Just Joined NW Aquaponics ..and have a few questions

[Converse]

  Greetings All,

   I am very pleased to have found this group, and hope to learn a lot from all of you.  Not sure what I have to offer anyone else though in the way of knowledge or experience.

  We live just on the "wet side" of the Cascades in the PNW.  Aquaponics seems practical for us.  Growing veggies conventionally has not been a huge success for us due to the short growing season and we have a marauding herd of elk that make short work of the "deli" we provide.  We had gone to growing what we could by hanging buckets in trees higher than the elk can reach (not too convenient for plant care) and in bins on the chicken coup roof top.  Then we discovered aquaponics!  So we are going toward growing what we can in a greenhouse with aquaponics. We hope to add a good harvest to help out the family budget not only with a veggie harvest, but also with fish...

     We run a commercial worm farm, so we have ready source of fish food (we feed our chickens the worms too!)...and no, you don't get rich selling redworms.  It does help put food on the table though.

     The part we are not sure about in doing aquaponics in our region is a good way to heat the water for tilapia inexpensively.   Anyone from this region have a solution?  I just saw a Coleman solar panel yesterday in a store on one of our trips to "civilization".  I was a bit encouraged by this thought...  So at this point I will ask what is the method most in the "wet side" of the Cascades of PNW region are using to keep fish alive in the winter? 

 

Sincerely,

Converse

[Christina Hersey]

Ok good advice.  On the freezing point, this will almost never be a concern because it is in a greenhouse which is attached to the house and built on top of a concrete patio attached to my house through a sliding glass door.  The glass will intensify some winter light, the concrete and water will store some amount of heat and it'll get a bit of ambient heat from the house.  It almost never freezes in Portland and when it does, I don't mind using the space heater a tad bit just to take the edge off.  It won't be toasty in there, but it sure never gets anywhere near freezing.

[Christina Hersey]

Also, why can't I grow duckweed on the pond surface?

[Rick Stillwagon]

It can and will if the fish do not eat it all first.  Also if you grow it it in a nutrient rich environment it will grow faster and you will harvest more. This amount of nutrients in the water wouldnt be healthy for your fish though. I am going to use a series of kiddie pools to raise the duckweed and harvest as often as possible to keep it at an optimum growth level. If you harvest too much or too little growth will slow down. I reccomend you look at some of the studies on duckweed that are available on the net. One in particular is "Duckweed Aquaculture" by Paul Skillicorn, William Spira, and William Journey. It is a study by the World Bank and is 40 pages. Very informative

[Converse]

  When I told a few people that I was doing aquaponics who are also local farmers I got some strange and disgusted looks from more than a few....after a bit of resrearch I found out why.  Those particular people have been with various organizations like the Peace Corp overseas.  They actually helped villages build ponds where tilapia are grown....and the chicken coops are set right over the ponds...and the fish eat the chicken poop (I can type "poop" on this forum I hope) as their source of food....( and now just use your imagination when you are buying those Tilapia fillets from China, etc., from your local WalMart)....Ugh!

    So I went back and re-explained the aquaponics methods used on our farm....and looks of relief can over those people.  So I can imagine there is a lot of people in the USA who hear of Tilapia farms in the USA and think of that they experienced overseas...not realizing this is a totally different system.

     Yes, you CAN feed poop to your tilapia...but would you really want to eat  the fish grown in this poopy water  and eating poop too?  I agree with Rick.  The best use of your chicken manure is for plants, or  even age it a bit and grow redworms in it to feed your fish and chickens..

 

 - Converse

[Christina Hersey]

This is eye-opening as well.  When I first got interested in aquaponics, it was because of the site gardenpool.org and his incorporation of the chickens into the system.  I'll admit that my primary inspiration for doing this is to have something useful to do with my chicken poop.  And while at first, I didn't think the fish actually ate the chicken poop, when I found out they do, it wasn't that much of an obstacle to me.  It would never occur to me to feed the waste of one animal to another (except maybe to animals like worms and flies).  But my take on it is this:  if we are open to eating fish that grow in lakes, then do those fish eat the poop of the ducks that swim on the lake?  If not, then the duck poop is serving another purpose in the ecosystem and I wouldn't be grossed out by the fish living with ducks and swimming in the water in which the ducks poop.  If so, then haven't we been eating fish that eat bird poop for millennia?  I'll admit that my first reaction when dealing with poop is to think "ew!" But the more practical side of me is growing to accept that every part of the biological system serves a purpose and it's foolish of me to not take advantage of that purpose, especially when I have the poop of four chickens just getting washed off my property by the rains and straight into the Willamette River.  If fish want to eat bird poop, then I don't have a problem suspending chickens over them.  My design won't incorporate this because my hot tub will be small and my chickens have run of the backyard.  Their quality of life would go down if they were living in the greenhouse.  But if fish want to eat algae that is fed with bird poop, then I can certainly get that system running, either in their tub or in another tub.  I've begun thinking that my first steps in aquaponics are going to involve growing worms and algae before I do anything else.  But that's a topic for another thread.

[Eric Warwick]

With warm-blooded animals e-coli can find it's way into the recirculated system and the plants and fish will be infected--which will go to you.

Christina Hersey said:

This is eye-opening as well.  When I first got interested in aquaponics, it was because of the site gardenpool.org and his incorporation of the chickens into the system.  I'll admit that my primary inspiration for doing this is to have something useful to do with my chicken poop.  And while at first, I didn't think the fish actually ate the chicken poop, when I found out they do, it wasn't that much of an obstacle to me.  It would never occur to me to feed the waste of one animal to another (except maybe to animals like worms and flies).  But my take on it is this:  if we are open to eating fish that grow in lakes, then do those fish eat the poop of the ducks that swim on the lake?  If not, then the duck poop is serving another purpose in the ecosystem and I wouldn't be grossed out by the fish living with ducks and swimming in the water in which the ducks poop.  If so, then haven't we been eating fish that eat bird poop for millennia?  I'll admit that my first reaction when dealing with poop is to think "ew!" But the more practical side of me is growing to accept that every part of the biological system serves a purpose and it's foolish of me to not take advantage of that purpose, especially when I have the poop of four chickens just getting washed off my property by the rains and straight into the Willamette River.  If fish want to eat bird poop, then I don't have a problem suspending chickens over them.  My design won't incorporate this because my hot tub will be small and my chickens have run of the backyard.  Their quality of life would go down if they were living in the greenhouse.  But if fish want to eat algae that is fed with bird poop, then I can certainly get that system running, either in their tub or in another tub.  I've begun thinking that my first steps in aquaponics are going to involve growing worms and algae before I do anything else.  But that's a topic for another thread.

[Converse]

Thanks for the input about e-coli, Eric. Very good point.  Also after years of farming I can say with certainty , that what you feed an animal has a huge impact on how it tastes on your plate..  This is true for pigs, chickens, cattle, etc...  Yes, you can feed your tilapia poop.  They will grow on a diet of it.  But when it comes to putting the tilapia on your plate, their diet will make a difference in how it tastes.  I guess that was more my point, rather than the "eeew-ick" factor.  If I was really squeemish about "poop", I would not be operating a redworm farm. Also, fish may consume poop (that is, duck and such) out in the wild, but they are not fed a steady diet of it as their main-stay, as would be the case in those ponds I described in my previous post.  I hope that clear things up.

   Just info to consider in your design of your 'permiculture puzzle' for your place, and how aquaponics fits in it all.

[Christina Hersey]

Yeah, I've thought about e-coli (and salmonella) a lot.  Because I'm going to be working extensively with poop, I figure I'm going to have to test my system regularly.  With a husband who's a water scientist, I think we'll be able to do that inexpensively.  I hope.  

 

I definitely get what you're saying about the poop affecting the taste of the fish.  The tilapia I ate was downright disgusting and that could very well be why.  Like I said, I wouldn't want to purposefully make bird poop the main source of food for my fish.  It would never have occurred to me on my own to do that and it can't possibly represent a balanced diet for them.  My plan right now might entirely avoid food fish for a long time.  I want to concentrate more on building up my feed sources (worms, algae, feeder fish) and have high populations of all of the above before I get any food fish into the mix.  And if tilapia really are illegal in Oregon, there's no way I'll grow them.  Do perch eat bird poop?  That's the question right now that would help me work on my design.

[Rick Stillwagon]

Yellow perch eat minnows, crayfish, aquatic insects, worms, and other invertebrates. They are also canibalistic in eating smaller perch.