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  • From: Toby Hemenway <toby@patternliteracy.com>
  • To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [permaculture] Is this Acquaponics then ?
  • Date: Thu, 14 May 2015 09:05:02 -0700


> On May 13, 2015, at 10:17 PM, Steve Hart <stevenlawrencehart@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2015/05/13/seafood-shrimp-industry-fraud.aspx?e_cid=20150513Z3_DNL_art_1&utm_source=dnl&utm_medium=email&utm_content=art1&utm_campaign=20150513Z3&et_cid=DM74728&et_rid=950105294

Ah, Steve’s trolling again. Okay, I’ll bite: That link was about an
aquaCULTURE system. That’s CAFO farming at sea: Large scale, factory feed
inputs, no re-use of manure and other wastes, monoculture. Horrible stuff.

And it’s a totally different system from aquaPONICS, which is small scale,
multiple feed sources, all wastes and manures re-used and converted into
fertility via the same processes as in soil, and it’s polyculture.

Steve, this is more evidence that you don’t know what aquaponics is.

To critique a subject, you need to make an honest effort to grasp what it is,
and not confuse it with something it’s not. Otherwise you’re just setting up
straw men, and that wastes everyone’s time. Equating industrial aquaculture
with garden-scale aquaponics is like equating factory farms with
permaculture. Like saying CAFO beef is the same as pastured. It’s simply
wrong.

Aquaponics is not a panacea; it’s a limited-case solution. I’m in agreement
with Scott, that aquaponics is primarily for food deserts. And for places
where land is too expensive or rare for soil-based growing (e.g. cities) or
for experimenting with or demonstrating a method. Elsewhere, let’s use soil.

The problem of inputs in aquaponics is easily solved. Just as in agriculture,
we need to use better sources: organic versus chemical, essentially. But like
every intensive system, it can’t produce its own inputs indefinitely.

And that's the root of it: Aquaponics is an intensive, (nearly) closed loop
system, not an open, extensive system. The former always require inputs.
It’s just like an intensive raised bed veggie garden: you can’t grow all your
fertility from only the crop wastes; you need an outside source, like manure,
a long fallow season or rotation, or a compost crop area (which Jeavons says
is 4x the food growing area). Replacing the losses and harvests from an
intensive system always means inputs.

Extensive systems, such as food forests or fish growing in a lake, can
generate (nearly all of) their own nutrients through natural weathering of
soil minerals and other ecosystem processes. That’s because, unlike a raised
bed, most of the system is not being harvested for human use. It’s an open
system that performs many ecosystem functions. Not like a raised bed, which
grows human food, period.

So either we grow most of a city’s food outside the city, or we use intensive
systems in the city and import inputs. That’s basic thermodynamics.

Extensive systems require the luxury of land. Not everyone has land. The
land-poor either buy food or use intensive systems. Hence the interest in
aquaponics.

Toby
http://patternliteracy.com

Coming in July: my new book on urban permaculture, The Permaculture City.
Pre-order it at on-line booksellers or at
http://www.chelseagreen.com/bookstore/item/the_permaculture_city/



> On May 14, 2015, at 7:50 AM, Scott Pittman <scott@permaculture.org> wrote:
>
> I, too have serious questions about aquaponics, Larry. I have yet to see a
> system that is regenerative and not dependent on imported inputs. I only
> see a value for aquaponics in "food desert" situations and in areas of
> extreme poverty; otherwise I feel it is whistling in the dark. Ocean
> farming is still factory farming just in seawater. I agree that any form
> of factory farming is odious.
>
> Scott
>
> "To change something build a new model that makes the existing model
> obsolete" Buckminster Fuller
>
>
>





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