My commercial system plan

[Damon]

i have a friend here i ohio who raises fish in his garage. granted he raises fish fit for pets an not eating, but they're fish all the same.

evey so often, for the delecate fish, you have to do a water exchange. basically emptying 2/3 of the tanks water. i spent last winter telling him how we used fish waste water to grow our plants in hawaii, so this year he took all of his exchange water and instead of puring it down the drain, he watered his back yard garden with it. let's just say this years harvest was alot bigger than last years. lol. i got more peppers and broccoli than i know what to do with.

all i was pointing out with the above is its unfair to use an overall farm production number interchangably with an aquaponic systems production number. yes, all of the end results may come from some part of an aquaponics system production cycle, but what's grown in the system should be counted as such, and whats grown using system byproducts should be counted in a different catagory.

FAP's lettuce production was 400lbs a week, befor that whole farm crashed and basically burned. and thats market sellable product. the waste amount was about the same, some weeks less if the lettuce was really good. if you do the math right, thats under 42,000 pounds, not counting the coir/vermiculite mix left in the net pots. these numbers came from a 2. acre farm. now how growing power is saying they are growing a million pounds of food a year is beyond my scope of understanding.

aquaponics is a spatial scope growing system, meaning that it has limits... more or less the walls of the system. even if you found a way to grow denser products like beets, rasishes, and carrots in a system, you're still limited to the systems size as far as how much you could grow. and when you're talking about square footage, i highly doubt that there would be any vegie you could grow that would be dense enough, and require little enough space, to grow a million pounds of the stuff. even if you add in fish weight as part of the food calculation im thinking you be off by a few hundred metric tons. well that is unless they found an efficient way to grow things like granite, marble, or even sandstone.... you can only fit so much inside of 3 acres.

but if you were to account for things grown outside of the system... like i mentioned befor, we used system water to fertilize banana plants and otheer fruiting trees. we did the same with our 3 kinds of sweet potatos that grow out side of the system, as well as out tomato patch that grew in a compost pile comprised of the coir/vermiculite leftovers... i dont have an accurate weight measurement for the things grown outside of the system... but im willing to bet even with those things added in... it's still a far cry from 1,000,000 pounds... because thats a big damn number... a million pounds is more than 20 times larger than what FAP produces even if you count in FAP's system waste... im not saying FAP is the god all mighty of aquaponics farms and no one should question their athority... most time i boast just the opposite... but there needs to be some sense of realism when people are picking production numbers here...

FAP's farm is only half an acre smaller than growing power... so lets knock growing powers speculated growing power... funny play on words, down by 1/6th. that means if growing power is able to grow 1,000,000 pounds of food on 3 acres, then FAP should be able to grow 8333,334 pounds of food on 2.5 acres... now take that number and multiply it by the amount that they were selling their product to costco and you have $4,958,337.30. now if all of this is true im pretty sure i would have been getting a pay check and still be working on the FAP farm as we speak. but since i know that none of those numbers are real i find myself in ohio. you'd literally have to be growing rocks to hit a million pounds of anything on 3 acres... well.... that is unless you're growing 67 male bull african elephants on 3 acres and counting them as food... lol. well... that wouldnt work either because their gestation period is 18 months... lol.

[GaryD]

Hi Damon,

You make some interesting points....

even if they find uses for the waste products, telling people they grow a million pounds of food is missleading.

A business quantifies its activities in terms of profit. Growing Power is a charity (I think) and would be better able to quantify its outputs in terms of the quantity of food it produces.

A million pounds of food.......certainly sounds impressive.

converting waste into a product is something i've done in the past in the food industry. heres my example.

the fast food meatball sub is a tricky thing. we had rolls that were shapped like nerf footballs. the easiest way to cut the bread as to fit the balls into the sandwch was to cut a wedge into the top of the bun, then place the meat and cheese into the wedge.

at first we threw away the left over wedge, and sold the subs for $8. (tourist industry explains the high price.) profit per sub when you broke it down to its base components was 316%. after you factor in the 4 meat balls. 2 ounces of sauce and 3 ounces of cheese and the roll itself and told it.

now heres the tricky part. we noticed that if youu took 4 of the wasted bread wedges and covered them in garlic butter and parm cheese we could sell them as bread sticks for $4.75.

now. would u take that extra $4.75 and add it to the profitibility of the meatball sub, because thats what the bread wedges origionally came from, making it around 750% turn over per sub? or would you call it a pure profit from a previously wasted product?

you end up with 2 different products by the end, but i cant go around and tell people with commercial ambitions that my subs turned a major profit, and then string bet them with the fact that after the sub was made they had to put more work into it to get the second half of the products profit.

Businesses exist to make a profit.....and they often do so by adding value to what is otherwise a waste product.......in a similar way to the excellent example you provided.

i realize that in Aquaponics there are many ways to use the wastes of the origional products to produce more products, but you cant call the secondary proucts a profit of the main source because of its added input of work. ive used lettuce stumps as compost and mulch for bananna plants and a whole assortment of other fruit baring trees, but i would call those trees a profit of the growing troughs production power, even though the nutrients for speeding up their growth come out of the system.

Many people who operate very profitable businesses will tell you that their enterprises are very different to the businesses they started in......and they won't (if they have any brains) care too much that the "wedges" are what's really making them the money.

Let's remember that aquaponics exists because we have some seedlings and some "wedge" water to which we add value.....by converting it from the toxic wastewater that it was to the plant elixir that it will become.

you can call it overall farm production if you want, but you cannot say that a certian amount of food comes out of a system when infact and large number of the food comes out of the systems recycled byproducts. thats farm profitibility, not system profitibility.

I agree that, if you use some other feedstocks, you may eventually integrate yourself out of aquaponics (but not microponics) but, in the context of operating a profitable business, I think it hardly matters.

Aquaponics with other integrations (Microponics) is no different to any other mixed farm.

.......but aquaponics production is in the closed system, everything else is pseudoponics.

Aquaponics is recirculating aquaculture and hydroponics (in all of its forms).....aquaponics (and everything else) is Microponics.

Gary

[Damon]

it's kind of like a scientific addition theory. in aquaponics you have the fish as the main engine of the system. provides the nutrients for the system. but thats small scale thinking.

side note: this all remindes me of the documentary i watched on the universe when each scientist in history used a previous scientist's knowledge toe build off off to broaden the scope of understanding.

instead of thinking as the fish as the engine, thoe whole AP system in the engine, it just produces food as well. in order to fully use an AP systems full potential you'd have to go into a microponic setting. and even that wouldnt be the end of the line. the waste from the inground garden could be recycled and put back into use. compost piles packed with system water nutrients, mixed with a little dirt, and you have a super topsoil for back yard gardens. hell, that would even solve the problem with plants that cant have roots fully submerged in the systems water all of the time, or "wet feet" as my grandmother calls it.

you can start with aquaponics, but the only way to truly make a facility completely efficient would be to use up the systems wastes in a dirt farming setting... or selling the profitable system byproducts to people that would use them in a dirt farming setting.

[keith_r]

i agree! while growing power is a non-profit (at least for now.. with the wal-mart deal who knows?) they've depended on contributions to keep going..
ap could and should play a "part" in a truly commercial system, but it is only one part..