Welcome to Friendly Aquaponics!

Aquaponics is a sustainable food production system that combines aquaculture (raising fish in tanks) and hydroponics (growing plants in water) so that both grow better.

• Aquaponics uses less than 2% of the water that traditional farming does.

• Aquaponics is energy-efficient: our current systems use one-tenth of the energy conventional farming does!

• Aquaponics has eight to ten times more vegetable production in the same area and time.

• Aquaponics is fully scalable from indoor systems to backyard family systems to full commercial systems.

• Aquaponics is pure, clean, and natural: USDA Certified Organic and Food Safety Certified.

• Aquaponics is easy to learn and operate: anyone can do this!

In contrast to hydroponics systems, where the aim is to have a sterile system to avoid disease outbreaks, aquaponics systems are teeming with life. They are miniature human-made ecosystems: there are mosquito fish, prawns, tilapia, water fleas, and little red worms in our systems. Those are just the things visible with the naked eye; there are also myriad smaller creatures and bacteria, all of which contribute to the incredible health, dynamic strength, and stability of these systems.

Things we grow in our aquaponics systems for income are:

Malaysian Giant River Prawn; these grow in the hydroponics troughs under the vegetables and don't eat the roots.

We planted 90 different vegetable varieties in our first aquaponics system for market tests and to see what grew best.

White Tilapia. We think these are a cross between niloticus and mossambicus.

The reason we’ve been so successful with aquaponics in such a short time is that we built on the work of the many researchers who went before us, primarily the excellent research done at the University of the Virgin Islands under Dr. James Rakocy. We’ve done a lot of aquaponics research ourselves in the three years we’ve been operational, coming up with valuable new technology such as our new Low-Density energy-efficient aquaponics systems, new vegetable sprouting and tilapia hatchery techniques, new water circulation designs (that use only 10% of the energy the original UVI designs did) for pumping water, and many other useful cost and labor-saving developments. However, our main interest in aquaponics has always been to make it sustainable in the real world and this is what really sets us apart in the field of Aquaponics, as we are among the first to take the wonderful research that has come from the university setting and apply it to the the economics of business.

Being sustainable in the real world means aquaponics needs to turn a profit for the average person without advanced and expensive technology. There are many good existing hobby systems and university research systems. However, if they don’t pay their way and turn a profit, they have little or no use in the real world! In our course materials we’ve made every effort to make aquaponics accessible and easily duplicatable for anyone anywhere in the world to feed themselves, or feed others and make money doing so.

We have clients currently building commercial aquaponics systems in mainland China, Barbados, Trinidad, Hawaii, Hong Kong, Spain, Singapore, Vermont, Australia, Oklahoma, and California. Our first aquaponics training (in October 2008) had 78 participants, and of those, fifteen have built and are operating aquaponics systems; six of those are small commercial systems (five of our students have gotten organically certified as of June 2010), and we know of four others from the same course that are under construction.

We’ve done our best with this website to help you to see clearly into the new science of Aquaponics. Please see our FAQ and cruise this site for information on how to determine if other “aquaponics experts” really know what they’re talking about.

Aquaponics can feed the world with energy-efficient, sustainable food-production methods. We think individuals and families with backyard aquaponics systems will do a lot of this important work. We have allowed agri-business and mega-farms to become the source of most of our food, and that needs to change. As these systems become more economical and efficient, backyard systems will become more common until every neighborhood has one, and the neighbors will want one too! This will put tremendous power back into the hands of individuals, as they become more and more responsible for their own food security and head toward what we refer to as “food freedom”.

Thank you for your interest in this technology; it is our honor to share it with you. This is what we call “food freedom”, or “food sovereignty”.

Our commitment in Aquaponics is to:

• Share our knowledge and this technology with as many people as possible.

• Develop new and profitable aquaponics applications and technology to share.

• Put ourselves out of business as soon as we can. When you know what we know and are teaching each other aquaponics, we’ve done our job, and we can finally take the family sailing in the 100’ boat that is our dream to build.