Commercial (lessons learned) advice for backyard NFT & Mineralization

[jobney]

Originally posted for Earthan Group in another thread.
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It's hard to find any good NFT how to guides that are not related to growing weed. Large commercial hydro growers don't get into operational details of systems online so there seems to be a void of info in this area.

Has Earthan Group done any aquaponics only NFT systems and if so is there any advice you'd like to offer for backyard systems trying NFT only besides keeping solids out of the NFT component?

Not sure what the best practices are in this area so here goes. When using rock wool cubes in NFT is the trend now to just place them directly on the nutrient film? If rock wool is not the trend now what are newer systems doing?

Is mineralization being done in commercial systems or are solids just being dumped? Are you guys using an activated sludge/aerobic digestion method?

[GaryD]

Jobney,

NFT (as an hydroponic growing system) is now around 50 years old, is the most widely used commercial soilless growing method .....and is very well understood from a technical standpoint.

While individual commercial growers might be loathe to talk much about their operations, their suppliers are usually much more forthcoming.

Industry magazines and journals also deal with technical issues affecting NFT.

From a backyard perspective, I have grown Asian and salad greens in a small NFT system (48 holes) on many occasions and there's nothing like it for pumping out lettuce.

There are very few NFT-based commercial aquaponics systems around and, of those that do exist, the fish and plants are treated as two distinct production systems.

Mineralisation is a feature of the UVI raft system but NFT aquaponics systems are usually set up as recirculating aquaculture systems......to which a growing system (in this case NFT) is attached.

Gary

[Earthan Group]

Yes we have been involved in the development of NFT aquaponic systems in AU, but we are bound by non-disclosure though our involvement was the design of the aquaculture systems and integration with the plant systems. One is well known and the other is very large and privately funded.

However, we are building a large one in the next three months in QLD which I will be freely publishing the data for industry, which I expect will role out to the back yard growers as well.

If it is of any use, I will be publishing full details around the work done by Challenger Institute in WA in the next week which will contain some very relevant information for the backyard and budding commercial operator around NFT.

Advice I would give you now is to use the UVI (proven system) details on feed rates/m2/day and adjust the size of your NFT system to reflect the volume of water in the system.