Aquaponics The Most Expensive Food You Can Grow

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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NOTICE Lloyds Emerging Risk Report Food System Shock

This document was brought to my attention by a good friend (thank you Stella)- one that I would have missed in the madness that this past two weeks has been chaotically lost in, lol.

This, my friends, is NOTICE.  Lloyds of London is putting it all out in black and white, as notice.  The insurance industry is the biggest scam ever created- even bigger than the idea of "derivatives" and "leveraging" and its impact is directly related to both.    When the Insurance companies are running out of things to insure, they have to create a "need" else where so that they can continue to perpetuate their fraud.  This is clearly seen in Zerohedges article:

Wall Streets Next Bonanza: Subprime Marriage-Backed Securities

The last crash was caused by reckless investments in subprime mortgage-backed securities, an ingenious way to repackage and redistribute staggering amounts of credit risk to unsuspecting investors. After losing their house and their money, some investors may take comfort in their enduring marital relationships.Unfortunately, marriage is one of the riskiest bets of all, which makes it a prime, or should I say "subprime" target for Wall Streets masters of innovation.....If marriage insurance sales take off, its only a matter of time before Wall Street repackages it and sells it to investors via subprime marriage-backed securities. A boom in marriage speculation would ensue. Did you see your neighbor with his mistress last night? Buy some MBS credit default swaps on him and tell his wife what you saw. Is your other neighbor away from home a lot? Buy some MBS insurance on his wife, seduce her, and when they get divorced, you can cash in. Consider it "inside her" trading. Does it sound preposterous? Its not any crazier than buying credit default swaps on poor peoples mortgages and making $15 billion when they become homeless. Remember, everything is fair in the "free market."

I have posted the entire PDF of Lloyds Emerging Risk Report – 2015:  Food System Shock Below.   please share this information around as it is more important than most of the crap the MSM is putting out there- this is the NOTICE that is being handed to us.

"There is a pressing need to reduce the uncertainty surrounding the impacts of an extreme shock to the food supply. Sudden disruptions to the supply chain could reduce the global food supply and trigger a spike in food prices, leading to substantial knock-on effects for businesses and societies. The food system’s existing vulnerability to systemic shocks is being exacerbated by factors such as climate change, water stress, ongoing globalisation, and heightening political instability
Lloyd’s commissioned the development of a scenario of extreme shock to global food production in order to explore the implications for insurance and risk.Experts in the field of food security and the economics of sustainable development were asked to develop a scenario describing a plausible, relatively severe production shock affecting multiple agricultural commodities and regions, and to describe the cascade of events that could result. ....
A shock to the global food supply could trigger significant claims across multiple classes of insurance, including (but not limited to) terrorism and political violence, political risk, business interruption, marine and aviation, agriculture, environmental liability, and product liability and recall. These losses could be compounded by the potential for a food system shock to last for many years; and the ability of insurers to pay claims quickly is expected to be an important factor in post-shock recovery. More broadly, the insurance industry may also be affected by impacts on investment income and the global regulatory and business environment.
The insurance industry is in a position to make an important contribution to improving the resilience and sustainability of the global food system. As businesses become increasingly aware of the threat posed by food system disruption, they may invest more heavily in comprehensive risk transfer structures, and a severe shock could motivate individuals and businesses to address gaps in their risk management. As such, global food supply shock could also represent a substantial opportunity for insurers, who will have a key role in assisting clients to understand their risk exposure and to tailor appropriate risk transfer solutions.
Scenarios are an important method of exploring emerging risks; they are not predictions or forecasts. The following scenario is simply one of a multitude of events that could occur. When the scenario considers actions or events by individual governments or individuals within specific countries, it is not stating that Lloyd’s is predicting that the events will occur. Many of the comments are based on events that have occurred in the past – either in the countries mentioned or extrapolated from other regions. However, individual countries are only named specifically to give realism to the event and allow appropriately detailed calculations to be made – events could occur in different countries or not at all, and to illustrate this some alternative scenarios are provided. Lloyd’s firmly believes that the insurance industry will be stronger by considering a variety of scenarios around mega-risks, and the only way to do this consistently is to give sufficient detail. This has long been the approach within the Lloyd’s Realistic Disaster Scenario process. Lloyd’s has chosen to share this work openly because it believes that a debate within the insurance industry, and beyond, will strengthen the global community

LLoyd's Emerging Risk Report – 2015: Food System Shock

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Forging Farmers Celebrating Women Transforming the Food System

Last week I had the pleasure of participating in this wonderful event hosted by MESA, the Multinational Exchange for Sustainable Agriculture. What a privilege to be part of a panel of such amazing women working diligently to build more resilient food systems around the world. 

The panelists were all so different and accomplished including the fiery Joelci Dannacene, a militant organizer with The Landless Rural Workers Movement of Brazil and Myriam Kaplan-Pasternak, owner of Devils Gulch Ranch in Marin, founder and director of HaitiCoffee.com, Inc and a USAID Farmer to Farmer volunteer in Haiti and El Salvador with Partners of the Americas, Winrock International and HaitiCoffee.  The panel also included Clara Nicholls, a lecturer in the Latin American Studies Program at UC Berkeley, teaching "Perspectives for Sustainable Rural Development in Latin America" and president of the Latin American Scientific Society of Agroecology, as well as, Shu-Chen Cheng, a beginning small-scale farmer from Taiwan who hopes to educate farmers in sustainable methods, and share with her community the importance of supporting local farmers.

Not only was the conversation inspiring and stimulating, the homemade Puerto Rican tapas were off the hook!  Thank you MESA for including me in this uplifting evening, I am honored and excited to collaborate further in the future!

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A revolution Grow Food in the city

This is a small sideshow that the students will see tomorrow at the Bronx Writing Academy

If you want to support my project with the school, but that you cant volunteer, you can give a donation to Chfermette see the donation button on the top right corner. Any donation will be used to finance a trip to one of NYC rooftop farms or to insure the continuation of the project after the end of the spring semester. Also, I am in the process of making it a non profit. Please If you enjoy the blog content, comment and/or subscribe.

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