A Community and Forum For Aquaponic Gardeners

commercial course

Who has the best commercial aquaponics training course?

Also, I watched some videos from Santa Cruz Aquaponics on YouTube, but can't seem to find any contact information about them? Does anyone know?

Thanks, Kim

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Permalink Reply by RupertofOZ on January 6, 2012 at 2:59am

I believe Santa Cruz closed their doors last week...

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Permalink Reply by Calvin Schmidt on January 6, 2012 at 4:47pm

Really? Any ideas why? Does anybody know who they are? It could be extremely helpful to the community to be able to go through a post mortem. I know we've done so on a couple of projects at work and it was really eye-opening to get people to share what went wrong, especially if they can get over the emotion side of the failure. As painful as it is to go through these when your involved it can really show you problems with yourself and your processes.

RupertofOZ said:

I believe Santa Cruz closed their doors last week...

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Permalink Reply by Calvin Schmidt on January 6, 2012 at 4:48pm

I was hoping to visit them later this month when I'm in SF for work...

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Permalink Reply by RupertofOZ on January 6, 2012 at 11:47pm

I'll quote "aquadave" (Ventura CA)... from another forum...

I just talked with Chris from Santa Cruz Aquaponics, and they closed their doors last week. California is a hard place to sell and raise fish. He said they had a hard time with Fish and Game and that the rules and regulations made in very difficult to grow much on a commercial scale. they ended up growing Carp for live sale at Asian markets. Combined with the local farm culture in California where your competing with thousands of acres of crops grown organically on well established soil based farms, Plus some miss calculations with the future returns. The result is not enough people to do the work and an under funded farm. I only found out because I was hoping to go over there in the morning to look the place over. talking with Chris he said some other folks have looked at establishing commercial farms but all decided not to because of one reason or another

The above suggests they ended up stocking carp, although I've also seen it reported that they were growing catfish...

I had believed that they were growing striped bass... after being informed by Fish & Game that Tilapia, the basis of their initial business plan projections... were not legal in California...

(That confuses me as well... because that was what I had been consistantly informed was the case... but I see some posts here that suggest otherwise...)

Anyway.. it seems to come down to...

Problems related to fish species selection and profitability
Over-estimation of plant production
Over-estimation of market availability, or market penetration
Under-estimation of labour requirements
Under capitalisation
Over-estimation of potential returns
Wishful thinking, or poor market research, and/or business analysis

I think this highlights the potential pitfalls of what to me has been a "rose-coloured glasses" rush towards commercialisation of aquaponics...

(No offense meant to Santa Cruz...)

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Permalink Reply by Kim on January 7, 2012 at 12:45am

Wow...is tilapia really illegal to raise in California? Does anybody know? How many regulations are they going to throw at us? This is just getting ridiculous.

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Permalink Reply by RupertofOZ on January 7, 2012 at 3:00am

The best information I have suggests that O Mossambica and O Horonorum are allowed, but only south of the Techahapi Mountains.

I have seen a site that claaims that "Californian Hybrid Tilapia", whatever they may be.. are allowed... I suspect they're actually one of the above species...

In Australia... none of the 40+ species variations are allowed...

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Permalink Reply by John Fox on January 13, 2012 at 7:25pm

I emailed the owner to ask if I could come visit and he said they were closing. He did not respond when I asked why. I fully agree that knowing why would be extremely helpful to the industry. Perhaps in a month or so he will be ready to talk. My guess is that they went to big to fast.

Calvin Schmidt said:

Really? Any ideas why? Does anybody know who they are? It could be extremely helpful to the community to be able to go through a post mortem. I know we've done so on a couple of projects at work and it was really eye-opening to get people to share what went wrong, especially if they can get over the emotion side of the failure. As painful as it is to go through these when your involved it can really show you problems with yourself and your processes.

RupertofOZ said:

I believe Santa Cruz closed their doors last week...

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Permalink Reply by Zalinda Farms Inc on January 15, 2012 at 9:48pm

U R absolutely correct......

RupertofOZ said:

The best information I have suggests that O Mossambica and O Horonorum are allowed, but only south of the Techahapi Mountains.

I have seen a site that claaims that "Californian Hybrid Tilapia", whatever they may be.. are allowed... I suspect they're actually one of the above species...

In Australia... none of the 40+ species variations are allowed...