permaculture

[Toby Hemenway <toby@patternliteracy.com>]

Thanks, again, Kathryn, for being so nicely rational. I think you're spot on 
about the "gadgety" nature of aquaponics being a turn-off for a lot of us 
natural types. I'd like to add that plants spent a few hundred million years 
evolving in the sea before crawling onto land, so they have a long genetic 
legacy within them of living without soil and soil-penetrating roots.

There is little that is "natural" about agriculture, either--we've just 
gotten used to it over 10,000 years. I can imagine the first response: "Wheat 
that doesn't lodge or shatter? Using a plow? That's not natural!" (we could 
segue here to the whole argument about domestic species having lower 
nutrition, but that's a condemnation of agriculture, not aquaponics).

We grow thousands of varieties of plants never seen in nature, in light 
fluffy, heavily manured soil that is also unnatural. All the plants we are 
talking about in aquaponics are domestic varieties with highly plastic 
genomes that have been messed with for millennia. Many of them cannot survive 
without our intervention, and quite a few are only found near people.

It's very helpful for me, as a skeptic, to see the arguments against 
aquaponics crumble when you look at them more closely.

Toby
http://patternliteracy.com


On Oct 10, 2012, at 12:31 AM, KAKerby@aol.com wrote:

> 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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