permaculture

[venaurafarm <venaurafarm@bellsouth.net>]

On 10/8/2012 8:08 AM, Cory Brennan wrote:
> What you're describing is a classic permaculture aquaculture system
> with fertigation loop added in, right? The water plants in the fish
> pond would filter the pond and provide additional food, and you could
> add more fish in the pond because some of their poop would be removed
> to fertigate your veggies. Then you would need to replace pond water
> via rainwater catchment, filtered and sent through flow forms or
> other oxygenation. This system uses more water, but wondering how
> close could it get to the efficiency of aquaponics?  Another type of
> loop that Growing Power uses is to pot plants, run water under the
> pots and let it wick up, filter it, and send it back to the fish. I
> would put it through a wetlands filter with edible wetland plants
> rather than an artificial filter. I plan to try this type of system
> on a small scale in our yard. Would love to hear from others who are
> doing similar things.

Ah, you have it right, in a nutshell. Very complete.

> So, where do fish get their minerals in the wild? Why couldn't we
> replicate that, just as we replicate soil building or anything else?
> It's simply a design challenge, right?

Exactly!

Perforated barells with top quality soil from the same gardens used for 
soil-only production, constantly amended with filtered and purified 
aquaponics effluent, NPK & mineral/trace mineral amendments added as 
those nutrients become depleted through cropping. Grow edible crops in 
this medium. Aquaponics effluent goes into an artificial wetlands zone 
with purifying plants such as: papyrus, horsetail (garden soil 
amendment), cattails, duckweed (harvest for animal feed and garden 
fertilizer, some varieties can be used as human food) and water 
hyacinth. This zone also hosts colonies of aquatic insects, 
invertibrates, snails, etc. What about growing crayfish, prawns, shrimp 
or clams in a special zone with stones, pebbles, gravel and a constant 
flow of water, temperature controlled, passively. Purified water gets 
sent to hydroponice systems involving plants growing in soil in 
perforated barells and wicked up to irrigate the crops then flows back 
into the artificial wetlands zone then into the aquaculture system 
growing fish. Collect rainwater for use in this system, which could be a 
lot of water; send overflow to gardens and landscape and to irrigate 
biomass crops to be used to make compost to add to garden soil or use as 
mulch. Overflow from the aquaculture-hydroponics systems could also be 
sent to these three outdoor zones.

> Tilapia are vegetarians so would have to get the right combo of
> nutrition to them. That is why most places feed them prepared food
> that is balanced and tested for what they need (including minerals).
> Some people are growing duckweed, azolla, etc, in separate ponds (the
> fish will eat every last morsel otherwise, nothing left to create new
> baby azollas)

Have tilapia only in a special system with aquatic plants; cycle the 
effluent from this system to the artificial wetlands with no fish to 
fertilize more aquatic plants of the type tilapia will eat; harvest 
periodically and feed it into the tilapia system. This is labor 
intensive; maybe there is a passive solution to this.

> but how do you get the minerals in, would be the design
> question. In the wild, minerals come into the pond/stream systems,
> microbial life, and up the food chain.  Could one add sea minerals or
> rock minerals to the water? Sourcing the minerals can be energy
> intensive, or not.

This should be easy to accomplish. Your hydroponics vegetable-growing 
system uses high quality garden soil; as water passes through this 
system and wicks into the growing containers many important nutrients 
will leach back into the water thus fertilizing it; this effluent can be
sent directly to the tilapia system, unfiltered. To maintain adequate 
levels of nutrients leached into the water to feed the aquatic plants 
that tilapia will eat you could, within a cycle, top irrigate the 
vegetable growing contains to flush even more nutrients, just the right 
amount, into the water. Make sure the soil in the containers is amended
periodically and nutrients and minerals lost are replaced. Water flowing 
through this system an be directed into the tilapia system directly and 
also to the wetlands system where more aquatic plants are grown for 
harvest to feed the tilapia.
> http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2211926412000112
The Chinampas system is really excellent. It is used not only in Mexico 
but also in the Andes and in many Asian countries (Burma comes to mind).

Here is another important crop that can be easily grown in this system: 
dwarf and full size citrus trees: Ponderosa lemon (the size of 
grapefruit), grapefruit?, dwarf Meyer lemons which are very tolerant of 
raw effluent and urine directly applied, key limes, various asian limes
(kaffir?), calamondin, kumquat, oranges and possibly other types of 
citrus. These are essential food to eat and also contitute a profitable 
cash crop. There is a lemonary in Georgia (the country) that uses 
supplemental heat and cover acres in greenhouses. I posted about this 
with links a year or so ago or maybe it was the nafex list or both. All 
those archives are google searchable so this post would be easy to fine.

A reminder about using Google to search the pc, nafex, seedkeepers and 
marketfarming list archives which is at the bottom of each message in 
the footers:
Google message archive search:
site: lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/permaculture [searchstring]
enter your string in the Google search box in your browser, not in the 
URL dialog box. Eliminate the brackets and word listed above ad simply 
add your search string, i.e. lemonary.

> What lessons are there from Mollison's aquaculture/chinampas system
> at Tagari?

> Could wastewater be a part of the loop, in cities? Balance is the
> trick in aquaponics. Too much of anything creates a surplus which
> becomes pollution and creates negative feedback. From that view, it's
> a good system to observe and learn about negative feedback loops on.
>
> http://www.mekarn.org/MSc_CTU/literature/cheng%20et%20al%202009.pdf

The Chinampas system is really excellent. It is used not only in Mexico 
but also in the Andes and in many Asian countries (Burma comes to mind).

Pollution can be avoided by employing water purifying, nutrient 
absorbing aquatic plants to clean it up. Water hyacinth, duckweed and 
cattails are some of the best to use for that purpose.

> ** You are what you eat. In principle the aquaponics is much better
> from a carbon footprint point of view and a lack of pesticide
> residues but a person has to get complete nutrition. Unless I am
> shown otherwise I can't see aquaponics providing all a person needed
> year after year, only part of what you need. You will have to get the
> rest from soil grown crops. Why can't you irrigate outdoor gardens
> with part or all of the aquaculture effluent? Do both on the same
> site, one backs up the other, all are "locally grown", low carbon
> footprint.