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  • From: Robyn Francis <robyn@permaculture.com.au>
  • To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [permaculture] pc aquaponics
  • Date: Tue, 9 Oct 2012 08:48:26 +1100

The lessons from Bill's systems at Tagari are not encouraging or promising

The "chinampa" wasn't built in a swamp, it was excavated on dry land and only
had water in the channels during the wet season, it soon became over-run with
weeds and a maintenance liability. The lesson: chinampas are swamp-land
systems, don't try to re-create them on dry land unless you've a constant
supply of water coming through the system year-round.

The aquaculture system at Tagari was a series of standard fish farming ponds
designed for controlling water levels, harvesting etc, and stocked to maximum
density with aeration and feed inputs, with native freshwater fish, Silver
Perch. It had to go through all the government licensing procedures for
commercial fish farming. After a few good seasons and harvests disease got in
and effectively shut the operation down. The disease was an endemic (locally
occurring) freshwater disease, local species in streams seem to have
resilience but in an intensive or semi-intensive aquaculture disease can wipe
the entire fish stock out in no time.

More aquacultures fail than succeed, mainly from fish diseases. I see it
again and again, also with aquaponic systems. A local organic aquaponic
system integrating fish, earthworms and vegetable production after a number
of successful years is now struggling with fish disease. Fish disease has
shut down hundreds of fish farms in Taiwan as well as Australia.

It seems the only systems that don't readily go down with disease are with
telapia, which seems to be able to cope with bad water quality better than
most other fish species.

BTW Telapia should NOT be introduced into systems in Australia.
Unfortunately there are several river systems in Nth Queensland and Western
Australia that had telapia introduced with devastating impacts on habitat of
native species.

Robyn

On 08/10/2012, at 11:08 PM, Cory Brennan wrote:

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





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