Automated Hydroponic System Build (2020)
kylegabriel.com
kylegabriel.com
What I like the most about aquaponics (and recirculating hydroponics) is the sustainability aspects, it is an almost completely closed-loop system, with relatively small external inputs compared to other farming methods, and extremely small water requirements (due to the fact that water is continuously recycled).
Two bits of info about aquaponics that not many people know:
1. it is possible to have aquaponics systems in a vegetarian context: in many cases the fish is not for human consumption as food (in large commercial systems this is usually koi that is sold as ornamental fish[2a], in smaller systems goldfish kept as pets[2b]).
2. there are aquaponics systems that don't require access to electricity, in particular the iAVS system (a.k.a "sandponics") was developed with subsistence farmers that had no electricity access in mind, it doesn't require water to be pumped continuously, rather you are only required to manually recirculate the water a few times a day which can be achieved with a bucket or other low tech solutions[3].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aquaponics
[2a] https://www.pvrkoicentre.com/pages/aquaponics
[2b] https://farmingaquaponics.com/caring-for-goldfish-in-aquapon...
We are also running a prototype setup where we take roots and plants not sold and feeding them to mealworms, which will become food supplement for the fish. This way we won’t need to feed them as much conventional fish feed.
This is a pilot and demo facility, and we have spent about 15 000 hours building it and learning, and material cost has been about €200k.
http://cirkularodling.se/build-an-aquaponic-indoor-farm-part...
I’m kind of bummed because I was hoping there were going to be a lot more people focused on this and scaling it, but in this thread there are not…
This is a pilot facility, but looks similar to what Nelson and Pade offers at a quick glance. The commercial scale facility will be very different than this. The scale is 50-100 times larger and you can think of the growing area of this as one layer in a multi-layer facility.
This small scale pilot is far from profitable. Generally we think you need to be at up to 1000 m2 growing area if you have a facility which is a side business and you take care of it alongside your farm. If it is a business by itself with external distribution you probably need it to be about 10 000 m2. (Of course this depends heavily on your local conditions, what you can sell, at what price etc.)
We are focused on scaling, but that is another story than a demo and pilot plant. :)
* a good number jumped out as the water level was close to the top of the tank when the water was cycled. Of these, some were found me and others by something else. * birds found and ate them. I was completely okay with this. I never actually confirmed this but it seemed the only plausible reason * illness. The goldfish I bought were feeder fish meant for turtles and were never meant to survive long. Disease was a big component. I would replenish often, but on two occasions within a week or two, all would be dead, old and new. * temperature. We had a deeper freeze than typical for my area in the 20s F. It froze in the pipes and much of the tank. And in the summer we had over 100F
I would have cared more were they fish for consumption. When you can buy goldfish for 10 cents a piece it was too easy to simply replenish than to fix the problems. A more humane, and likely cheaper solution would have been to put a small amount of ammonium chloride in the water regularly. I had a giant bag from setting up the system.
I got a ton of lettuce and tomatoes from the system though and learned a ton.
Right now, the pond has a lot of regular pond plants, including azolla (aka mosquito fern or fairy moss) which about every week or two I cull about a bucket's worth and feed to the roommates's chickens so it doesn't take over the whole surface.
Because the topic of hydro and growing food and all that is on HN here, I wanted to leave the following comment on a higher level.
Ten years ago I was super dedicated to problems surrounding water, which of course include food and all the issues we have with our food systems. At the pinnacle, I was working with a half acre aquaponics greenhouse in Watsonville, CA. We had 8000 striped bass and produced and incredible amount of fresh produce. It was pesticide free because of you put chemicals on the plants it would get into the water and hurt the fish.
It was more “natural” than hydroponics. You weren’t using fertilizer imported from all over, everything in the system could be produced on-site. The more biologically diverse the system was, the more resilient and productive.
Both hydro and aqua phonics - the latter of which has been practiced for thousands of years, definitely save a ton of water. But I think aquaponics has a massive chance of being mainstream, especially as automation and all the advanced tech and robots get better.
It’s about ecological engineering on a local scale - you are maxing out the ecology to human and nature’s benefit, and there are so many relationships to learn and exploit.
It’s strange how impactful this could be on a grand scale - see some Dan barber Ted talks [1]
Just really need to get some investment on this on a big scale, like the hydro houses in Canada. No one has, from all that I know, really built aquaponic systems on a grand scale that are economically viable. But I see it coming and after I wrap up my current company, I’m jumping right back in to working on this.
We are just going to be doing what nature did best before we murdered all of it…but maybe Mac it out super hard and super quick compared to what it could do.
Lastly, with all the climate stuff: Don’t forget, you can’t put a price on the systems that produce the food, water and clean air we breath, cuz you know, we’d be dead. Well maybe we can, but we sure aren’t trying.
[1] https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_barber_how_i_fell_in_love_with...
Everything seemed very open and accepting to people different than themself. In a positive way, not in a "join my cult" way.
Not going to mention any of this to my wife though - it'll just cause fights :)
Funny how on a smaller human scale ("our bass will die and our food production will be in danger"), the problem and solution seem obvious. Once you scale it up to world terms, where you're only lightly polluting a very large amount of animals, humans no longer instinctively comprehend it. Much like empathy and compassion only hold a group together up to a certain size.
One company you can check out is Windset Farms.
Check out Leamington Ontario and there are some big greenhouses.
But there’s a part of Spain where the whole city is a greenhouse: check out el ejido.
I’ve poured a lot of time and money into the hobby, and have settled on organic soil with some simple drip for indoor growing.
The water use is about the same. As long as you’re indoor the water has nowhere to runoff/evaporate to.
IMO the benefits of hydro/Aquaponics are nonexistent. Also, the whole system is a pile of plastics. The tote and drain pipe in the linked article are not food grade plastic, which would scare me away from this system.
The automation is way way way overkill. Hydro is very easy to tweak. The nutrient profile is a tiny percentage of the labor, and a $3 battery operated temp/humidity display is plenty for keeping things nice for the plants. They show the high and low since last reset, which is all you need.
If I had any outdoor space with good sun I would set up a greenhouse, but since I don’t have that I run leds directly off of solar panels on my roof (dc-dc step ups and downs as needed).
Kind of cool to see them rise and set with the sun.
I'll see if I can locate the talk from Dr. Bruce Bugbee on flushing.
I take my cues from the cannabis hobbyists, and they’ve largely moved away from hydro because of the taste. Unflushed bud is known to be harsh, give a nasty headache, and leave extra salts in the ash for those who smoke it.
You can use the same plastics as in water pipes.
But one thing, externalizing a lot of the automation to already automated processes i.e. the natural environment is quite useful. You have a general pattern of predictability and the trade off is that it is not granularly predictable but there are less catastrophic failure modes. All in all, if you're on earth it makes the most sense to just grow things outside, or in a passive greenhouse if temperature is a concern. Also to be considered is the more active automation complexity you add, the more narrow the scope will be, so if you're tightly controlling nutrients for example, you're restricted on what variety you can have. If you consider the plants active participants in the system as opposed to subjects to or of the system you can devise a much easier system to construct, a la permaculture.
I make due with with the garden in the meantime. As you say a lot of it is just free in nature. Nutrients are in the compost (I have a lot of trees meaning leaves that I compost with grass clippings, kitchen scraps and guinea pig poop) and sun and water are free and automatic most of the times.
The problem comes in when these don't cooperate. A few years ago my corn was unusable. Too wet and I'm not sure what exactly it was but it had this black fungus-y stuff. Threw it all out. Then it was too dry so I had to add an automated watering system as the rain barrels couldn't keep up. This year I haven't had to use it yet. I can't even really use the overflowing rainbarrels because it keeps raining once a week (mainly have potatoes this year).
What I really like is fruit trees. Very very hands off after getting them established. Unfortunately they are mainly for fresh eating and jam, so not really food production in that sense. But sure as hell very tasty all year round! I can recommend sour cherries. The sour of the cherries is awesome once made into jam and personally I will eat them right off the tree too. Not many worms either.
Interested in this statement, because I’ve always read and been told not to put pet waste into the compost; the rationale being that they can carry viruses that you can then catch if you eat what grew in it. Is guinea pig poop special, or do you have a particular method to avoid that?
Chickens have been used for ages to make really awesome manure. It's so 'hot' you need a lot of other material + time so it doesn't burn plants. I guess they might not count as pets in most places, but around here lots of backyard chickens.
Do horses count as pets? Horse manure is awesome too. It's only lightly processed grass/hay and you can still see individual blades. I started off my veggie garden with a load of 1 year old horse manure from a local horse place.
My guinea pigs mow the lawn in summer (and still get some kitchen scraps like cucumber cut-offs the kids don't like) and the radish greens whenever we pull a radish etc. In winter I still don't feed them any meat :)
These small rodents, along with other common household pets such as gerbils and hamsters, are omnivores, eating both plants and animal proteins (mainly from insects). That being said, those kept as pets are typically fed a plant-based diet with much of their proteins and minerals obtained from specialized food, often in the form of pellets. So, unlike meat-eating animals (including your cat or dog), their manure is perfectly safe for use in the garden and suitable for home composting too.
I've been tooling around the idea of making a corn smut farm, because once you get it it 'll stay (in most instances) but that would also make growing corn difficult if I wanted to grow it in the future.
So are the guinea pigs! But further south and higher elevation than taco consumers.
As I’m still in the midst of implementing - I have the physical end largely done, sensors mostly made, logic roughed out - I’m definitely going to be working through his article looking for gotchas.
I’ve gotta say, I am curious as to what drove him to build his own platform to run it - openhab works great for home automation stuff, even complicated home automation stuff — and grafana+influxdb give great insights.
I digress, but I’m literally trusting it with my life these days, as I’ve built a flood EWS around it - we live on a river that, once in a blue moon, goes crazy - but predictably so - so a simple model around the delta and double delta of level change and precipitation rates (both from our weather station and the one other weather station in the drainage basin with public data, as well as weather forecasts) tells me when it’s time to bug out, and when it’s time to just enjoy the sound of the rain on the roof and the rumble of the river. It proved itself gratifyingly accurate this winter. The river started to look scary, the weather was dreadful, and I was giving only a 5% chance of a flood entering the house - less than 1% of it being a dangerous flood. Evacuated anyway, as I didn’t trust it at that point, but we didn’t flood, and the peak level was within 5cm of forecast. Really short drainage basin makes the river dynamic but very easy to predict.
So yeah. Openhab. Super powerful for this kind of thing.
I wonder if the use Mycostop would be effective against algae?
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/11808440_Stabilizat...
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0190416920936436...
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1399-3054....