Alternate Energy On The Farm
This should be titled “Why aquaponics needs to replace conventional agriculture as soon as possible so we don’t run out of food”. Aquaponics is the only modern agricultural technique that doesn’t need to rely on oil. Conventional agriculture cannot operate without cheap oil, because all the machines run on it. Manufacturing the chemical fertilizer, pesticides, and herbicides is also extremely energy-intensive and requires a LOT of oil. Commercial-scale organic agriculture also must have cheap oil to operate, because it uses exactly the same machines (plus a few more such as compost shredders and spreaders), and the fertilizer it runs on comes from planting and plowing in cover crops, and from composting wastes usually brought in from off-farm; all of which are oil-intensive activities involving tractoring and trucks. Conventional and organic farming both use EXACTLY the same amount of our non-sustainable petroleum resources; there’s NO benefit oil-wise in going organic!. If we wait until our oil runs out, we’re going to be up the proverbial creek without a paddle, scratching rows in the dirt in our backyards with hoes and hoping for the best.
And the oil is running out; the United States stopped being able to supply its oil needs from its own domestic sources in 1972. We’ve been dependent on foreign oil imports since then, and the percentage of imported oil we use has been steadily increasing. Why else do you think that all the overseas conflicts we’ve gotten into since 1972 have been in oil-rich Middle Eastern countries? Where is new oil going to come from? The answer is: there is NO NEW OIL! It’s a limited resource that will never be replenished, which we have to make last for the rest of our history on this planet. And the only way to do that is start switching from technologies that consume oil to alternate technologies that don’t, preferably now. It’s just like planting a tree: the best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago; the next best time is today.
Aquaponics offers the best alternative we’ve seen for switching from an unsustainable oil-dependent agricultural system to a sustainable energy-self-sufficient agricultural system. We’ve made improvements in energy-efficiency in our own aquaponics systems in the last three years so that now they run on only ~30% of the energy our first systems used. Given that our first systems used only 50% of the energy that the UVI (University of the Virgin Islands) systems we learned on in 2007 do, our leading-edge systems are only using 14% of the energy the UVI-type systems use. The importance of aquaponics systems in making our food supply sustainable is that they run on electricity, not oil, and thus can be powered from sustainable, alternate-energy sources. Unless you have draft horses and know how to hitch them up and plow (we do!), aquaponics is the only sustainable candidate for the future of the world’s food supply. Everything else uses a non-sustainable resource we are rapidly running out of.
Even in Hawaii, with our prodigious geothermal and wind power resources, almost all our energy comes from burning oil in big diesel generators. It’s not a pretty picture; it happened that way because that’s what our utilities make the most money from. But it’s certainly not sustainable; we know that if the fuel barge doesn’t come, the utilites turn off the power in about a week max. We also have nine days worth of food on our supermarket shelves and import 94% of what we eat. This is absolutely insane in a state with a 365-day per year growing season.
So, the farmily at Friendly Aquaponics has taken a stand. We are saying that we will shift this imbalance of energy and food dependency towards energy and food self-sufficiency and independence. We are only a small mom-and-pop farm with a small research budget, but we see the tremendous importance of this to the future of our communities. We’ve made huge progress in the last two years in making aquaponics more sustainable, even with our lack of funding and need to pay the bills while we do our research. We’d love to be better funded, or to attract a big player who saw the importance of this the way we do. But we’ll keep on keeping on no matter what. We have a window of time to do this in; we don’t know how long it is or how soon it will need to be implemented. So, we are doing everything we can now to make our own farm sustainable and to teach others how to grow in a sustainable manner. If you are interested and want to play, welcome to the Farmily!
.png)