The Business of Aquaponics

[GaryD]

Hi Damon,

If you can provide the same product as your competitors at a better quality at a lower price, group mentality shows that people will go great lengths to save a few cents. So if undercutting the competition is what needs to happen well then... i guess thats just capitalism.

Ah......the old "if you can build a better (and cheaper) mousetrap, they will beat a path to your door" notion.

Sorry Damon, the simple fact is that they won't.

Business Boot Hill is filled with wannabe entrepreneurs who thought that all they had to do was make it better or cheaper. For any business to survive (much less prosper) in the face of competition, it has to not only create a meaningful point of difference, but it also has to successfully communicate that difference to the market......easier said than done.

Have you considered raising the money to start your own farm? There's no shortage of money for people who want to commercialise good ideas. All you'll have to do is convince the prospective lender that aquaponics is viable from a business perspective.....and that you have the necessary knowledge and skills to manage such a business.

Gary

[Damon]

I am currently talking to a chain of resorts in the united states about supplying their restaurants with their own saland bar grown on their property.

As a part of their new program to "go green", along with using biodegratable plastic wear and food cartons and a number of other upgrades to help join the "green" standard i proposed the energy efficient way of growing food such as aquaponics as a small scale commercial farm capable of producing enough produce to continuosly supply themselves things such as lettuce for salad using a floating raft system but also using the effluent water to fertalize raised dirt growing bed for thing like tomatoes and cucumbers for their salads.

Currently we're looking for the best materials supply contract... leaning towards lows... then the finishing touches on a foot print and labor costs. After that, final submission to the board for implementation.

We've already contacted several food vendors about the possible aspects of what to do in the event of extra product

I do appreciate the "sweep the problem under rug" idealism of your "if you think your so smart do it yourself" type remark. Im sure george washington, bill gates, and rupert murdock heard the same types of things before their ideas have changed, and continue to change history.

All that matters for a business is this. Revinue - (Running cost + labor cost) = positive numbers. As long as jobs are being provided and businesses are run maturly and properly things will be alright. Bills paid, people fed, thats what its all about.

Making tons of money with ap would definately require a facility many times larger than the friendly aquaponics ap system, but at least they are working to give the world something to use and grow off of instead of postulating ideas and never acting on them.

[GaryD]

Hi Damon,

I do appreciate the "sweep the problem under rug" idealism of your "if you think your so smart do it yourself" type remark. Im sure george washington, bill gates, and rupert murdock heard the same types of things before their ideas have changed, and continue to change history.

Damon, I can get into quite enough trouble for the things that I actually say without you attempting to interpret (incorrectly as it happens) my comments.

For the record, what I actually said was.....

Have you considered raising the money to start your own farm? There's no shortage of money for people who want to commercialise good ideas. All you'll have to do is convince the prospective lender that aquaponics is viable from a business perspective.....and that you have the necessary knowledge and skills to manage such a business.

What I meant is that, whether you persuade someone to convert to aquaponics or to loan you the money, the challenge will be the same.......you'll have to demonstrate the viability of the whole thing.

Im sure george washington, bill gates, and rupert murdock heard the same types of things before their ideas have changed, and continue to change history.

Your task is infinitely easier than theirs......you don't have to develop any ideas or to invent aquaponics (and certainly not change history)....other people have already done that. All you have to do is come up with a model of aquaponics which is translatable across some temperate climatic regions......and demonstrate that you can return a profit.


Gary

[JohnMc]

Damon,

I think something you might be missing is that ap is already being done in a sense here in the SW. If you view ap and hydroponics both as a water borne growing system. TX, AZ, CA all have large installations of hydro farms of a commercial scale. Were I the plant manager of any of these facilities I could hear their hurdles to switch to ap --

* We can tune the solutions to the exact vegetative, bloom and harvest cycles of the crop. You either can't do that with ap or is considerably harder to do.
* Since I am not limited to the range of the fish in the environment I can swing PH and other factors quite dramatically under fully automatic control.
* I can feed a very large facility the nutrients that are needed from a relatively small chemical feedstock and inject the ratios on demand. My savings in labor is noticable.
* I have no breeding cycels or biomass considerations to calculate to optimize plant growth.
* I have the same level of mechanical failure rate (pumps, pipe, air) whether hydro or ap. Yet with ap I also have the added burden if my fertilizer source up and dies it is not just another case of ordering a replacement pump.
* At the scale at which I must operate can I compete on a fair cost basis with selling my residual fish crop vs Mississippi pond reared fish?

To my knowledge no one in the US has taken ap on and scaled it to the size of hyrdo farms out here. You would have to look to the Israeli or Egyptian literature to see commerical scale ap.

Just an observation.
Commerical ap is probably doable. But its twin may have the edge on technical merit in tuning for the crop.

[ecosystem]

Sorry to interrupt this great discussion - Damon - you mentioned

after a few more modifications were made to the system to regulate the aeration in the troughs

Could you elaborate? Did you increase the rate of aeration - decrease the rate - make it more consistent throughout the troughs - did they/you monitor dissolved oxygen - how was it regulated. Thanks!

[Damon]

John, youre actually proving my point... the pairing of. Fish and produce profit marins is undoable. The ratio of fish needed to produce adequit amounts of nutrients for the water on a commercial ap farm are a small fraction of what would be needed to be considered a fish producer.

60% of the friendly aquaponics growing area is fed nutrient water from only aprox. 2.5klbs - 3klbs, if not less, of fish mass feeding 12 80ft x 4ft troughs. Thats 3,840 sq ft of growing area. Commercial fish farms need much more fish mass for a proper turn over.

Yes, it may be easier to swing the ph to benefit the plants, but meeting around neutral ph will be just fine on both end, fish and plants alike.

Yes, it may take 1 watchful eye to check the nutrient levels of your ap system, especially if its automated, but if aeration is consistant as well as fish mass levels, the disapearing nutrient levels would only happen if a very large percentage of the systems water were to be replaced with new water. The only problem with an ever increasing fish mass is the amount of ammonia that it will feed into the water. Keep the fish mass in check, and your nutrients will follow suit.

With ap, speciffically organic ap, using ph adjusters is against policy. What ive seen is once a system is stable, the natural like envrioment will sustain a steady ph level, that is until the increasing burden of fish mass will throw aeration and ph levels off balance. Things like ph buffers like coral calcium was used for a while to regulate the acidic rain caused by sulfer in hawaiis air brought by the mountians. In the 10 months i was there we never added any type of ph buffers. The living pond like eco systems found in every inch of growing area did the work for us. Even life forms such as gammarus began to show up because of the systems stable and good health.

Reletivly cheep cost of of nutrients? Tim fed the fish stock with a coffe can, not a feed shovel. Even moderatly priced fish food isnt that expensive when a flat would last 2 months.

And when it comes to technology hydro does have ap beat, hands down. Its been around longer, studied more indepth. But can your nutrients that feed your system be sold from time to time to restaurant vendors to off set long term running costs? Yes, you mave to to watch the breeding cycles of your fish in ap, but checking your breeding tank for fry isnt all that taxing. Again, when a commercial ap farm isnt dependant on its fish sales things begin to get much easier. If extra is made, good, sell the fish, give it to charity. Once your system is producing, a few fish may die off from old age, but the ammount that would be bred would out weigh those that die. Friendly ap doesnt sell their fish for regular profit, they dont breed enough of them to begin to be able to attempt to claim that they could grow them commercially. But what they dont use for planned farm expansions they do sell to people starting their own back yard systems, or people looking for a fish fry party occasionally.

Ecosystem, what we did was add air stones to the troughs to keep the level of D.O. consistant throughout the system. We ramped the DO up to 7ppm in the troughd and the lettuce shot up but began to show symptoms of iron def. When we added iron, the leaves returned to their bright green. They didnt do any studies on what happened, but we did turn the aeration down to around 5ppm, and the iron def. Stopped showing. What we figure was happening was the growth rate of the lettucs was surpassing the rate at which the lettuce zapped the iron from the system faster than it could be put in naturally. By reducing the do it reduced the lettuce's growth rate.

[JohnMc]

Again, when a commercial ap farm isnt dependant on its fish sales things begin to get much easier. If extra is made, good, sell the fish, give it to charity. Once your system is producing, a few fish may die off from old age, but the ammount that would be bred would out weigh those that die.

60% of the friendly aquaponics growing area is fed nutrient water from only aprox. 2.5klbs - 3klbs, if not less, of fish mass feeding 12 80ft x 4ft troughs. Thats 3,840 sq ft of growing area. Commercial fish farms need much more fish mass for a proper turn over.

The Patero Principle says 20% of your effort yields 80% of your gain for whatever enterprise you a dealing with. The other 80% are drains on the successful components. Now in a commercial enterprise that is a critical nut to know. And in Ag, hydro is probably about as distilled as it gets. So when you compare the two systems ap adds a distraction to what is the main profit generator. Again if the fish are not going to be an essential source of the profit stream then, applying Patero, eliminate it. Bam, you are back to hyrdo.

As to the fish. Crusing around a couple of the threads on the boards I notice that its not a small percentage of the fish that die off, its nearly all of them. It seems that whatever gets started in a fish kill doesn't stop at a few but decimates nearly the whole lot. On a commerical operation that is at the fruiting stage, to have a die off of those proportions would be an economic disaster.

With ap, speciffically organic ap, using ph adjusters is against policy.

Suggest you check the regs. If part of your marketing plan is to declare organic to get the premium price for the items you produce via ap you might be in trouble. As it is right now, in the US, the powers that be are making that a near practical impossibility. Stupid I know considering water cress grown in a swamp would be classed organic. But that's another story.

I am not an ap detractor. I will be running an ap system this year after a hiatus. I can see real benefits for families using ap. With a modicum of investment it provides food, health, personal responsibility and entertainment. You know what you put in the fish so you know you are putting in you when you eat it.

Ap on a commerical scale I might take a different approach. I would put a great deal of focus on the fish as my profit center. Then to handle the waste loads growing a combination of azolla and duckweed seperately in shallow troughs. Both specie have the wonderful trait of being able to double their biomass within days and their husbandary requirements are low. The harvesting can be mechanized. Azolla sold off as a biofertilizer, wholesale. The duckweed as a biofeed, again wholesale. If you want to try a triple play, see if you can get your operation classified as a carbon sink in the european carbon market and sell the carbon credits if you can. But your main crop would be the fish. Sadly as good as that sounds, I still have to be wary as the price points for buying Thai/Chinese fish is very low. My market focus would be to sell fresh not frozen fish product. Still might not be able to make it.

[Damon]

Monitering fish illaness is a big part of the aquaculture aspect of ap. Things like cotton fungus could runt rampant in the tightly packed systems, so your absolutly correct when leaving your fish population un checked against disease.

I did hear about them making the organic cert, more difficult to atain mainly because of the word "soil". That sad thing is soild without nutrients is useless, but nutrients without soil, as weve seen in hydroponics works. leave it to the dirt farmers to raise a ruccus.

The biggest benefacttor for mainland growers in the cheaper price of electricity. Even if your sale price is 30% lower than those of hawaii, the 40%-50% savings on electricial costs alone are enough to off set the sales prices effect on profit margins, as well as cheaper fish food, cheaper water and cheap product transit. So yes, there are some negetives when comming into a more competetive market, but there are also positives to be tabulated as well... labor cots being another big factor. You'd be hard pressed to find anyone in hawaii to work for less that the $9.50 starting wages that you could get at any mcdonalds, but on the mainland where finding a job is a more compeitive market as well, labor costs stand a real goo chance at sticking to $8.40 which is still around a full dollar above the national minimumwage.

[GaryD]

Hi,

Keep the fish mass in check, and your nutrients will follow suit.

Keeping the fish healthy in an AP system is the most important part of the whole deal......simply because the thing runs on the fish. In my view, sick or dying fish in a tank is less a matter of the affected fish but rather the whole tank. Given the nature of the medium in which the fish live (the water), a sick fish most frequently means a sick tank. In most cases, whatever afflicted the specific fish will eventually spread through the tank.

Rather than run a mixed age population of fish (where some there are small ones mixed up with those dying of old age), I'd be more inclined to design the system so that it has more than one tank.....each one containing fish all of which are the same age......one tank would have mature fish while the others would have smaller ones. That way, you can ensure that your plants have continuous access to nutrients being provided by vital, healthy fish.

As Damon said, getting rid of the fish is no problem. At worst, you could hold an occasional fish BBQ for your vegetable customers.....a good public relations exercise if nothing else.

Gary

[Crusty]

60% of the friendly aquaponics growing area is fed nutrient water from only aprox. 2.5klbs - 3klbs, if not less, of fish mass feeding 12 80ft x 4ft troughs. Thats 3,840 sq ft of growing area.

Can you run a commercial aquaponic farm on 5 to 6 grams of feed per square meter, as you have noted above or is this an error?

We tried feeding that low with a 32% protein commercial feed and had very poor herb (basil) growth and had to add foliage spray and at times add nutrient to the water to get any noticeable or acceptable growth.