DIY vertical "zip grow system"

[Cole_Robbie]

Originally Posted by marktutt

There is a local company doing the aquaponic thing and they claim it is profitable and are talking about franchising their system.

Once again, call me skeptical, but when I read that it makes me wonder why they are trying to make money off franchising. If their operation was that profitable, they would just expand the operation. It's the catch-22 of paying anyone to teach you to make money. If they're so good at making it, they shouldn't need yours.

[Cole_Robbie]

Originally Posted by davidstcldfl

As far as 'less yield', I'm not sure on what you base your claim ? I do know AP works better then 'dirt gardenig'.
Since I've never done hydroponics, I can't really say 'if' it's true or not. I realize you have 'more control' of the nutrients in a hydro set up. Maybe, that could speed up your total yield compared to AP ?

I've at least seen pictures of giant hydroponics setups. The biggest ones seem to be built in places like Israel or Australia, where there is a desert climate. That makes sense because they can't grow in the ground. I even know of a few people locally in Illinois who have profitable greenhouses growing hydro tomatoes.

But if there is a large scale, commercially profitable aquaponics farm somewhere, I have never seen it. They always seem to have income from other sources besides actual food production. My thinking is that if it worked as well, there would be big growers using that technique, and they just don't. Fertilizer is cheap and fish food is expensive, especially lately. Worm food is expensive too, if you feed them grain, but worms will eat almost anything.

Free food scraps from a restaurant would be ideal worm food. But like the guy who made his van run off used cooking oil, it is limited to having free fuel and there is not enough free fuel for everybody. I've also read that worms will eat fresh manure, but I'm not sure how you'd deal with concerns over e coli and other bad bacteria.

Like I said, I really like the idea of aquaponics, but I want to see it be practical for a typical small farmer. As I see it now, there is no advantage over hydroponics.

[Redbaron]

Originally Posted by Cole_Robbie

Like I said, I really like the idea of aquaponics, but I want to see it be practical for a typical small farmer. As I see it now, there is no advantage over hydroponics.

One of the agricultural departments at a major university published a model for commercial scale aquaponics. I think it was Purdue ?

If you search around these threads, you may find a link for it.

I personally don't do either aquaponics or hydroponics either one. So I have no idea about the subject first hand. But it was being discussed before at Tomatoville and someone provided a link that was very interesting. I have also found a few interesting links at YouTube that claim to have made commercial models.

[Zana]

I found this today...and might be a cheap alternative:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K9vN2eudWcQ