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  • From: venaurafarm <venaurafarm@bellsouth.net>
  • To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [permaculture] pc aquaponics
  • Date: Mon, 08 Oct 2012 11:22:48 -0400

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.




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