the anchor project in the transformation of a massive industrial building in an “industrial slum” into a show-case of the potential of living technologies and high-value added urban agriculture.

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Kenyan project. Larger image here.

Aquaponic Greenhouse Prototype for Kenya

By Faith And Sustainable Technologies

Prototype aquaponic (combination of hydroponics and aquaculture) system using 700 gallon elevated ferro-cement flood tank technology developed by Travis W. Hughey which uses no float switches, electronic timers or microprocessors to control the flood and drain parameters of the system. It is a large version of the flood tank in the “Barrel-Ponics” manual found on this site as a free download. The system uses approximately 400 gallons of water per flood cycle. There are 37 barrel half growbeds also of Travis’s design incorporated. In the shallow pond water hyacinth and water lettuce are grown for fish feed.

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Photo by Tyler Anderson/National Post

For the past six years, staff at Scadding Park Community Centre have drained the pool of its chlorinated water, filled it with freshwater and dumped in 1,000 rainbow trout for a week of fishing.

So instead of taking people to the fish, Scadding Court brings the fish to them. Several school groups stream through each day; the pool is also open to the public after school hours for $8 per person. Two fish are included in the price, but gutting costs an extra 75 ¢.

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Farm Fountain is a collaborative project by artists Ken Rinaldo and Amy Youngs. See their beautiful videos, photos and a web cam!

Farm Fountain is a system for growing edible and ornamental fish and plants in a constructed, indoor ecosystem. Based on the concept of aquaponics, this hanging garden fountain uses a simple pond pump, along with gravity to flow the nutrients from fish waste through the plant roots. The plants and bacteria in the system serve to cleanse and purify the water for the fish.

This project is an experiment in local, sustainable agriculture and recycling. It utilizes 2-liter plastic soda bottles as planters and continuously recycles the water in the system to create a symbiotic relationship between edible plants, fish and humans.

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“I currently have in my backyard, a facility that I designed and built myself, that is capable of producing about 2000 pounds of tilapia per year. That is over 38 pounds of fish per week!

“These are the 500 gallon pools; the big 5000 gallon tank and the 400 gallon ‘catch of the day’ tank are on the other side of the storage sheds. Check out the tomato plants on the left, the fruit bearing banana in the center, and the papaya right in front of it. What you don’t see are the red onions, the pineapple, the chilli peppers, the red and green bell peppers, the thyme, parsley, greek oregano, sugar cane, and cilantro plants. Outside I have Mandarin oranges, Valencia oranges, grapefruit, Japanese plum, cassava (yuca), and blackberry plants.”

Go to the web site of Edgar F. Sanchez, Orlando, Florida; owner of Tilapia Vita Farms.

“Ecocity Farm is an improved aquaponics system of food production which combines the breeding of fish with the growing of vegetables and, importantly, is designed for use in areas where farmland is at a premium – namely the urban, village and suburban environments where 75 per cent of the world’s population live.

“The Ecocity Farm produces more food per square metre than any other farming system, because unlike existing aquaponic systems, the Ecocity Farm produces little to no waste. All solid wastes within the system are converted into nutrients (through a biofilter) and used to “nourish” the vegetables. The system is also drought proof as all water is continually recycled within the system.”

Link to short video. Video loads slowly.

“Will’s newest aquaculture houses are built in simple plastic hoop houses with the fish tanks buried in the ground to increase insulation and allow the use of inexpensive pond liner vs. stand alone tanks in an attempt to cut costs and reduce energy inputs. The last greenhouse system he took us through was built for $5000 plus labor, and several hundred pots of greens and vegetables that were basking in the warm humid air.” 

Link to this article about Growing Power.

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