Aquaponics is a system that has been used for many years. It is the production of fish (aquaculture) with plants (hydroponics). China, for example, uses flooded rice paddies with fish. The Aztecs used artificial floating islands to produce greens over their swamps. Now it seems we are trying to go back to these basics (which is not as simple as it seems).

The system benefits from some synergies. Fish excrements (breathing, pee and poop) have a lot of organic material that other living organisms can benefit from. For plants to benefit from it, it has to be available in the way they can use it (bioavailability). Some microorganisms such as bacteria (that are everywhere) make these necessary transformations. So an aquaponics system needs fish, plants and micro-organisms to work. However, each one of these have different needs (they are very picky!). The temperature has to be right, the pH too, the amount of oxygen, carbon dioxide, protein, or phosphorus, also need to be in the right quantities. Oh, and you can't use any "poison" (aka defensives or medicine) because it can kill the other necessary organism in the system. So you see, it seems simple, but if you want to control yields and mortality, you need to control a lot of things.

That is why I fell in love with Aquaponics, it's simple yet very complicated. It also benefits from many sinergies, making it a very sustainable way of producing food. There are many criticism around this, for example, how sustainable can it be if you need a bunch of plastic tubes connecting the fish tank to the plants? Or yeah, sure, but you can´t produce for the masses (wheat, soy, corn, etc.). All this is true. But nothing is perfect. At least it avoids many of the negative externalities that other agriculture systems have.

If it is so great, why haven´t we heard about it? Well, because it still hasn't proved to be profitable (or better, only some people have managed to make it profitable). There are many reasons for this, the complexity of controls is one of them, but also, it has a much higher investment requirement than traditional systems where you throw seeds in the dirt and just wait. In an aquaponics system, if you don't control it a bit better, the fish will die and the plants will die. Not as simple. But, there are places where it is more reasonable to make it work - Islands! The produce will compete with imported goods prices. Food security in an island also has more community awareness than in other places. In Brazil, for example, where we have a bunch of land, water, space, sun, and cheap labor, why would anyone do aquaponics?

I bought the domain www.aquaponics.dev and intend on using it to help develop aquaponics' community and commercial ventures with some of the things I learn and produce in my PhD. I am not sure yet what will be the steps and timelines to create this project, but rest assured, once it is up and running, even in its beta version, I will post it here.