Aquaponics - The Most Expensive Food You Can Grow

Considering setting up an aquaponics system to feed your family?  Here's 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 I'm wrong?  Here's 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 doesn't 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 here's my common sense solution.

Go to Walmart and buy a 14 dollar blue plastic splash pool.  It's 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 doesn't wash out.  Then fill it with 12 cubic feet of garden soil from Lowes for about 36 dollars.  And there's 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.

Farming Tilapia At Home - Better Tasting Than Store Bought

The decision to farm tilapia in our backyard started out as more of a gardening hobby.  We liked how tilapia took on the flavor of whatever preparation we decided to use on any particular night so it was already our fish of choice.  We started with a few Blue tilapia and after nine months of feeding them, they were all over one pound and ready to feed us.

The difference between our own backyard farmed tilapia and store-bought was incredible.  First of all, we never really noticed the brownish tint that store-bought tilapia had until we saw the beautiful white filets that our own tilapia had.  That first year we weren't particularly concerned with water clarity.  We figured that the water that they originate from in Africa and the Middle East couldn't have been any cleaner than ours, so we relaxed a bit on the clarity.  But then we started thinking, how bad did the water have to be to stain the insides of the store-bought fish a brownish color.  Well, we did some google research and found out.  I don's suggest that anyone repeat our searches, you may not like what you find.  Let's just say that the tilapia farmers in Indonesia, China and Honduras (but especially China) aren't raising their harvest in the cleanest water.

After cooking our first backyard farmed tilapia topped with our own paprika yogurt sauce (plain yogurt, sugar, paprika) and pico de gallo (tomatoes, white onion, cilantro) piled high on top, we immediately tasted the difference.  Our's had a clean flavor that we have never experienced.  Most people would agree that tilapia has little, if any, of that "fishy" taste, but after tasting ours, we knew there was a big difference.  The taste difference is hard to describe. The only word that we can come up with is "cleaner".  Sort of how a salmon has a distinct salmon flavor but it's very clean tasting too, that's how our tilapia tasted.  Almost as if you could see a Japanese chef turing it into a plate of sashimi.

We loved our first backyard tilapia so much that today we raise them by the thousands and ship them all over North America and beyond.  And of course, we still eat them three or four times per week.

If you are interested in purchasing some tilapia fingerlings to raise in your own backyard, you can buy them from us for about a dollar each at backyardtilapia.com. By the time you factor in the cost of their food, you will spend less than three dollars per pound for your own perfect tasting tilapia.