I have been in the aquarium hobby in the past, so when I started looking into hydroponics, for me the natural outcome was to also look into aquaponics[1].
What I like the most about aquaponics (and recirculating hydroponics) is the sustainability aspects, it is an almost completely closed-loop system, with relatively small external inputs compared to other farming methods, and extremely small water requirements (due to the fact that water is continuously recycled).
Two bits of info about aquaponics that not many people know:
1. it is possible to have aquaponics systems in a vegetarian context: in many cases the fish is not for human consumption as food (in large commercial systems this is usually koi that is sold as ornamental fish[2a], in smaller systems goldfish kept as pets[2b]).
2. there are aquaponics systems that don't require access to electricity, in particular the iAVS system (a.k.a "sandponics") was developed with subsistence farmers that had no electricity access in mind, it doesn't require water to be pumped continuously, rather you are only required to manually recirculate the water a few times a day which can be achieved with a bucket or other low tech solutions[3].
If you want inspiration to build a bit larger aquaponics system, then maybe our build can help. We have a system with place for about 7000 plants, with two fish tanks of 4.5 m3 each. We have about 200 rainbow trout. Total system water volume is 38 m3.
We are also running a prototype setup where we take roots and plants not sold and feeding them to mealworms, which will become food supplement for the fish. This way we won’t need to feed them as much conventional fish feed.
This is a pilot and demo facility, and we have spent about 15 000 hours building it and learning, and material cost has been about €200k.
Visited your website but I don’t speak that language so I couldn’t understand it, but looks like you use a method similar Nelson and Pade…? One thing we did to increase rev per area of space was inoculate wood with mycelium and hang it above the water. You could harvest market desirable mushrooms along with your produce and protein. Also, incorporating shrimp to further add to the process of breaking down the ammonia particulates during the transformation to nitrate can be beneficial and another rev stream. Are y’all profitable and scalable with the ops you’re running?
I’m kind of bummed because I was hoping there were going to be a lot more people focused on this and scaling it, but in this thread there are not…
The build log I linked to is in English. We will also publish more in that if you want to follow it.
This is a pilot facility, but looks similar to what Nelson and Pade offers at a quick glance. The commercial scale facility will be very different than this. The scale is 50-100 times larger and you can think of the growing area of this as one layer in a multi-layer facility.
This small scale pilot is far from profitable. Generally we think you need to be at up to 1000 m2 growing area if you have a facility which is a side business and you take care of it alongside your farm. If it is a business by itself with external distribution you probably need it to be about 10 000 m2. (Of course this depends heavily on your local conditions, what you can sell, at what price etc.)
We are focused on scaling, but that is another story than a demo and pilot plant. :)
Excellent! Both your website and the original post. I think farming in Scandinavia needs a reboot, specially because of unfavour Clima. At the moment it relies heavily on buying food from other countries with better clima and cheaper labour. Unortunately this involves a lot of transportation/contamination.
This kind of project seems to point the right direction.
For more «normal» people I believe is important to try growing things outside when possible or inside. Then you really understand the real value of what we take for granted on the grocery store.
Well done! IMHO producing the feed on site is the ultimate sustainability move because it makes aquaponics truly autonomous. In the past I tried soldier fly larvae but I wasn't able to produce enough to sustain my fish, it was just a supplement for them.
I set-up an aquaponic system on my front porch a few years ago. My wife was skeptical but I grew some of the finest basil around. Just used a tote filled with goldfish, some PVC piping, and a pump. Unfortunately one evening the raccoons figured out how to pop the lid off the tote - it was a massacre!
I had a small one in my backyard for a few years. My goldfish would ofen simply disappear. One day they were there, the next day they weren't. They also died often and there were a few causes.
* a good number jumped out as the water level was close to the top of the tank when the water was cycled. Of these, some were found me and others by something else.
* birds found and ate them. I was completely okay with this. I never actually confirmed this but it seemed the only plausible reason
* illness. The goldfish I bought were feeder fish meant for turtles and were never meant to survive long. Disease was a big component. I would replenish often, but on two occasions within a week or two, all would be dead, old and new.
* temperature. We had a deeper freeze than typical for my area in the 20s F. It froze in the pipes and much of the tank. And in the summer we had over 100F
I would have cared more were they fish for consumption. When you can buy goldfish for 10 cents a piece it was too easy to simply replenish than to fix the problems. A more humane, and likely cheaper solution would have been to put a small amount of ammonium chloride in the water regularly. I had a giant bag from setting up the system.
I got a ton of lettuce and tomatoes from the system though and learned a ton.
It was! They were my urban farming buds. I took care of the PVC, they took care of the pooping, the basil took care of clearing the nitrites out of the water. It was all golden until that masked bandit struck. Now I live out of town - I'm quite sure the bears would eat the whole kit if I set it up again.
Hmm... I built a pond last summer as a pandemic project, and just got koi in it a couple months ago. I haven't really thought seriously about aquaponics, but I seem to have most of what I would need right there already if I wanted to start growing something. (Maybe lettuce?)
Right now, the pond has a lot of regular pond plants, including azolla (aka mosquito fern or fairy moss) which about every week or two I cull about a bucket's worth and feed to the roommates's chickens so it doesn't take over the whole surface.
This is obviously nothing less than astounding. I can’t start to describe how incredibly knowledgeable and skilled this person is.
Because the topic of hydro and growing food and all that is on HN here, I wanted to leave the following comment on a higher level.
Ten years ago I was super dedicated to problems surrounding water, which of course include food and all the issues we have with our food systems. At the pinnacle, I was working with a half acre aquaponics greenhouse in Watsonville, CA. We had 8000 striped bass and produced and incredible amount of fresh produce. It was pesticide free because of you put chemicals on the plants it would get into the water and hurt the fish.
It was more “natural” than hydroponics. You weren’t using fertilizer imported from all over, everything in the system could be produced on-site. The more biologically diverse the system was, the more resilient and productive.
Both hydro and aqua phonics - the latter of which has been practiced for thousands of years, definitely save a ton of water. But I think aquaponics has a massive chance of being mainstream, especially as automation and all the advanced tech and robots get better.
It’s about ecological engineering on a local scale - you are maxing out the ecology to human and nature’s benefit, and there are so many relationships to learn and exploit.
It’s strange how impactful this could be on a grand scale - see some Dan barber Ted talks [1]
Just really need to get some investment on this on a big scale, like the hydro houses in Canada. No one has, from all that I know, really built aquaponic systems on a grand scale that are economically viable. But I see it coming and after I wrap up my current company, I’m jumping right back in to working on this.
We are just going to be doing what nature did best before we murdered all of it…but maybe Mac it out super hard and super quick compared to what it could do.
Lastly, with all the climate stuff: Don’t forget, you can’t put a price on the systems that produce the food, water and clean air we breath, cuz you know, we’d be dead. Well maybe we can, but we sure aren’t trying.
I saw a segment 15 years ago about "biodynamic" hydroponics. Not sure if that's a real term or whether I'm even remembering it right, but as I recall the concept was that your grow is more or less a completely closed system that involved fish circulating nutrients through the system. As you say, you don't add nutrients from far off places. The fish feed the plants and the plants feed the fish. In that segment, the fish were tilapia. It seemed perfect and has captured my imagination this whole time.
Just for the reference, "Biodynamic" refers to Rudolf Steiner's method for growing food. It's a quite common ritual in Europe, mostly for wine but also for other type of plants. It j's related to Anthroposophy, an new-age/esoteric movement from the 1930s' which somehow lived and grow until now and is still quite active. IMHO they're a bit frightening as they are now quite powerful (they have a bank (La Nef) many schools in western Europe and their own pharmatical lab (Weleda), all of them making a LOT of money) and clearly have highly conservative political views (one of their leader ran for president in France a while ago with an homophobe and racist project). Most documentation is in French or Deutch so if you wanna dig it's probably gonna take some translation.
https://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/2018/07/MALET/58830https://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/2018/07/MALET/58797
They really are a scary bunch. Moreover, it's terribly annoying how most people in Europe seem to have labelled them as harmless. They're very much considered "ah, those weirdos, I don't agree with them but surely we should just let them do their thing". It's frightening – the Steiner guys are dangerous.
What do you mean by dangerous exactly? I was briefly involved with some people from the Steiner philosophy (the school) and while some people could definitely be labeled as a weird bunch with esoteric tendencies, none of them seemed dangerous at all.
Everything seemed very open and accepting to people different than themself. In a positive way, not in a "join my cult" way.
They form most of the anti-vax movement in Europe (there are documented case of a presumed-extinct disease killing children in Steiner schools) and are also deeply sexist and homophobic due to their beliefs in a mystical balance between "Man" and "Women". They also actively infiltrate medical institutions in France, Germany and Switzerland to favor meds from their official medicine (and private labs), and some country allow them to be officially sold as medicine with reduced controls in regard to efficacy.
Oh and they successfully lobbied the French state into shutting down it's own observatory of derives in cults, known for having rose many alerts against Steiner schools to the govt over the years.
Thanks for the information. It does seem like the anti-vax movement is a lot larger within the Waldorf-community than outside. I never really thought about that.
This is the first I've ever heard of this, I normally give my kids Weleda cough mixture and always pretty much saw the whole movement as basically a slightly better commercialized version of homeopathy.
Not going to mention any of this to my wife though - it'll just cause fights :)
i saw a youtube video on that kind of system within the last few years so yeah it's definitely something. you just need to make sure the fish are happy
> It was pesticide free because of you put chemicals on the plants it would get into the water and hurt the fish.
Funny how on a smaller human scale ("our bass will die and our food production will be in danger"), the problem and solution seem obvious. Once you scale it up to world terms, where you're only lightly polluting a very large amount of animals, humans no longer instinctively comprehend it. Much like empathy and compassion only hold a group together up to a certain size.
I live in Canada but haven't heard of the hydro houses you mentioned ("hydro" here is confusingly a synonym for electricity so google isn't helping either), can you provide specifics?
Canada has enormous hydroponic vegetable growing operations. They're quite impressive. I don't know really why they have built so much more than the US, but my theory is that there may be regulatory issues with importing fresh food from the Salinas valley, where much of the American vegetable crop is grown, and hydro is the best way to grow in the Canadian climate.
Have you seen the weather up here?!? For most of this country, growing things indoors in completely artificial environments is the only option. There may be regulatory issues at play, but mainly I would think it’s a climatic necessity.
Hydro doesn’t taste as good as organic, and it needs to be flushed or you ingest a lot of nitrates, which is likely carcinogenic. Flushing requires careful planning and a system designed for it. You can’t just treat it like a fridge full of food. With soil you can just leave stuff in the ground until you want to eat it.
I’ve poured a lot of time and money into the hobby, and have settled on organic soil with some simple drip for indoor growing.
The water use is about the same. As long as you’re indoor the water has nowhere to runoff/evaporate to.
IMO the benefits of hydro/Aquaponics are nonexistent. Also, the whole system is a pile of plastics. The tote and drain pipe in the linked article are not food grade plastic, which would scare me away from this system.
The automation is way way way overkill. Hydro is very easy to tweak. The nutrient profile is a tiny percentage of the labor, and a $3 battery operated temp/humidity display is plenty for keeping things nice for the plants. They show the high and low since last reset, which is all you need.
If I had any outdoor space with good sun I would set up a greenhouse, but since I don’t have that I run leds directly off of solar panels on my roof (dc-dc step ups and downs as needed).
Kind of cool to see them rise and set with the sun.
I’ve found that herbs like cilantro taste extra strong when unflushed (even I taste the soapy thing, which I don’t normally)
I take my cues from the cannabis hobbyists, and they’ve largely moved away from hydro because of the taste. Unflushed bud is known to be harsh, give a nasty headache, and leave extra salts in the ash for those who smoke it.
The plastic also scares me, who knows what’s leeching into the water from these non food grade plastics… endocrine disrupters and carcinogenic compounds would make me stick to simple soil
Having built simple pneumatic and hydraulic systems using relays, sensors and SoCs, this would he an excellent and fun project. It is actually one of my ultimate goals in life to automate a closed system of food production.
But one thing, externalizing a lot of the automation to already automated processes i.e. the natural environment is quite useful. You have a general pattern of predictability and the trade off is that it is not granularly predictable but there are less catastrophic failure modes. All in all, if you're on earth it makes the most sense to just grow things outside, or in a passive greenhouse if temperature is a concern. Also to be considered is the more active automation complexity you add, the more narrow the scope will be, so if you're tightly controlling nutrients for example, you're restricted on what variety you can have. If you consider the plants active participants in the system as opposed to subjects to or of the system you can devise a much easier system to construct, a la permaculture.
Same dream here. I just never have time or space ;)
I make due with with the garden in the meantime. As you say a lot of it is just free in nature. Nutrients are in the compost (I have a lot of trees meaning leaves that I compost with grass clippings, kitchen scraps and guinea pig poop) and sun and water are free and automatic most of the times.
The problem comes in when these don't cooperate. A few years ago my corn was unusable. Too wet and I'm not sure what exactly it was but it had this black fungus-y stuff. Threw it all out. Then it was too dry so I had to add an automated watering system as the rain barrels couldn't keep up. This year I haven't had to use it yet. I can't even really use the overflowing rainbarrels because it keeps raining once a week (mainly have potatoes this year).
What I really like is fruit trees. Very very hands off after getting them established. Unfortunately they are mainly for fresh eating and jam, so not really food production in that sense. But sure as hell very tasty all year round! I can recommend sour cherries. The sour of the cherries is awesome once made into jam and personally I will eat them right off the tree too. Not many worms either.
Interested in this statement, because I’ve always read and been told not to put pet waste into the compost; the rationale being that they can carry viruses that you can then catch if you eat what grew in it. Is guinea pig poop special, or do you have a particular method to avoid that?
That entirely depends on the animal. You don't want dog, cat or human.
Chickens have been used for ages to make really awesome manure. It's so 'hot' you need a lot of other material + time so it doesn't burn plants. I guess they might not count as pets in most places, but around here lots of backyard chickens.
Do horses count as pets? Horse manure is awesome too. It's only lightly processed grass/hay and you can still see individual blades. I started off my veggie garden with a load of 1 year old horse manure from a local horse place.
My guinea pigs mow the lawn in summer (and still get some kitchen scraps like cucumber cut-offs the kids don't like) and the radish greens whenever we pull a radish etc. In winter I still don't feed them any meat :)
These small rodents, along with other common household pets such as gerbils and hamsters, are omnivores, eating both plants and animal proteins (mainly from insects). That being said, those kept as pets are typically fed a plant-based diet with much of their proteins and minerals obtained from specialized food, often in the form of pellets. So, unlike meat-eating animals (including your cat or dog), their manure is perfectly safe for use in the garden and suitable for home composting too.
that black fungus, corn smut, is highly appreciated in Latin American communities.
I've been tooling around the idea of making a corn smut farm, because once you get it it 'll stay (in most instances) but that would also make growing corn difficult if I wanted to grow it in the future.
This is very impressive. I’m in the midst of implementing an outdoor hydroponics system in much the same vein, except I’m mostly rolling my own sensors using arduino and LoRa for comms, as we are really distributed here - the pi running openhab which runs the show (not just the hydroponics, but energy production and routing, tank levels and pumps, river level monitoring, weather station and generic drip irrigation) is hundreds of meters away from the garden. Finding sensors that weren’t expensive or didn’t require hardwiring was a pita, so just went for very generic modules. Ultrasonics for tank levels and river levels are my favourite so far - something really neat about being able to measure depth without contact, and the modules cost me €6 or something crazy. Commercial gear was all the better part of €1,000 for the same function. It’s all a load of work, but it’s a lot less than managing the homestead by hand.
As I’m still in the midst of implementing - I have the physical end largely done, sensors mostly made, logic roughed out - I’m definitely going to be working through his article looking for gotchas.
I’ve gotta say, I am curious as to what drove him to build his own platform to run it - openhab works great for home automation stuff, even complicated home automation stuff — and grafana+influxdb give great insights.
I digress, but I’m literally trusting it with my life these days, as I’ve built a flood EWS around it - we live on a river that, once in a blue moon, goes crazy - but predictably so - so a simple model around the delta and double delta of level change and precipitation rates (both from our weather station and the one other weather station in the drainage basin with public data, as well as weather forecasts) tells me when it’s time to bug out, and when it’s time to just enjoy the sound of the rain on the roof and the rumble of the river. It proved itself gratifyingly accurate this winter. The river started to look scary, the weather was dreadful, and I was giving only a 5% chance of a flood entering the house - less than 1% of it being a dangerous flood. Evacuated anyway, as I didn’t trust it at that point, but we didn’t flood, and the peak level was within 5cm of forecast. Really short drainage basin makes the river dynamic but very easy to predict.
So yeah. Openhab. Super powerful for this kind of thing.
Nice work! I tried hydroponics a couple of times, though with a simpler setup. I usually had to combat the build up of algae in the reservoir tank. I was farming outdoors so I blamed sunlight and nutrients for creating conditions for algae growth.
I wonder if the use Mycostop would be effective against algae?
As a side note, the way the plants and electronics are interwoven is summoning strange emotions for me, an Akira'esqe picture...
There are two main ways these days to do natural farming, one is back to the roots, the other one is this high-tech, putting all advancements we got into it. Straight out of a sci-fi movie if you ask me.
interesting. could you point to more details? I'd like to know more since I'm a fish breeder and a lot of fishes need a controlled environment for breeding.
There are a variety of papers on the topic for hydroponics (see below) using weak acid cation resins with reciculation to control pH so you don't need to constantly replace buffers or use pH up/down chemical additions either, there are also some forum threads and reddit posts, some related to marijuana hydroponics. I suspect the same approach could work for fish breeding depending on marine/fresh water.
This is great, and this also means that it's possible to artificially create an environment of scarcity to the plants, which apparently is great for our longevity, like David Sinclair pointed out [1].
I've been mentally planning all of this in my head for when I move to a place with enough space. The amount of detail and research provided in one page is nothing short of astounding. I know I would have never done anything close to this level of work had I done it myself. This level is something else entirely.
Unfortunately these DIY systems are usually made with PVC. I think it’s worthwhile, to purchase a ready made system that uses food grade plastic, as I have done.
PVC is a food safe plastic. There are some PVC products treated with things that make them not food safe, but as long as it has a NSF-51 marking it's food grade.
I was watching this and wondering if a simplified version of this could be used for mushrooms. Then I saw the very first comment to his YouTube video linking an unlisted video showing a timelapse of oyster mushrooms fruiting. Nice!
Awesome build and write up. I used to work for a company called AEssense making automated aeroponic systems for commercial cannabis growers. They are still around and have installs all over the US. Many similar features to your NFT system. Cool stuff!
What I like the most about aquaponics (and recirculating hydroponics) is the sustainability aspects, it is an almost completely closed-loop system, with relatively small external inputs compared to other farming methods, and extremely small water requirements (due to the fact that water is continuously recycled).
Two bits of info about aquaponics that not many people know:
1. it is possible to have aquaponics systems in a vegetarian context: in many cases the fish is not for human consumption as food (in large commercial systems this is usually koi that is sold as ornamental fish[2a], in smaller systems goldfish kept as pets[2b]).
2. there are aquaponics systems that don't require access to electricity, in particular the iAVS system (a.k.a "sandponics") was developed with subsistence farmers that had no electricity access in mind, it doesn't require water to be pumped continuously, rather you are only required to manually recirculate the water a few times a day which can be achieved with a bucket or other low tech solutions[3].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aquaponics
[2a] https://www.pvrkoicentre.com/pages/aquaponics
[2b] https://farmingaquaponics.com/caring-for-goldfish-in-aquapon...
[3] https://garydonaldson.net/home/iavs/