Considering setting up an aquaponics system to feed your family?  Heres a few thoughts for the home gardner.

An aquaponic system with ten square feet of growing space can cost 1500 dollars and will feed you for about a week.  Think Im wrong?  Heres the facts.

The aquaponic system in question comes with a 100 gallon fish tank.  A one pound fish, lets say a tilapia, will yield two 4oz. filets.  A one pound tilapia requires 3.74 gallons of water to survive.  A 100 gallon tank will hold 26 one pound tilapia assuming you could fill it to the brim.  The fastest growing tilapia, a hybrid between Orange Mozambique and Black Hornorum (Wami), will grow to one pound in 6 months if fed a very portion controlled amount of food.  This means that you can get 13 pounds of fish every six months from this system under optimal conditions. A value of about 51 dollars at the grocery store.

This same system has 10 square feet of growing space.  That about the area of a standard computer desk.  What are you going to grow in ten square feet that can possibly justify the cost of the system?  Lettuce? Some peppers?  Forget corn or most root crops like carrots.  Regardless of the claims of the aquaponics cult, there are far more crops that will not grow in hydroton balls without real soil than there are crops that will.  Okay so you might get about a weeks worth of some salad greens.  A street value of less than 50 dollars.

It doesnt take a genius to figure out that its going to take you several years (if ever) to recover the initial costs of any aquaponic system assuming that nothing wears out, like the pump.  So unless you have a die hard cultist attitude with a huge bank account, I highly recommend you just buy your lettuce and fish at the grocery store.

Now,  whenever I write an article debunking the claims of an industry or business, I always offer a solution to the problems that I expose.  The problem here being the costs.  So heres my common sense solution.

Go to Walmart and buy a 14 dollar blue plastic splash pool.  Its about a foot deep and six feet in diameter.  Thats about 28 square feet for 14 dollars.  Drill 4 one inch holes at the bottom edge as a drain and cover the holes with coffee filters so the soil doesnt wash out.  Then fill it with 12 cubic feet of garden soil from Lowes for about 36 dollars.  And theres your grow bed.  It costs about 50 dollars.  Now set up a kiddie pool.  A 12 foot diameter pool with just 24 inches of water will hold almost 1700 gallons.  Thats big enough for over 450 pounds of fish and will feed you over 225 pounds of filets every six months. You can buy your tilapia at BackyardTilapia.com for about a dollar each.

Now, every day, grab a five gallon bucket of water from your fish and give it to your plants.  Your plants will grow just as fast as any aquponic system and you can plant a greater diversity to suit your taste.  Oh and the time it takes to recover your set up costs?  About six months.

In my own yard, I use splash pools for short root crops, three row high cinder block beds for deep root crops (like carrots) and I plant 72 corn stalks in plain old dirt about 8 inches apart in 4 rows. I grow over 30 different varieties of fruits and vegetables and they last all year.

Commercial aquaponics offers an exciting business opportunity with great income potential, but for the typical backyard gardener its just an expensive hobby.

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Tilapia hatcheries that throw out non-GMO claims are playing to an audience shrouded in fear and ignorance for financial gain.  The truth is, the term GMO was invented by journalists, television writers and newspaper reporters as an acronym for another made-up term, genetically modified organism.  Today the term non-GMO is used to market products to consumers who are fearful of a process that they dont understand.

Genetic improvements have been developed by breeders and growers for over 8000 years.  Moving pollen from one plant variety to another to generate new seeds with traits from both plants happens in nature with the blowing of the wind or on the bodies of bees. But even if the pollen is moved by the hands of a farmer, the results are still the same. In more modern times, scientists use other methods to induce changes by using chemical compounds or irradiation.  Obviously when people hear chemicals they immediately think of all the skull and crossbones warning labels on their household cleaners and bug sprays. But remember, to a scientist, H₂0 is a chemical, to the rest of us, its just water.  And irradiation is also used to cold pasteurize hundreds of everyday foods. Even farm animals are selectively bred for a number of reasons, including the prevention of disease and improved production using such techniques as artificial insemination or embryo rescue.  The truth is, almost everything we eat today has been genetically modified in one way or another within the last 8000 years.

Genetic engineering is different from genetic improvements in that genes from any species are introduced. As a way to illustrate this difference, genetic improvements can be made by combining two types of corn but not one variety of corn and one variety of rice.  Rice pollen will not pollenate corn.  However in the laboratory, scientists can take genes from either plant and create a new variety of either.  This is genetic engineering.  The resulting plant may be more corn than rice or more rice than corn but ultimately it will be a new variety of one or the other, similar but different.  There is another level of genetic development called precision breeding which is sort of a hybrid between genetic improvement and genetic modification.  The methods used in precision breeding are far more predictable than anything else, and can result in getting exactly what the scientist is after.

For a tilapia hatchery to be truly non-GMO they would have to sell natural colored random sized and shaped, mixed-sex, certified pure strain tilapia exactly as they were from ten thousand years ago.  Like it or not, breeding for size or color is just another form of genetic improvement.  And we all know from the fear mongers that genetic improvement falls under the dark cloak of GMO.

At Backyard Tilapia, we sell everything from pure strain naturally colored tilapia exactly as they were 100 centuries ago to one of the most genetically improved hybrids of all time.  Yep, GMOs are served here, and were darn proud of it.

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