Using Fish to Grow Food in Aquaponics

I felt it this morning.  That first bit of humidity in the air.  That sign that it might indeed be time to move my tropical plants back outside and consider digging in my raised beds this weekend.  My seed catalogs are dog-eared, and my local garden store is flush with seedlings.  But then I remember, the squirrels, oh how I loath them.  They love to thwart all my soil-based gardening attempts, despite my feeble attempts to guard my crops.  My option?  Return to one of my first loves, aquaponics.

I have been practicing aquaculture as a career for over 30 years and aquaponics for about 15 of those.  Aquaponics is a unique food production method that combines aquaculture with hydroponics, or the raising fish with raising plants in a typically soilless system.  The fish produce waste nutrients that bacteria in the system convert into a form that the plants can utilize and extract from the water, thereby cleaning the water for the fish.  The process is a bit more complex than that and I can spend all day talking about it but that is the short version.  Aquaponics can be done in small homemade systems or very large commercial systems.  There are hundreds of designs online and you can spend hours online viewing what others have done.  My recommendation is to start with the research-based information that you can get for free from colleges and universities and then explore once you are confident in the basics.

In Florida, many types of fish and plants have been successfully grown in aquaponics, however, there are some legal restrictions on some species of fish, so be sure to check before deciding on what fish you will grow.  I chose to grow catfish in my system and over the years produced multiple crops and varieties of lettuce, bok choy, pak choy, cherry tomatoes, Swiss chard, basil, turmeric, and snow peas; the sky is the limit. 

If you are interested in learning more about aquaponics in Florida, checkout this page on the Florida Sea Grant website: https://www.flseagrant.org/aquaponics-growing-fish-and-food/, or contact me lgtiu@ufl.edu for additional information or to get added to our aquaponics listserv.