Aquaponics.
The word has a certain mystery to it. I find myself often needing to explain the term to those who peer at my logo or stop for a chat in the hardware or health section of our specialty food store.
Aquaponics is actually all about you. It’s about your health, your habits, your food and your money.
Growing healthy, natural plants for food – at home – using fish as the nutrient source. Sounds amazing! A mutually beneficial symbiosis where there is no more waste, or at least, where the waste of one component becomes the food of the next, in a recirculating system. Is that even possible? Well, yes! That is what Aquaponics is all about. It is science at the highest level, but with very little human intervention. Perhaps even romantic science! Or perhaps that takes it a bit far, but when we run an optimized Aquaponics system, we find ourselves as observers as natural processes take their course and produce food with ease and aplomb!
It is so rewarding. So simple. So much fun. And the food produced is so healthy, so tasty and grows so fast. It seems too good to be true.
Aquaponics certainly has some limitations, and it is important to know what they are.
We can get some astonishing results from Aquaponics… But…
There is a big BUT… The system needs to be built for balance at almost every level. You need to start with a proven system design and components, unless you want to reinvent the wheel for yourself – and it is actually great fun doing that if you are good at plumbing and don’t mind some school fees along the way – But for most homeowners who want healthy food as an outcome, the desire is more for a solution than a problem. When you run the system, you need to be sure about what is going on at a Biological level, or at a water quality level. And that is why training is so important to success.
Aquaponics is a journey that you embark on, part of a philosophy on life that places a high value on health, values quality above quantity, and environmental ethics above profits.
Aquaponics is something you can do at home, that liberates you from the need to buy food (often unhealthy food) from a shop, and empowers you to grow it yourself.
The thing about growing it yourself is that you don’t need to ask anyone any potentially embarrassing questions about how and where it was grown. Or whether they sprayed the crop with a toxic pesticide when the last whitefly outbreak happened. You know for yourself that you did not spray anything because doing so would have destroyed the whole system.
No, you can be sure that you are getting the best that money can buy, (not that you would want to sell it if you need it) but it is TOP quality, it is fresh, and you are certain that it is healthy.
Sounds like the kind of journey that we should all be on. The kind of journey that leaves you healthier, feeling better while leaving the world a better place.