9UNP1282HD_Chris_Hartleb_WordPress
Aquaponics: Sustainable Food Production

- Welcome, everyone, I'm Chris Cirmo, the Dean of the College of Letters and Science at UWSP. I want to welcome you to a community lecture series tonight highlighting our faculty scholarship and its relation to our community. Tonight's lecture is being recorded by Wisconsin Public Television, for broadcast as part of its University Place series.

First of all, I'd like to thank a couple of folks here at the Portage County Library: Bob Stack, the director, and Scott Tappa, who's my assistant for Marketing, Public Relations and Events.

Tonight's lecture is entitled Aquaponics: Sustainable Food Production. And our presenter is Chris Hartleb, who is professor of biology at UWSP, and director of the Northern Aquaculture Demonstration Facility in Bayfield, Wisconsin. He's also Research Director of the new Aquaponics Innovation Center in Montello, Wisconsin. The Aquaponics Innovation Center is a really neat story. Chris assisted us in getting about a $700,000 grant from the Wisconsin Economic Incentive Grant Program last year, and worked with a private firm by the name of Nelson & Pade. And Rebecca Nelson and John Pade were pivotal private partners in this partnership, and I think Chris is going to talk a little bit about that tonight. 

I've worked with Chris for six years. I've been here six years as dean, and I'm going on my seventh year now. And I can say unequivocally that Chris is one of the more energetic, creative and imaginative people I've ever met. We've gotten to know each other on five-hour drives up to Bayfield, Wisconsin and an hour and a half drives down to Montello and always have something great to talk about. Chris has done wonders with our Northern Aquaculture Demonstration facility in Bayfield, and the work that he's done as a faculty member and as an entrepreneur is nothing short of magnificent. I just want to commend Chris for his incredible drive and entrepreneurship. Chris received a Bachelor's Degree in Biology from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York. His M.S. in Limnology from the University of New Hampshire and his PhD in Fisheries Ecology from-- excuse me here-- his PhD in Fisheries Ecology from the University of Maine. He's been a professor of Biology at UWSP for 19 years, where he's had experience working with larval fish, cool and cold water aquaculture, and most recently, aquaponics, which he's going to talk about tonight. He teaches courses in aquaculture, aquaponics, fisheries ecology and field ecology. 

It's my pleasure to welcome Dr. Chris Hartleb as tonight's special guest, speaking about Aquaponics: Sustainable Food Production. Chris? 
(audience applause)
- Well, thank you, and thank you for joining me tonight. As Chris just mentioned, I want to speak about the topic of aquaponics, which we'll discuss in some more detail, some of the specifics about it. But the other part is, is talk about it as a sustainable food production system. And before we can get into that, I think what we have to look at really is how does it compare with our more traditional types of agriculture, how much they're producing and what their impact is and then try to see where aquaponics can fit into food production. So if you think about traditional agriculture, you know, most of the time, you're thinking about corn and soybeans or potatoes in a field. You're thinking about cows, pigs or chickens. 

Something to keep in mind is, is are we producing enough? And if not, what are we willing to sacrifice to raise production of these different plants and animals? I kind of got this graph together here from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and what you can see is, is that except for Asia, traditional agriculture has really kind of maxed out in most other continents and most other locations. So in essence, we're either producing most of the food that we can, or we've reached a limit on how much we're willing to produce. As you can see in this graph, basically, the world population as we know continues to increase. Most people look at the top line here of world agriculture production and say to themselves, "Well, it looks like we're actually keeping ahead "of the pace of human population growth." But the fact is, that most of that increase in production is actually happening over in Asia, where all the other continents have basically gone flat. So how long can Asia continue to produce more and more agricultural products to feed the growing population? I think most experts would say that we're coming very close to the limit that we can actually produce. So how are we going to feed the world? 

And as we feed the world, what are we willing to sacrifice? Are we willing to pollute the environment even more? You know, adding fertilizers? Adding different types of biocides to these crops just so we can produce more and more? Are we willing to damage habitats and wildlife? Because we've got to clear more and more land in order to put these crops and plant them. And of course, as you look at these animals, what they're doing with a lot of animals is, is that they're stocking them at higher densities, crowding them together. This often results in the spread, a rapid spread of diseases, so they're adding more and more antibiotics, pesticides, herbicides, you know, to these crops to keep them healthy. But in the end, we're the ones consuming those crops. So how are we going to meet this worldwide demand for agricultural products without accepting these side effects being applied to what we eat? 

Well, all you have to think about is, is what could go wrong with this system? Can we stay on that same path? So if you've been paying any attention to the news over the past few months, and in fact, the CDC released an update this morning, there have been three deaths and 558 people sick from that vicious little creature known as the cucumber. And this morning, they actually said that, that number of sick has passed over 600 people already. Why is this happening? For the most part, it's salmonella poisoning that's occurring because these crops are being fertilized with different types of manures, and then these crops are getting these diseases on them, and then they're going off to market and we consume them. So what about food safety? You know, is there anybody out there who's keeping an eye on the food that we're actually eating? Most people would say, okay, and yet this harmless little cucumber has now made that many people sick, and is responsible for at least three deaths at this point. What about our resources? 

Water resources to start. Again, if you haven't been paying any attention to the news you might have missed this, but most of the Western U.S., specifically California, is in the midst of a massive drought. In fact, they refer to it as a four-year record drought. And they've instituted massive changes out there and fines if you use too much water. I found this photograph here just to be remarkable in that this is an agricultural field. There's a tractor. They really don't have that much ground that they have to care for with that tractor. That's the only area that's getting water at this moment. So we've got these droughts that are coming out. What's it going to do to the agricultural crops? 

Well, they're going to lower the amount they can harvest. They're going to increase the prices, and then we're going to have to come up with some other ways to grow these crops to feed the people. And then it comes back to the statement of sustainability. And that is, is how long are we willing to put up with all of this? Or maybe the other way to look at it is, how much longer can the Earth put up with it? And if you look at this as the world's population booms, will its resources be enough for us? Well, these are mostly the predictions that are coming out of reports, this one from National Geographic. If you look at that, it basically says the human population is increasing. We've said that already. And with that, our agricultural output has to increase to match it as well. 

But most experts say that we're not going to be able to sustain that type of output, because the resources are going down, and the pollution is going up. So what's going to happen over time is, is that the amount of food produced is suddenly going to crash. And likewise, you're going to get more and more starving people, so then your human population is going to start to crash as well. So we really have to take a global view of all this, and start examining it to say maybe traditional agriculture is not for the long term. Maybe we need to start supplementing it with alternatives that are out there. And the alternative obviously that I'm here to talk to you about tonight is the alternative of aquaponics. So what is aquaponics? I've actually heard people give me a variety of definitions to it, but I stick with this kind of more, a basic form, and that is, is that it's an integrated production system where you're raising both plant and fish crops, but it's in a completely soilless environment such that you get the benefits of the fish essentially feeding those crops, and those crops returning fresh water back to the fish. There are some others out there that, they still include certain types of soils in their aquaponics, or they enhance it with an addition of different types of nutrients or fertilizers. I'd argue that, that's not truly aquaponics because it's a hybrid version it. 

Aquaponics says you're doing it all in water. What do we know about aquaponics? Well, I'm going to show you today that, I think it's a sustainable production mechanism. And that is that you will be able to see this closed circuit of nutrients, water, and energy just revolving around growing both of these crops. It's also a natural production system. It's fish producing fertilizer that's feeding the plants, returning fresh water to the fish. There's nothing artificial being dumped into the system. It's highly efficient because it's what we refer to as a closed loop agriculture system, Which means that things don't enter and exit throughout the production. In this case, the water is just recycled round and round between the different organisms so that you get production. Therefore, it's a conservative use of water, space, time, and labor. 

Also, you can't apply any of those biocides, pesticides, herbicides, insecticides to it. Most of those are used on the plants, but almost every one of them is toxic to the fish. So if you did come across a disease outbreak, if you did have pests that are in there and you apply it, within hours, you'll actually watch all the fish die, and there shuts off the nutrients going to the plants. So you actually cannot apply these to the plants in the system, and some people will say, well what about the fish? Do you give them antibiotics? Do you treat them for disease? Turns out, almost all of the medicines available for fish are toxic for plants. So it really cuts you off there that you can't add all these different biocides to the system.

As I mentioned before, it produces both a protein crop in the form of fish, as well as a vegetable crop. So you're practically raising an entire meal. 

If we can sort of tie into that and try to figure out how we can grow a dessert, then we'd really have a nice, three-course meal for the night. And then the last part of which I want to talk about a little later in this presentation is the fact that aquaponics has the potential to produce crops 365 days of the year. It's done so, if the aquaponics is done in a controlled environment, such as a greenhouse. Around here, I think most of us would agree, that we'd be in favor of that. I've walked into an aquaponics greenhouse in the middle of January and seen about an eighth of an acre of corn growing. Now you might say to yourselves, well it's corn, we get a lot of that in the summer. Yeah, but think about what a fresh ear of corn tastes like in the middle of January. And you could have that right next door. So it does have some unique aspects that tends to attract a lot of people to it as well. Now that's not to say you can't do aquaponics without a greenhouse. 

I've seen people do it in their garage, their basement. Nowadays, they're trying to do it in warehouses. On top of buildings. And then if you, the further south you head, say the tropics, they do away with the greenhouse all together, because they don't have a need to. It's summer 12 months of the year.

Now one aspect of this, as I frequently get asked by people, well, aquaponics sounds new, sounds risky. It's not something I want to get into. I'm going to wait and see, you know those people who get into it, do they fall apart? The fact is, is that aquaponics is not new. There is evidence, documentation that over 1300 years ago, the Aztecs actually had what's referred to as chinampas, and you can see them right here in this diagram. 

They're actually floating rafts that they would push out into lakes. And in those rafts, they would have plants growing. And that was basically an early form of aquaponics. Water, where obviously there are fish in the lake that are producing nutrients, and plants on these floating rafts that would absorb the nutrients and grow. If you actually go back about 1500 years ago, the Chinese used an integrated system of rice paddy fields and fish. In fact, this photo here is actually a recent photo because they're still doing it. They haven't given up on it. They raise the fish right in the rice paddy field, and they harvest the rice, and the fish provide them with the nutrients. So aquaponics has been done for a very long period of time. It's just nowadays becoming, I guess you could say, technologically advanced. 

And that's why I add the term here "modern aquaponics." Modern aquaponics is where we start to add technology into it. Get computers involved in controlling the green house. Using different types of technology to make the fish more efficient at feeding and the plants growing faster. And I put up three different bullet points here. One of them I wanted to start off with was Leonard Pampel. He actually worked at the Milwaukee Public Museum in the 1960s and 1970s, and he actually got three patents when he was there. And each one of them was basically based upon, at the museum, looking at fish displays that they had there that the fish tanks would turn very green. So what he did is, behind the scenes, the place where most of us don't actually get to see at the museum, he started irrigating some of these plants that he had in the back or the back scenes of the museum, and the plants would essentially neutralize the water, they would absorb the nutrients and return clear water back to the fish display that people were looking at. I just happen to mention it because just three weeks ago, I got a phone call from a Mr. 

Leonard Pampel who lives in northern Wisconsin at the age of 96 and said, can I come see the University's new Aquaponics Innovation Center? And I said, how do I have to get you there? Do I have to come and pick you up? Can you make it? He says, my neighbor will drive me there. And there he is, and he came and looked at the Aquaponics Innovation Center, spent a half day with us when we were there. He loved what he saw. He loved to see where we're taking aquaponics. And he basically just said, stop by, call me anytime. I'd like to see this program grow. 

And he says, I have a lot more good ideas, he says, that I didn't share with the Public Museum even after I retired, he says, that I could share with you. And, you know, it's really unique that you get to meet one of the fore-founders of an actual new modern industry such as that. He's not alone. In the 1970s, there was a facility known as the New Alchemy Institute at North Carolina State. And they actually started publishing some of the more recent science articles on what fish and plants could be grown in aquaponics. And then the University of the Virgin Islands in the 1980s, a man by the name of Dr. Jim Rakocy, he did something that kind of took it a step further and that was that he started applying economics to aquaponics and said, you know, you can talk all you want about sustainable food production, but if it's not economical, people are not going to do it. So he started doing the math. And what he found is that essentially, if you treat aquaponics as a local food production system, it's quite affordable and can compete with anything else that you can buy in the supermarket. He said, it's when you add distance into it, that aquaponics suffers a little bit because now you're getting into transporting these products. 

And you really can't beat the current transportation system for most of the goods that we eat. So that kind of gives you a summary of the history of aquaponics. We're in the next generation now, the modern aquaponic world, and we have to start addressing some of the questions or challenges that are out there and I'll get to those a little later in the lecture.

Go back to the topic of sustainability and that is, in order for us to actually look at aquaponics as a sustainable food program, we have to know what its sustainability is. Again, what we can do is compare it to traditional agriculture. As I mentioned already, it's a natural system that results in the recycling of nutrients. So that helps us go a long way. But the other is, is if we compare it for some other production systems, we can see, how about beef? It's pretty odd. I put this presentation together a little while ago and yet this morning, on CNN, they had a topic that said, "Is beef the next SUV?" 

I don't know if anybody read that article, it was out there. It caught my eye more along the lines of, what are they talking about? Comparing a car to a cow. The whole article was about the fact that beef production worldwide is in a decline. And the reason is, is that it takes a lot of energy and resources to raise a cow. And in the end, it's not very sustainable. I just used one factor here, and that is water because that's what's used in aquaponics, and beef basically requires between 5,000 to 20,000 liters of water to raise one kilogram of beef. That's not really good. That's not an efficient use of water. But I wanted to be fair here as well, and that is, is if you look at extensive aquaculture, now aquaculture is fish farming, and extensive aquaculture is that fish farming which is done outdoors, say, in ponds. 

And what you can see is, is that it's not too much better when it comes to the water use. You still need between 2500 to over 375,000 liters of water to raise a kilogram of fish. So aquaculture in itself is not the most perfect sustainable system when it comes to food production, or I should say extensive aquaculture. But when you move things indoors into a circulating system such as aquaponics, suddenly you don't have nature playing a role in the process. You're controlling nature. And it turns out that in aquaponics, you need about 100 liters of water to raise a kilogram of fish, because that water is constantly recycled through the system. So at least from a water perspective, aquaponics appears to be on the higher end of sustainability, especially, you know, for water resources, but in terms of food production as well.

Now the other question, and this one's rather interesting, is that people say, well where does aquaponics fit in the grand scheme? You know, what is its roots? And I would argue that it's probably a subset of aquaculture. 

And I find this really interesting just because this past summer, I was on actually a federal review panel where they were trying to set up federal programs in aquaponics, and this was actually the first question they asked. Where does it fit? Does it fit into traditional agriculture? Does it fit into aquaculture? Does it fit into hydroponics? And they really didn't know where to put it. Again, I was on the panel, and I kind of argued with them and said, I think it's a sub-set of aquaculture. Aquaculture is the science and industry of raising fish. And you're doing that in aquaponics. The other is, is that you do it under controlled conditions. 

Now I already mentioned extensive to intensive ponds flow through recycled systems. Aquaponics, to me, seems to be a recycled system. It's recycling the water. And you get the benefits from aquaculture from it, and that is, is that raising fish is the most efficient production of protein. I have this little name over here of FCR, which stands for Food Conversion Ratio. It's a very simple equation. How many pounds of food do I have to feed my animal to get a pound of growth? And for most fish production and aquaculture, it ranges between one to two. In other words, you can feed fish one pound of food and get one pound of growth out of those fish. You can't do much better than that. 

But some fish are a little sloppy eaters, and it may raise up to two. If you do compare that with things, the closest is chickens where it's about 2.5 pounds of food to a pound of growth. Then come pigs at about 30 to one. And then once again, our beef comes along with the cows, and they're like 100 to one. So fish are a very efficient user of the food we're giving them. They turn it into body growth, and that's actually the protein that you eat. And again, it's a conservative use of resources, it's sustainable and consistent, and aquaculture worldwide is on a rapid incline so that essentially, it's becoming a very profitable business for a lot of people. So it seems that it fits that model. Now if that's true, then we have to look at a couple of questions. And that is, again, I go around and I ask people and I say, do you eat seafood? 

And they say, sure I eat seafood. And I say, well, where does your seafood come from? And where do you think the general answer is that people give you? Supermarket, restaurant, and then I say, well, where does it come from before that? And almost everybody will say, it comes from the wild. It comes from nature. Well, the fact is, is less and less is coming from nature every year. If you look at this graph that's up here and it shows you the years across the top, it shows you our stocks of wild fish in the world. Oceans, great Lakes and what's happening to them. And the fact is, is that all of our fish that are out there in the wild are already fully exploited. 

We're catching as much of them as they are available to us. In fact, many of them are over-exploited and quite a number of them, 32% of our fish stocks, have completely collapsed. So even though people think their food comes from the wild, more and more, or I should say less and less of it is actually coming from the wild because there just aren't any other fish out there anymore. So if that's the case, then where are the fish, the seafood that we eat, where is it going to come from? Well, I can tell you where it's going to come from, it's going to come from fish farms. Or farms such as aquaponics growers. Now here's some staggering statistics about that seafood that you're consuming. And that is, did you know that fish and fish products or seafood contribute to the largest food commodity that are traded internationally. That's more than chickens, cows, pigs, fruits, and vegetables. The U.S., though, imports 90% of its seafood. 

So now you know. It's not generally coming from the wild anymore, but this other thing is, is that it's not coming from the United States either. Most of it's coming from foreign countries. But in those foreign countries, about half of it is farm-raised seafood. So next time you go to the supermarket and you look at the display case, if they don't have signs that say "Product of" and list a country, ask the grocer. And if they have that information, which they actually do have, they may just not be sharing it with you, but if they have that information, then they'll tell you, well, that's from this country, and this country. Then say to them, well is it farm raised or wild? And then you'll know if you have a really good grocer because they should know the answer to that question. And then they can tell you, and I think what you'll find is, is 50% of what's in that display case is coming from a farm. Unfortunately, it's a foreign farm, not a U.S. farm. 

What impact does this have on our economy? As I said, it's the single largest food commodity that's traded. This graph over here basically shows you, the blue arrows are the imports of seafood, whereas the green ones are what we export. And the disappointing thing are the light blue arrows down here which you can see in the negative, which means that we import more than we export. And you might say, well what does that add up to economically? It adds up to about $10.4 billion dollars a year in a seafood deficit. So it's costing us a lot of money to bring in that seafood. And the part that I usually put up here, which, if the financial aspect doesn't kind of get you confused or upset, this other one usually gets me pretty upset, and that is, is all that foreign import of seafood comes into this country, but the FDA, the Food and Drug Administration, can only monitor as much as they have resources and labor that can monitor it, and they're publicly open about it, that they can only inspect about one to two percent of that imported seafood. So now you know that your seafood is coming probably from a foreign country. It's going to be farm raised, as well as wild. 

And that when it reaches this country, only about one to two percent of it is inspected. The rest of it, you're basically eating and hoping that for the best, that there aren't any contaminants in it, any types of pharmaceuticals, any types of diseases, because we just don't have the capacity to inspect all that seafood. So what's the simple answer to that? It really is quite simple, and that is, go to your grocery store or when you get your seafood, buy U.S.-raised seafood. Therefore, you know where it's coming from. Whether it's farm raised or wild is up to you to decide, but then if you look at it and say, well farm raised, I know the path from where it came out as an egg and grew up to my food, you know that, that food is heavily inspected because the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the FDA looks at all of our food and inspects it closely, and you know that, that's the food then that's landing on your plate. So it's a little promo there for U.S. farm-raised seafood actually. It's the safest seafood that's actually out there. Now the other aspect I just mentioned to you when I said, well it's about even now that the seafood you eat, half of it is coming from farms, and half of it's coming from the wild. Well the fact is, these are the projections, and what you can is, is now that we're in 2015, more and more of that seafood, so the lighter colors up here, is farm-raised seafood. 

The darker colors are the wild catch. So in other words, farm-raised seafood has actually surpassed the amount that's caught in the wild, and that number, they only expect to just keep increasing. But that's kind of an easy prediction. You'll notice this has kind of fallen flat. I showed you the graph that said nearly all the wild fish that are out there are fully exploited. So where are they going to get more of them? They can't, the ocean's just not producing it. So as the demand goes up, all of that demand has to be met from farm-raised fish.

All right? Otherwise, there's predictions out there, and that is, well what about the popularity of seafood? 

Will it grow? Will more people want seafood? And the fact is, is that about 45% of people in 2009 were eating farm-raised fish. By 2030, they expect that to equal up to 62%. More and more people are looking at seafood saying, you know, when I read about the health benefits, there's a lot out there that I like to hear. It's really low in polyunsaturated fatty acids. It's really good for your heart health. It's really good for your mental health. So seafood overall, from a nutritional perspective, is a well-received, well-respected type of protein that's out there. And more and more people, as they understand that, are increasing their intake of seafood. 

Now you might look at that and say, well, that's a pretty dramatic increase. And it is. The sad part is, is that not much of that increase comes from the United States. We've been eating about the same amount of seafood over the past decade as we are right now. So the rest of the world is increasing their uptake of seafood. Here in the U.S., we generally look at it and say, I eat my seafood once a week, if you're good. Once a month, if you can afford it. And we don't eat as much as what the world is. The world views seafood as almost like their fast food, where we kind of look at it as more of a luxury meal that we go out to a restaurant to actually have.

Now if you remember when I started on this path, I said that the question that's being asked is where does aquaponics fit? 

And I argued that it fits into aquaculture. Some people said, no, it's really a subset of hydroponics because isn't it really just feeding plants raw nutrients to get them to grow? Well, partially. But aquaponics does it in a little more natural way than what hydroponics does? When you look at hydroponics, and here's just a schematic of it, you basically have plants growing in long trays. And yes, their roots down here are floating in water, but that water is supplemented with basically inorganic minerals and nutrients. So in other words, they have to add up a considerable amount of macro and micro nutrients that are obtained through industrial or mining resources. And then they mix them up into a slurry, and they spread them out in the water that the plants are growing in, so that they can absorb these nutrients. The problem with that is, is industrial production of nutrients is a very energy inefficient and polluting way of producing nutrients. And the other is, is mining is just basically strip mining these nutrients from all across the globe. 

And I'll talk a little bit about that later on as well. A lot of those nutrients are not strip mined in the United States, they're done in foreign countries. And those countries then ship those into the U.S. Well, they're strip mining them and they're running out of things such as potassium, such as sulphur, and therefore, they control the market where they raise the prices for these nutrients, and we just have to accept it, so we can bring them in as fertilizers. There's a big issue there that's kind of a political issue, too, because if there's a country that dominates, say, potassium mining, and we have to buy from them, well, they can make demands upon our country at that point. Tell us that they want us, therefore, to export to them really inexpensive U.S. goods so that they will send the potassium to us. So there's kind of a political play there as well when it comes to mining resources and who controls the dollar. The other aspect is, is that it's a lot of nutrients that they put into hydroponics. In fact, they put in excess, because they don't ever want the plants wanting more. And then the last is, is that it's using up finite resources. These are exterior resources being brought in, flooded to these plants and then essentially remixed the next day and done all over again. 

So it's not a recycling of natural resources. It's really a one-way flow pattern when it comes to hydroponics. And again, it's one of the reasons why yes, aquaponics kind of merges aquaculture and hydroponics together, but I think it leans a lot heavier on the aquaculture side than it does on its relationship to hydroponics. Now if we look at a typical aquaponics system, it is just that. It's integrated, or a hybrid system that contains on one side your fish production and on the other side, your plant production. So an aquaponics system is really quite simple, and that is, is that you have the fish tanks here. The fish spend their entire life in those tanks. This is where you feed them. This is where you watch them grow. This is where you'll harvest them from. 

What they are contributing to the system is that they are providing nutrients. In a crude form, you could say it's fish manure, but it's raw nutrients they're eliminating from their bodies into the water. Some of those nutrients plants can use right away, but most of them they can't. So you have this middle section right here where you can see two terms: one is called a clarifier, and one is called a mineralization tank. I'll show you another slide in a few minutes, but what's taking place here is that you have beneficial bacteria growing in these other tanks, in these filter tanks. And what the bacteria do, is they convert the nutrients that the fish are releasing into an immediately usable form for the plants. Most people don't realize, fish, 50% of their waste is actually given off as ammonia. Well, ammonia would be generally toxic to most plants if you expose them to it. But these bacteria take the ammonia, and they convert it into nitrite and then nitrate. So by the time the water reaches over here, where the plants are, it's now in the form of nitrate that the plants readily take up. 

Another aspect to it, which is the mineralization tank, is that fish just don't release as waste potassium, sulphur, magnesium and calcium. They release fish manure. But it has all of that in it. So once again, there's a whole other group of beneficial bacteria that decompose that solid waste. And during decomposition, they literally do release the calcium, the magnesium, the sulphates, the phosphates into the water that then travels over to where the plants can absorb those nutrients. So the little known aspect about aquaponics that people don't realize is, yes, you're growing fish, yes you're growing plants, but you're also a bacterial farmer, because you need those beneficial bacteria to complete this conversion for you. And they're, like I said, the unsung heroes of aquaponics. Once that conversion is done, the water then goes into your plant grow area, which we'll talk about a little bit more, depending on what plants you're raising. They absorb most of those nutrients and then that water basically heads its way back and goes back to the fish tanks, where the fish get cleaner water back to them, and they renew this cycle over and over again. So talk about the fish just a little bit. 

We'll talk at the end, we'll have questions. I'll talk about the fish a little bit here, and that is when you ask about aquaponics, what I can tell you is, is currently the king of aquaponics is tilapia. People raise them for a variety of reasons, which we'll just cover a couple of them here. But one of the reasons I see, as a fish biologist, that people like tilapia, is that they are a very forgiving fish. In other words, you can forget to turn that pump on for a day, or you can go on vacation for the weekend and you'll come back and you'll look in the tank, and they'll have their little fins up in the air like this saying, we're okay. 
(laughs)
 I think that's probably the main attraction for people to use tilapia. We can make mistakes while we're trying to grow them, and they'll still be there. I put together just a little chart over here to show you why. The reason for that is, is that tilapia have very wide tolerance ranges. 

In other words, they can stand different conditions over a wide span. Starting off with the first one. They'll grow just fine between the temperatures of 64 to 90 degrees. Over 26 degrees, and they'll handle it just fine. All right? You compare that with any other fish that we have around here, say the native Wisconsin fish, and they can withstand something more in the range of about five degree change, and then they would just die. So it's nice to have a fish that'll take it easy on you if the temperature changes. The same goes for oxygen, pH, ammonia, which I spoke about already. Nitrites, carbon dioxide. This is a fish that has an amazingly wide tolerance range for almost all conditions. 

And again, personally, I feel that that's one of the driving forces as to why people like to raise tilapia in aquaponics. They're afraid to make mistakes, and this is a fish that basically will say to you, it'll be all right. We'll get through this together. 
(laughs)
 Right? They also have another feature about them and that is, is that if you're raising them in the range, a temperature range they like, you get remarkable growth rates out of them. In others words, you can take a one-inch tilapia and you can raise it to about a pound and a half to two pound tilapia in about six months. That's a rapid turnaround for a fish. But that helps in aquaponics because it means that you get a product out of your system every six months. And a lot of people, whether they're feeding themselves or their families, or whether they are trying to sell them to make this into a business, it's good that you get two crops a year out of your protein source in the system. 

Now how does that differ? Well, I'll talk about this facility in a few minutes. As Chris Cirmo mentioned, the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point opened the Aquaponics Innovation Center this past April. It was a really nice event that kind of blew me away, especially because we had three days where we opened the doors and said, come on in and see what it's all about. And in three days, we had 700 people pass through the facility, who all wanted to know about aquaponics. So really, it showed to me there's a tremendous interest out there, but it also is kind of unique. It catches people's eyes as they walk through it. And then they would get kind of an excitement to get into it. One of the projects we're trying to do is we're trying to diversify that fish crop. Tilapia's good, it's forgiving. 

It grows fast. But if you wonder when you see tilapia in the stores and you see it on a restaurant menu, almost all the tilapia that you're consuming is a foreign import. It comes from fish farms elsewhere. In fact, 90% of the tilapia consumed in the U.S. is foreign imports of tilapia. And again, we kind of covered that a little bit. Who knows where's it's been, where it hung out last night, and who it was drinking partner with during the course of that night. What's in that tilapia at this point? We don't know it comes from a foreign country, and it probably has not been inspected by the FDA. So one of the things that the Aquaponics Innovation Center is to do is to diversify its fish crop. And the angle we took from it is, well, why are we not raising in these aquaponics systems Wisconsin fish? 

We've got quite a number of fish here that should grow well in captivity, so let's give it a try. And one of the fish that we started with here are Walleye. Walleye show up on a lot of menus around here, especially on the Friday night fish fry, but it has always had kind of a draw back, and that is, is that Walleye have always been farmed in ponds. And when you raise a fish in a pond, you suffer through this, what do you want to call it, four to six month period known as winter? 
(chuckles)
 It really slows its growth down. So it generally takes a walleye farmer about one to two years to grow a walleye from a small size to even a one pound fish. So what we have done is, is we've moved them indoors into the aquaponics system. Now they're in a green house where they're growing 365 days out of the year. And if you look at the blue and the purple line, this shows you the growth that we're getting between April, over a course of a year essentially, and we've been able to get a one and a half to one and three quarter-pound walleye to grow in a shorter period of about 10 to 12 months. 

Now fish farmers, aquaculture growers, they like that. That's at least one product a year. But then we're taking it a step further, and we took these walleye and we basically mated them with their cousin, the sauger, and created what we call hybrid walleyes. Now somebody actually asked me the other day and they said, oh you're creating the infamous Frankenfish. These are dangerous if they ever get out there. In this case, no we're not. Because you can go fish in the Mississippi River and you can catch a hybrid walleye. Sauger and walleye actually naturally reproduce with one another. So these fish exist in the wild. We haven't created really anything new. 

We're just creating them in captivity. And then we added on here the green and the orange lines that are here. And what we've been able to do is these hybrid fish, these hybrid walleye, show advanced growth. So we've been able to get them to a one and a half to two pound walleye in nine months. And this is all in an aquaponics system. So we basically label these as our phase one, phase two grow out periods. They start out this small, and over here, they're a two-pound fish, which is more than enough for a nice platter on a Friday night fish fry. Most of that brought about simply by moving the whole process indoors into a green house. So we do think that there's potential for introducing more and more types of local fish into the aquaponics production system, and getting products out in as little as nine months, who knows, maybe if we try something else, we could even lower that and get closer to that six-month threshold with tilapia. So the potential is there, and we have some early success that's showing. 

And then on the other side of it, you've got to look at plants. Well, the nice thing about aquaponics is, is that you can raise pretty much any plant that you want to. I just put them into four major categories here, which is leafy greens, your lettuces, your micro-greens, which a lot of restaurants like. Then your rooting crops; then of course your fruiting crops. You can raise any one of them and all of them in any type of aquaponics system. The only thing you have to keep in mind is your expectations. What I can tell is, is that your leafy greens like lettuce, you can grow from a seed to a nice full head of lettuce in six weeks. So that basically gives you a rapid turnaround for your crops in that system. The microgreens, even shorter. You need about two, two and a half weeks, and you can get microgreens produced. 

No problem there. It's your root crops and your fruit crops that basically you've got to give them a little more time. Root crops, whether they're radishes, or onions can be grown in it, but then you're talking about something more along the lines of about 10 to 12 weeks that it's going to take them. And of course, fruiting crops, that's where you've got to let the plant mature first and flower, and then you've got to let the flower turn into the fruit. So there you're looking at something that could be as short as three months, but more or less is usually on the same cycle as the tilapia and that you'll get your crops every six months. So they're all, possible in aquaponics, it's just you have to set your expectations where you expect to make those harvests based on the plants that you're growing. Now I wanted to bring it back to this, and that is, is so you can grow any plant that you want. True, but the way or the system of the aquaponics that you raise them in has to be a little different. There are three plant production systems in aquaponics. The first one is known as the nutrient film technique. 

If you look at the picture over here, it should look a little familiar from a previous slide. That is what they raise hydroponic crops in. The concept is, is that you just have a gutter, and in that gutter basically is pumped in a little bit of water. If you pop the top off of the gutter, there's about a quarter to an eighth of an inch of water streaming down the middle of that gutter. The plants' roots basically kind of sway or flow into it to pick up the nutrients. Why am I talking about nutrient film technique? Because it still exists in aquaponics because it's the best way to get hydroponic growers to convert over to aquaponics growers. They already have the infrastructure, they just have to add the fish into it and stop adding in all those inorganic nutrients into it instead. So it has a constant flow of water. It has a really small amount of water that has to flow through the system, since it's only about a quarter to an eighth of an inch thick. 

But the disadvantages to it, is that you need a biofilter. Because that water coming through it is so thin, not only do the plant roots grow in it, but a lot of algae tends to grow in it as well. And you've got to filter out that algae, or they'll use up all the nutrients right away, and then your plants will basically just start to die off. So you have to have some biofilter. The other is, is that you get lower yields from the other systems that I'll show you because the plants are nice and evenly spaced, but you're limited by the length of these gutters. The other is, is if you actually wanted to do aquaponics with nutrient film technique, you'd have to buy the hydroponic components or infrastructure, and they tend to be very pricey. So you would have a higher startup cost there. And overall, the system is of a low stability. And the reason for that is, is that it has the least amount of water in it compared to the other systems I'll show you because they only have that quarter inch of water flowing by the plants. So if you were to add a little bit of this or a little bit of that and then too much of a third component, there's too much of it flowing through everything. 

It doesn't get dilute within the system. The other is, is that these plants, because they're at a low density and you have such little water, the nutrient uptake is relatively low, which means nutrient-rich water is returning back to your fish, and they can only withstand that for a while before they start to suffer due to polluted water conditions. So like I said, nutrient film technique, generally a holdover from hydroponics. But some people like it because it's clean, it's compact, it fits into a nice space, and doesn't require really that much water.

Another type is referred to as the media grow beds. And media grow beds, as you can see here, are essentially large channels in which some type of media or substrate is put into the bottom of it. There's really only one requirement for that substrate, and that is, is that it must not dissolve in water. Because the only thing the substrate is doing, is it's providing a surface for the roots of the plants to grab on to. So where we see media-based systems, and you can see it in this picture here, is where you get tall plants. Tall plants need strong root structures, and they hold on to the substrate and the media that's down there. 

So if you start talking about growing things, like I said, corn, tomatoes, cucumbers, you're going to want a media-based system because these plants need to dig in to grow up. As I put up here, the advantages is, the media that's in here acts as the biofilter. As the water flows through pipes in the system, that basically rains water out, it's carrying some of those waste products, fish manure in them, and they'll land in that media, and the media will cling on to them, and then have decomposition take place right in the media bed. So the solids are actually found in the media, but the other thing you find is that if you dig in there, and bring it up, you'll not only come up with a handful of media, but you'll come up with a handful of fish manure. And what's there as well are the bacteria breaking it down. So instead of having a mineralization tank, you actually have bacteria growing down the bottom of these media-based beds. That helps compact the space a little bit. The disadvantages is, is that you need a lot of water flowing through the system. You also have difficulties when it comes to maintenance and cleaning. As I just said, dig your hand down into that media, and you'll come up with fish manure and bacteria. 

A lot of people don't like the odor of that. They don't like the sight of that. Well, if you want to clean it out, you pretty much have to remove your plants, hose down the media, wash it out, re-plant your plants and start all over again. So there's a high maintenance cost when it comes to these media-based systems. And obviously here, as you get those solids from the fish manure building up in here, you can get clumps of these manure, which then basically channels the water through the system. And if your plants are not growing anywhere near the channel, they start to droop because they're not getting all the water that they need. On the flip side of it, is that the nutrient uptake by the plants is very high. They're sitting right there amongst the bacteria having the conversion of the nutrients done for them, and they immediately take up the nutrients. So there's a rapid uptake of nutrients in these systems, and you get fairly rapid growth of all these different types of plants that you're trying to grow. And then that brings us to the third type, which is known as the deep water culture, or also known as the raft system. 

As more of a fish biologist than a plant grower, I always laugh when I see deep water culture, because these are basically what they refer to as large ponds or pools that you're going to put the plants in. They're a foot deep. Maybe for a botanist, that's a deep water culture. For a fish biologist, I'm thinking thirty, forty-feet deep. 
(laughs)
 So essentially, they're a foot deep. Where they get their raft name from is that you have Styrofoam rafts that literally float on top of that water, and your plants are planted in holes that poke through the styrofoam. The roots dangle down into this deep pool full of nutrients, and the plants grow on the top side of that. It's probably the most common system in aquaponics for raising the plants because you can build these rafts of any different sizes. It's easy to float foam right on top of the water. 

And the other thing, as you can see in the picture, it's primarily used for growing the leafy greens. The ones that have a six-week turnaround from seed to harvest. You can probably also see the drawback. I mean, why do they not use these for growing tomato plants? Well, the roots would grow down into the deep water, the plant would grow up on the top, as soon as the plant's top growth is bigger than the roots, it would flip over. Because it's just floating as a raft. So they use shorter growing plants such as the microgreens and the leafy greens. There's a constant flow of water going through it. You don't have to have an enormous amount of water. It basically sits in these pools until the water gets replenished by a pump. 

And it's easy to maintain and clean because you literally just lift up the rafts, scrub them down. If the deep water looks dirty, you flush it out. You fill it with more water and you seal it back up again and it's all ready to grow. And you can do that in an hour or so. You may need a biofilter. Another nice thing about it is the bacteria, those beneficial bacteria really like to grow in these deep water cultures. But sometimes, it's not enough. You need more of the bacteria. So you may actually have to have one of those mineralization tanks. There is a large volume of water going through it. 

You can also aerate the roots, so that you get healthy root growth, which usually leads to healthy leafy growth, and the nutrient uptake by the plants is really, really high in these systems. So again, they are the most common. They're the most talked about and studied not only because they seem to be the most efficient and productive, but on the flip side, you have to look at it and say, I can't grow all the different crops I want. I can only grow those that will float on top of these rafts and not turn the thing over and drown out all your plants. Now I didn't forget about them, and I wanted to come back and that is, whether you call them beneficial bacteria or you call them aquaponic biofilm, you have to remember that if you're an aquaponic producer, you're growing the fish and you're growing the plants, which you can see, but you're also cultivating bacteria. Before you look at that and say, wow, those bacteria they look fascinating. No, that's just plastic. The brown, goopy stuff? That's the bacteria.

All the plastic does is, is that if you didn't give the bacteria something to hold on to, it would be going on a water park ride all throughout your aquaponics system and suffering pretty bad. 

You want them to sit still and you want them to do the conversions that you want, so you just give them things like plastic to hold on to. And then they'll stay in your filtration systems or your filtration tanks. What are they? Well, there's their official name in case you wanted to memorize it for the quiz after the presentation. Nitrifying autotrophic bacteria consortium. Sounds intimidating, actually. 
(laughs)
 It's made up of two groups: the nitroso-bacteria and the nitro-bacteria. What do they do? Well, as I mentioned before, fish give off a lot of their waste in the form of ammonia. 

What do we know about ammonia? It's highly toxic to fish, and it's very toxic to plants. That would shut down your aquaponics system in an instant. So instead, your nitroso-bacteria group essentially converts it to nitrite, an important step because fish are a lot more tolerant to nitrite, and some plants don't mind taking up nitrite and they do further conversion in their roots to nitrate. But luckily, we have the nitro-bacteria here as well, and they complete the conversion of nitrite to nitrate. What's beneficial about that? That's the form of nitrogen that plants will readily uptake and automatically put it into actual growth. And the other thing is, is fish are very tolerant of high nitrate levels. So if they do build up in your system because the plants aren't taking the nitrates up fast enough, it doesn't matter. It's just like water over the fish's back. 

It'll just pass right by them in the water. It's not toxic to them, except at extremely high levels, which are usually never achieved. So always keep that in mind. If you ever visit an aquaponics facility, most of the growers will show off their fish, they'll show you the little ones, they'll show you the big ones and they'll say, look at the growth we're getting. Then they'll show you the plants and they'll say, do you want to try some and taste it? Now you know the secret, walk up to them and say, yeah, that's all well and good, but show me the real stars of the system. Show me the bacteria. They'll probably either look at you very funny or kick you out. 
(laughs)
 But they'll immediately know, you know a lot about aquaponics at that point, because that's really the star of the system. 

Without their conversion, the whole system of fish and plants doesn't work.

And that basically brings full circle, this aquaponics cycle. It's a symbiotic relationship, as you now know, between fish, microorganisms and plants. Each one of them feeding off of the next one and replenishing the water in the system. The other aspect about it, and I've heard so many talks by different aquaponics scientists, is they said, aquaculture has some drawbacks. Especially if you talk about recycling aquaculture. Well, why is that? We just covered it. Fish produce ammonia, which is toxic to them. So aquaculture spends an enormous amount of time either mechanically or chemically trying to get ammonia out of the system. 

And it's a tough thing to do. On the hydroponics side, the negative part is, is you're totally dependent upon industrialized or mined minerals and nutrients to put into your system. If the shipment comes late, or if the price goes up, it impacts your hydroponic system. But if you take the best of those worlds, the fish and the plants, put them together with the bacteria, all of a sudden, everything seems to hit this symbiosis or equilibrium. The fish are producing the minerals, the minerals are converted by the bacteria, the plants absorb the minerals, and the water goes right back to the fish. And most aquaculturists, most aquaponic growers will look at you and you'll say, well how is that possible? And they said, I don't know, it just happens. It's amazing how the three of these organisms, or group of organisms, relate to one another and help each other out. I put together a little slide here, and these are some of the answers I've heard these experts say. They've said, why does it work? 

As a scientist, you can't just sit there and say, wow that sounds great, it's a symbiotic relationship, let's all watch them sing Kumbaya, and everybody will grow nicely. But scientists say, but why does it work. Well, one of the things is, is that you get this optimal ratio between the fish and the plants. It's based upon that nutrient uptake. I put this little table together over here because as a scientist, I want to know the answers to why it works. What I did was, is I took a label off of a bag of fish food. And those are the ingredients that they listed on that label. And then I picked out my book on plant growth and horticulture, and I put down a list of all the minerals and nutrients that a plant needs to grow. Just take a look at that list. All the same, until you get down to this level right here. 

Now one of them I highlighted on the bottom, that is plants need nitrogen while fish waste contains protein, protein is made up of nitrogen, so the plants are getting the nitrogen. So it's really this little group here. The plants are not getting all the boron, molybdenum and sulphur that they could possibly want that you would have to monitor. Well, the nice thing is, is those three have asterisks because they're micro-nutrients for plants. In other words, they need trace quantities. And it actually turns out that there may be a chance that the water you're putting into the system, say, from a well, already contains trace quantities of these micro-nutrients. So there have been very little studies or reports that have come out that have said aquaponics didn't work because my boron or molybdenum was too low. Most people find it actually finds its way into the system. There have been a couple that have said you may have to supplement just little trace quantities of sulphur into the system, but it really depends upon what fish you're growing since the source is the fish food for these nutrients. This is tilapia food, there are some fish foods that have a little bit of sulphur in them so they may be getting it anyhow. 

And if you're wondering, the cobalt, selenium and iodine, those are trace elements in fish food anyhow, so they're not accumulating within the system. The plants aren't using them, and they probably, through evaporation, through cleaning of the system, you'll probably flush them out anyhow. So that's one aspect of it. Again, what they find is, is that for aquaponics to work efficiently, you have to feed about 60 to 100 grams of fish food per day to a square meter of plants that you're growing within the system. Turns out that if you compare that to aquaculture, that's actually a really low feeding rate. So technically, you can underfeed your fish in an aquaponics system and still get abundant plant growth. Now I'm not saying you should do that because you probably also want to harvest your fish after a while. So you're probably feeding the fish all they need, and the plants are actually getting an abundance of nutrients that they need. But that right balance as I mentioned is really based upon a couple of things. The types of fish that you're growing, the plant growth platform, whether it was the nutrient film, the media-based or the raft, as well as the type of plant. 

Some plants such as your flowering plants won't actually set fruit unless they have higher or elevated levels of nitrate in the system. So you may actually have to increase your fish feeding to get that spike in nitrate and then your flowering plants will suddenly start to grow their fruits on them. And then it also depends on your chemical composition of the water. Again, where are you getting your water source from? Does it have boron, molybdenum or suplhur already in it, So it's always good to get a water chemistry test done of your well water to figure out what all the compounds are that are inside of it. And again, the study we're doing now with those walleye, to me, is going to be an intriguing study. Because tilapia are more kind of like the herbivores, but walleye are obviously carnivores. Therefore, what's in their diet or in their fish food is dramatically different between the two of them. I wish I could stand here and show you, now here's the results, but our walleye are now four months old. And I told you they have to grow 10 to 12 months, and we've been harvesting plants out of the system at actually the same rate as the tilapia. 

So it appears the plants are getting what they need, but we're kind of looking to see if their nutrient composition is a little different. You'll just have stay tuned for that, we still got at least another six months before we've got the results from that to share with you. And then the other part I mentioned is, is that it allows for year-round farming. And that shouldn't be ignored. If you're living down, say, in Florida, they already do year-round agricultural production down there. But as I said, how nice would it be to walk into a greenhouse in the middle of January or February in Wisconsin and hand-pick your fresh, well, I shy away from picking cucumbers, but your hand-picked tomatoes or your corn or your peppers that are growing right there in the middle of February in this tropical environment in the middle of Wisconsin? So it has a lot of potential there to get people back to eating their fresh fruits and vegetables in the middle of winter, that were grown right next door. And again, I don't want to make it sound like aquaponics is the savior of all. Aquaponics is a compromise. Again, putting the major players up there. 

Consider their tolerances. As I mentioned, the fish are between 60 to 80 degrees. There's also pH, they like seven to eight. If we look at plants, most plants like 60 to 80. Hey, there's a good match-up right there. On the other hand, plants actually prefer a pH that's a little acidic, fish don't. Uh oh, they're not directly on par with one another. Well, don't forget these guys, the beneficial bacteria, you're farming them as well. And what you see is, is there were two different groups of bacteria, one doing the ammonia to nitrite, another doing the nitrite to nitrate. Well, the nitrous ammonus is pretty good, 68 to 86 and 7.8 to eight. 

That matches up well with the fish. But those nitrobacter converting the nitrite to nitrate, they're heat lovers. They really want that system running at a much higher temperature. And as you can see, their pH is pretty neutral. So if you really look at all three of those crops you're raising, you have to have to pick something to set your aquaponics system at. I mean, what temperature do you want it at? What pH do you want the water at? Turns out that what most aquaponics operates at is a compromise. It's about 70 to 80 degrees Fahrenheit and about a pH of seven or neutral. What does it mean? 

Well, it means you can do aquaponics. You can grow fish, plants and bacteria. But you're probably not going to grow them at the fastest rate possible. You have to set your expectations right where they need to be, which is, I'll get great growth, I won't get super great growth out of my system, because everything is being compromised a little bit. And that's something to keep in mind. As I said, it's not the answer to all the problems, but it is one of the potential solutions.

Another question, and I actually was asked this, this morning on the radio, and that is somebody said to me, well, but who's doing aquaponics? Is this just for that person who wants something set up in their garage? Or is this an industrial complex? Well, my answer is, is that aquaponics is scalable. 

I suggest anybody getting into it, gets into it on a small scale. Set up your own home or hobby system, in your backyard or in your garage, and have some fun with it. Try the fish and the plants and try to match up what you'd like to grow and what is a good compromise. Most people get into it that way. And what they find is, is they're suddenly raising a lot more vegetables than they can eat. So that takes it to the next one and they say, well, if I'm doing that, I might as well start selling some of it. So they go to the Farmer's Market, a nice local market, where they can sell all their crops. The next thing you know, their system has outgrown their little shed and it's sticking now into their lawn. And now they're into a slightly larger size system. They also look at that and say, well, a lot of people stop by and want to see what it is I'm doing. 

So now we get into the social and community aquaponics. One of the more famous ones is right here, it's Growing Power in Milwaukee. They get people in their own neighborhoods to grow their own food, to get a job at the location, and see that their food is actually coming from just down the block. Well, now you got all the neighbors involved, and they're all interested and you're starting to build up a staff. So now you got a commercial food production at that point and you start getting all these fish tanks set up and you start setting up hundreds of feet of plant production. And what you find is, is that all these people that were interested, the Farmer's Market you started selling it at, suddenly, people are knocking down your door. They're ringing the doorbell, they're sending the email saying, but I want more. So you've increased the size of your production. But as I said before, it's scalable. Keep in mind, it was one fish tank there, and now there's five fish tanks there. 

That's really all you're doing. You're adding in another fish tank. You're adding into another raft system. And then another fish tank, and another raft. So you can watch the system grow, as well as all the products that are coming out of it. As well as your business. So as most businesses, start small and then watch the system actually grow. There are places now which I've seen in which they've got 20 tanks. And they've got over an acre to two acres of these raft systems set up. So they're really growing in size. 

A lot of it depends, of course, do you have the consumers to buy all that? And then of course, the other ones here, and that is education. The last time I counted, which was the beginning of the summer, there were 63 high schools in Wisconsin that had aquaponics systems in the schools. And it keeps growing. I mean, we're helping a lot of them set them up, and it's like another one or two a week. Why is that? I'll go into a little more detail in a minute, but the students find it fascinating. And they're learning about biology. They're learning about the environment. So it's a great teaching tool as well. 

And then, of course, the other is the research, such as the Aquaponics Innovation Center, which I'll show you in a minute. But I just love this photo right here, and that is is we had a 4K class come to the Aquaponics Innovation Center, and the kids basically all, immediately, as soon they leaned in and they saw the fish swimming by, you could just see their faces and you're like, oh, they're hooked. They're going home tonight and whether it's fish sticks or whether they're going to have real fish, those kids are going to eat fish tonight, and hey, maybe we just had them eat their vegetables for the first time as well. They just get excited about it. Many of them want to come back with their parents and see it all over again. A lot of those kids in 4K go into elementary school, go to the high school, they have a system, and then we start to see them at the university afterwards. It's amazing how it just has this appeal to it, this fascinating appeal that you're watching living things grow, and you're growing them. And everybody just seems to look at that and say I could do that as well. I wanted to put this up here, because that is a big question. Who is doing aquaponics? 

Well, unfortunately, there has only been one survey done on aquaponics that I'm aware of over the past 20 years. It was published in 2015 this year and they basically sent out an email survey and said, tell us what is the size of your system? How long have you been in business? And what are you producing? And you can see this here, and that is, is that these are the years that these respondents said they started doing aquaponics. I find it remarkable. It really only started a count five years ago. Before that, very few people were doing it. And all of a sudden, growth of aquaponics and who's doing it started to skyrocket. But it also shows you most of the people doing it have only been doing it for five years or less. 

So if it's something you're considering, you're in good company. There's nobody out there that has vast years of experience unless you consider five years vast. The other they want to know is how large is your systems? And you can see there's a large range here. But if you look at the system volume, most of these on this end are the home or hobby systems. These are like the Farmer's Market. It's just some people now, the brave ones, venturing out into commercial aquaponics. So the industry is just starting to grow. But it had to gain its momentum to launch it to get these larger systems to start to show up as people make it more and more scalable or upscale it. The other part of the survey, I kind of take this, take it with a grain of salt, if you would, and that was, is remember what I said, it was an email survey. 

How many of those do you get a day? 
(laughs)
 So they even admitted, they sent out the survey across all email lists, and they received 800 replies in three months, and that's what they based the results on. Most certainly, it underestimates the size of the aquaponics industry or individuals in the U.S. because like most of us, we'd probably just delete it if the email came in. But I look at it and that is, they got 800 responses in three months using a very faulty system for collecting data. That's pretty remarkable to begin with. And you can see, they're scattered everywhere. And then they went global with it, and they basically asked a simple question, and that is, is do you do aquaponics or not? And they got responses from a large portion of the world. Again, it's a faulty study because who knows? 

In half of these countries, the email could have been blocked or just never got out to any of the people that were in it. But again, as you start to see these dots, and as the dots get larger, it starts to show you there's some momentum building here. More and more people are getting into aquaponics and are starting to use it. And I think you'd be surprised if you start looking around where they start popping up, even right here in Stevens Point.

Now, again, we come back to that question, well, in order for aquaponics to be a sustainable food production system, it's going to have to compete with traditional agriculture. To do that, it's going to have to meet some socio-economic challenges that are out there. It can meet a lot of them. We talked about this already. Mineral recycling. That is what aquaponics is about. 

The fish put the nutrients in, the bacteria convert it, the plants use it, and the cycle begins again. Consider traditional agriculture, consider hydroponics. It's a matter of mining or creating the minerals, dumping them in and then going back and doing it over and over again to get those crops to be produced. It's not a recycling system. We already talked about water. Water is going to become more and more the world's scarcest resource. This is a system here in which aquaponics only uses 10% of the water that traditional agriculture uses. Why? Because it's recycled. Traditional agriculture sprays it on a field. 

I once had a person say to me, yeah, but it finds its way into the well, and it's pumped back up again. But do you really know the rate at which it takes for water to get from a plant, back to the aquifer and back up? It's measured in years or decades. So it's a recycled system, but it's a really slow recycle system. What is the turnover in aquaponics? You get two complete cycles in one hour. So that's a lot faster than say, 10 to 15 years. Energy efficiency? Aquaponics is kind of leading the way again. You know, like I said, more and more people are doing it in green houses. 

They're using solar heat. They're using solar panels to produce the electricity that they need to run the systems. We discussed over-fishing. More and more of your fish is going to come from farms, which farm would you like it to come from? The one next door to you, where they have an aquaponics system, or the one over in China where it's being raised somehow, imported here and not inspected, and winding up on your plate. As I mentioned before, it's scalable, but you can put aquaponics everywhere. Some people I think sell it a little short and they say, well urban aquaponics is just the future, that's the only one that's going to matter. Urban aquaponics is tricky. Most cities are not zoned for agriculture. And therefore, you've got to go through a lot of permits and regulations. 

The other is, is where are you going to put it? If you have a vacant lot or the top of a building, that's probably a good location. But a lot of people are trying to shove them into warehouses or condemned buildings. There's potential there, but I haven't seen any of them succeed on a high level because now you've got to heat the building and now you have to provide the sunlight. And you do so through lighting. That all costs money, and now you've got to make sure you're still producing those crops at a profitable level. So I think when you look at more of the peri-urban or more of the rural areas, I think this is where you're going to see the greatest aquaponics growth right now. Now when I say rural, I don't mean 100 miles from here. I'm talking about just get outside the suburbs and plant it right there. You're still within 50 miles of your consumers. 

I think that's where there's a lot of potential. Or, in the suburbs themselves, where some areas are zoned both residential and agricultural and you can actually put these facilities. And then the other challenges is, is that as more people want to get into it, they have to learn about it. And as I've said before, what you have to know about is aquaculture, you have to know about hydroponics, and you know how they work together with aquaponics. And that can be a little challenging. I just saw a survey that surveyed the Midwestern U.S. and then said there are a total of three universities in the Midwestern U.S. teaching aquaculture. Keep in mind, Stevens Point is one of them. But that's it, three. How many universities are teaching aquaponics? Well, as of last year, one. 

Stevens Point was it. Now there's three that are out there that are teaching it. So there's a limited supply of courses out there and programs right now to get into to learn about it. You just happen to be sitting right next door to a university that's ahead of the curve there. And speaking ahead of the curve, I've got to put a little plug in for this as well, and that was I mentioned in April. UW-Stevens Point launched the Aquaponics Innovation Center. And Chris Cirmo mentioned it was paid for by a UW System economic development incentive grant for $700,000. It's built at the Nelson and Pade facility, which is in Montello, Wisconsin, one hour south of here, but it was actually a really great opportunity for the university. Our facility is this one here that you see with the blue tanks. Their demonstration system is on the other side. 

Nelson & Pade is one of the world leaders in aquaponics system design, engineering and system-building. So they use this as a showroom for their systems. Well, we wanted to use their systems as part of our Innovation Center, and I couldn't think of a better place to build our Innovation Center than next door to the manufacturer. Think about everything, something you have that breaks. Wouldn't you like to have lived next door to the manufacturer of it, so at least you can go over there and complain? So we're located right there, and this is open to the public so they can come in. And as you can see, what we have are six replicate commercial aquaponics systems. This allows us to do a lot of side-by-side comparisons of the different crops, fish, plants, different systems, different temperatures, anything we want. Because it's all located inside of a green house, we can set the environment and test its parameters. What we use the facility for? 

We use it a lot for teaching. A lot for student research. We have educational opportunities. We invite people in to come talk with us, share ideas. The nice thing about research centers is, is that we can try things, and we can fail. And that's results. Whereas a business does it and fails, they're out of business. So we can help the industry in that case. We can help commercialize the discoveries. Maybe you have a new idea. 

A twist on some idea. We can help you test it to see if it's worth then patenting or promoting it. As we put it, what we're there for is, is that we serve the economic development of a blue-green industry. And we're hoping to see it grow more and more throughout the state of Wisconsin. Well, what are the results from this? Well, as I said, we work with a lot of partners. We've got dozens of businesses, current, future businesses that want to try different species, try different systems. We're also, as I mentioned, one of the sources of education. I mentioned the aquaponics course that we teach here at the university. We've taught it for four years. 

The first year, we got 20 of the bravest, most courageous students who said, I'm going to try the U.S.'s first aquaponics course, and see where it goes. And we had bumps and bruises, but we all made it through it. That was the first year. This last year, we had 74 students take the course. They came from, I think it was 24 states and seven foreign countries. So they're basically coming here to Central Wisconsin to learn aquaponics. Like I said, research and innovation. There are two parts of the course that I absolutely love, and that is we make every student create their aquaponics business. They can't graduate until they actually put out there the blueprints for their aquaponics business. And then everybody sits around, they criticize and they critique them and they compliment them. 

And they say that's either a good idea or a go back to the drawing board. What I find amazing is, is we've taught the course for four years, and I know at least seven students who have gone on to launch their aquaponic business. When they send me a note saying, here it is, I launched it, it's the same name as the poster board they put up in front of the class. 
(laughs)
 So they're thinking. They're thinking really well. All of this, as I said, is part of a localvore movement. People want more and more to know where their food is coming from. And they want to know what has happened to it. And aquaponics is a way of achieving that. 

There's less fossil fuel needed to deliver aquaponics products because most of these aquaponics farms are located right next to their customers. Also, as I said, aquaponics uses less than 10% of the water as traditional agriculture does. Purchasing from your local farm keeps the dollars closer and invests into the local economy. We see economic boons there as well. And I said, its an innovative, sustainable production system. Innovative is the key there. People want to see these systems. Most aquaponics growers, once they get to, say, the Farmer's Market model, or move to more of the commercial, they not only produce the crops, but they have a side business which is tours. And they charge for those tours. And people come in there, $10 a person, to spend an hour wandering around, watching plants grow, and watching fish swim. 

(laughs)
 The basics, but they do it. In many cases, here's our Lieutenant Governor. She heard about the Aquaponic Innovation Center and said, "What is it?" Well, we invited her there to come and see it. She spent over three hours there wandering around looking at it, and she said, "I'm fascinated." I said to her, I hear that from everybody who comes through here. It's a fascinating process to actually see your food grow. Now the other thing they ask is, is well, what does the future look like. It's only going to be good if a commercial industry is launched. 

Well, I think we're at the forefront of that. And that is, is that it's a small but a rapidly growing industry. As I said, more and more people are getting into it. Why? These are kind of like the main reasons they tell us. Food security is number one. Where does my food come from? Number two, locally grown. That has a lot of weight to it nowadays when it comes to what food you eat. And the other is, is that they're running out of fresh water or running out of agricultural land to grow these crops in. 

What do we know? When we talk to people who run aquaponics businesses and we say, are you hiring? Almost every one of them says yes. And we say, well, who are you hiring? And I love this expression, and they said, we need college-trained students who have taken aquaponics courses and know the science behind aquaponics. Because they said right now, the industry is an industry driven by enthusiasm more than knowledge. And I see that a lot. People jump into it thinking, well, that sounded great, I'm going to do it, but they have no idea how many hours in day does a fish need light? Do plants need light 24 hours a day? Or is it less than that? 

They don't know the basics. So they're asking us, they're saying, we basically have employment opportunities, we need people to run these systems. We've built them, but we don't know how to run them. And therefore there are investors that are out there, and we have students now who are interested in taking on aquaponics as a career. They want to run those facilities. As I said, the need for the industry as well, is we need to explore other crops. Tilapia are good, I actually recommend to people, start with tilapia. When they smile at you, when there's no oxygen in the water, and they're flopping on a dry pan, they're a good fish to start with. But once you've mastered that, then start diversifying. See what else is out there. 

Because unfortunately, for the tilapia, your main competition is some farmer over in China. It's not somebody right in your neighborhood. Now I don't want to paint the rosiest picture and say we should all leave here right now and launch aquaponics businesses. There are tremendous challenges out there for any new or innovative agricultural industry. The number one item up there, which most people would agree with is, there is no long-term economic data for aquaponics. If you looked at that survey, most people got into it less than five years ago. So will there be a business in 10 years? I don't know the answer to that. Will you be making a profit in seven years? I don't know the answer to that. 

We need more of that economic data, but it's only going to come as more of these farms come online and we start to analyze it. All right? The other is, is that aquaponics does need or require a multi-disciplinary approach. Being at the university, I constantly here about STEM. STEM, STEM, Science, technology, engineering, and math. They're almost there. The true word is STEAM. They're missing it. It's science, technology, engineering, agriculture and math. Now you've developed a crop that people will pay for. 

I don't know what they're paying for in the technology, science and math areas, but now they're buying something that they can eat. And you need to apply it. Aquaponics needs fish and plant biology. It needs microbiology. It needs engineering, computer science, economics, financing, marketing. You need a background obviously in all of these things, or you need to hire people who do have those backgrounds. As I mentioned before, there's a gap of knowledge in aquaponics for that fish-plant coupling system. I had somebody at the start of this lecture say to me, I really want to grow salmon. And I said, great, it's a cold-water fish, known for the Arctic waters. What vegetables do they grow there. 

You've got to find a plant that grows at freezing temperatures. So you've got to match that coupling of the fish and the plants. Pick your fish, but pick your plants at the same time. They both need the same temperature. If you can't match them together, you've got to try again. And then as I said here, the nice thing is, is that it's a recycling system. So we're replenishing the water that's in there. We're cleaning out those waste and turning them into usable resources. And that has to be incorporated more and more into aquaponics. When I hear people say, well I do aquaponics, but it's a flow through. 

I question them and say, I'm not sure that's aquaponics. That means the water goes in one end, and come out the other and is discharged into your waste stream. I said, it's got to recycle. That's aquaponics. And people have to look at it in that manner. So that's kind of an overview of aquaponics. And again, kind of my take on a sustainable food production system. And hopefully, it gives you a little bit more information, and like I said, get a chance if you can. Get out there and see some aquaponics systems. Stop by the university's Aquaponics Innovation Center. 

We'd love to show you around. And like I said, take a look at it. It's really important for you to know where is my food coming from. How safe is it? And is it right around the corner? All right? So, thank you very much. 
(applause)