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  • From: KAKerby@aol.com
  • To: permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [permaculture] pc aquaponics
  • Date: Wed, 10 Oct 2012 03:31:21 -0400 (EDT)

These questions are part genetics, part philosophy and part practicality.
I'll try to answer in similar veins:

What would happen to root strength if one were to grow aquaponics
vegetables over a few plant generations? Aquaponics has been around now for
50
years in its modern form, more or less. And some claim that the concept has
been used by multiple generations for thousands of years, with the first
well-documented system possibly being the water gardens of Babylon. But
let's
skip that historical precedent and stick with modern aquaponics. Even
with that limitation, hundreds if not thousands of plant generations have
come
and gone never seeing anything but an aquaponics system. Their seeds, cut
tings, divisions or other reproductive methods can be put right back into
the garden or field and grown alongside plants whose forebears never grew in
an aquaponics system. The plants grown in an aquaponics system would
undoubtedly change over time, just as any plant's genes would change over
time
when grown in a fabulously fertile, deep, soft, crumbly perfectly irrigated
garden soil. Take either of those plants and put them in the desert and
they'd both die. Does that mean we don't want to work towards fabulously
fertile, deep, soft, crumbly, perfectly irrigated garden soil, lest that
weaken our plants as well? Aquaponics can provide rich, diversified root
zone
communities, via the methods I've already described. That rich web can and
does rival soil-based communities from the best gardens. So any genetic
abormalities that come from aquaponics growth would come from rich garden
growth as well.

"What would happen to the strength of a vegetable/fruit strain........."
The same thing that happens to that vegetable or fruit strain when it's
grown in rich garden soil. It grows stronger, it grows faster, it grows
larger, it puts forth more leaves and/or more seed and/or more propagation
vines and/or whatever genetic cues it has when presented with everything it
needs. It has fewer pests, fewer diseases and lives longer with less
stress.
Again, let's compare apples to apples, no pun intended. A well balanced
aquaponics system gives the plant everything it needs. So does a
well-balanced garden soil. If you find fault with using the former, you'll
have to
logically find fault with using the latter.

"What would happen when human ingenuity stops and Nature takes charge
again?" Once again, if two plants of the same variety, one grown in a
well-balanced aquaponics system and one grown in rich garden soil, were
suddenly
uprooted and moved to a different climate, both of them would be limited in
response to whatever their genetic code plus their current condition allowed
them to have. If you took an aquaponic tomato vine and a garden-grown
tomato vine, and transplanted them both to the North Slope of Alaska, neither
of them would do well. If you took those two plants and transplanted them
both to some tropical location with adequate solar and water and drainage
and nutrients, they'd probably do quite well. If something happened to
dramatically impact the growing conditions for the aquaponics system, those
plants would probably die. Just like if something happened to dramatically
impact the growing conditions in a garden, those plants would also probably
die.

And as we've also discussed, a mature aquaponics system starts to very
closely resemble a mature fertile garden soil, in the richness of the
microorganisms that live there, in the diversity and ratios of nutrients
present in
the root zone, and in the diversity and health and branching of the roots
growing through the root zone. I suspect that after 10 years, most folks
would have a hard time differentiating between the two.

If folks find the concept of aquaponics distasteful or alienating or
whatever, that's fine. But admire it, or fault it, for the characteristics
it
truly has, which are much the same as the characteristics of the very best
gardening soil we fantasize about creating and working with. If our plants
are turning into wimps in aquaponic systems, then they'll become wimps in
our very best gardens as well. One of the true strengths of aquaponics is
that we can fine-tune the nutritional balance in a matter of weeks. Yet
most gardeners and farmers will spend years, if not decades, trying to
achieve
that same balance. If your dinner could only come from the quality of the
growing medium you used, would you be so willing to wait ten years for a
good meal?

I think a lot of folks have philosophical problems with the "gadgety"
nature of aquaponics, and that it could never be "as good as" our more
familiar
gardens and fields. But honestly, that's the opinion of a well fed
stomach. For folks who live where flood, famine, political upheaval,
economic
hardship and other challenges don't allow them the pleasantries of
well-tended soil and regular meals, aquaponics can keep them fed and fed
pretty darn
well. Fed so that they have the energy and health to go out and heal
whatever is going wrong with their region. Perhaps then they'll have the
time,
money and resources to pour into their soils what we've poured into ours,
and finally bring those soils back into healthy production. Then they'll
have the chance to sit back and mull which system is better. But insisting
on the use of nice fertile soils is to exclude a lot of humanity from the
dinner table, if not now then in the very near future.
Kathryn Kerby
frogchorusfarm.com
Snohomish, WA




In a message dated 10/9/2012 11:36:03 P.M. Pacific Daylight Time,
dfjager@yahoo.com writes:

Plant evolution created root systems for land plants to penetrate the
soil. To grow in soil that is not nutritionally balanced, and can *never be*
totally balanced in Nature. And to adapt plant species to specific soils and
climate conditions.

* What would happen to the root strength if one were to grow aquaponics
vegetables over a few plant generations?

* What would happen to the strength of a vegetable/fruit strain, if you
provide all nutrients in easily accessible form? By analogy: what happens to
humans when they have to do no effort, and get everything they need
whenever they want...???

* What happens when human 'ingenuity' stops, and Nature takes charge
again? Would we have natural aquaponics ecosystems, or just murky wetlands,
nutrient poor bogs, estuaries, tidal flats, and the like. With the natural
plant and animals species adapted to the specific constraints of that
ecosystem: both climatologically, soil physiologically and nutritionally.

Daniel



> Subject: Re: [permaculture] pc aquaponics
> To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
> Message-ID: <C6524D99-51CC-4C5B-95C7-03B24AEE2FD3@patternliteracy.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
>
> Thanks, Christopher. I, like most people, have a strong
> preference for working in the dirt instead of using a bunch
> of tanks and pipes to grow food, but, then, soil ag, too, is
> pretty mechanized these days.
>
> To sum up: there is nothing special about soil, in one
> sense: it is a medium for the propagation of the microbes
> that convert manure and other non-available nutrients into
> plant-available nutrients, and it can hold water and
> air. Same with water. Instead of a rock-based medium
> to hold microbes and nutrients, aquaponics uses water as the
> medium, which is a nice stacking of functions, if you think
> about it, because soil has to be kept wet for microbes and
> plants to grow, while water doesn't, and most of the
> nutrients that plants use are water soluble, converted into
> that form from insoluble form by microbes. The carbon, the
> energy source for the microbes, is provided by the OM in the
> fish manure instead of OM from insect frass and animal
> manure.
>
> And aquaponics has a couple of advantages over soil systems,
> because a water medium can transport nutrients to microbes
> and plants much more quickly than soil. In soil, water moves
> by diffusion, and once the water, or the nutrients in it,
> are used up in one area, the organisms must wait for more to
> diffuse in before they can feed or get moisture, and that
> can take time--and sometimes it doesn't happen, and the
> plants or bugs die. Same with oxygen, which can't travel
> well in compacted soil.
>
> But in a water medium, nutrients are constantly being
> circulated to where they are needed, as is air. That's one
> reason that growth rates in aquaponics is much faster than
> in soil.
>
> To make it clear: Aquaponics is not hydroponics plus fish.
> Hydroponics uses water-soluble nutrients from the get-go,
> with no microbes in the mix. Aquaponics, just like soil ag,
> relies on microbes to convert manure into plant-available
> form. Big difference--the former is chemistry, the latter is
> an ecosystem.
>
> Toby
> http://patternliteracy.com
>
>

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