Bioponica is devoted to research and development of sustainable farming systems for education, jobs and food security. More from the Bioponica web site,
By convention it is necessary to use store bought fertilizers or else rely on fish to provide them from their waste. The problem is that these approaches are either unsustainable, hydroponics or else require a close management of fish to maintain sufficient ammonia excretion, aquaponics.
With bioponics, it is possible to grow edible plants and fish without purchasing anything more than seeds and fish fry, simply by recycling nutrients from grass clippings, leaves and worm teas, giving us an opportunity to create abundant fish food and water fertility for growing even heavy feeding plants like tomatoes and melons.
Hydroponics uses chemicals or else requires the purchase of “organic” fertilizers from far away places and to be shipped to the site. This alone is not a very sustainable practice.
Our system is more like aquaponics though we don’t buy fish food nor do we rely on fish to create fertility for plants.
In the Incubator we create plant fertilizer by decomposing organic material in a tank that performs like a bioreactor. This nutrient rich water cycles into our algae tank, duckweed tank, zooplankton and finally to a live fish tank where we rear mollies and guppies to feed small and mid size tilapia, perch and brim, along with duckweed and live organisms that live on the algae.
The tanks are all interconnected so that one nutrient cycling system can remain undisturbed while others are transferring feed to the fish tanks below. Feeding takes place several times per day.
And the best news is that it works. We’ve never seen this approach before except in traditional farm settings in the Far East. It is however most practical to grow food through closed loop methods, reducing water as well as eliminating costs and transportaion of food and fertililizers. With a bioponic approach, at the end of the day, one can be certain they are eating a sustainably-raised tomato and even more remarkable at this day in age, an truly organic fish.
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