Building a Commercial Aquaponics System is easy AND economical with our Do-It-Yourself packages!
Why build a DIY “Friendly” system? Because even if you buy a “kit” from someone, you STILL have to build the system. You have to install fish tanks, trench for plumbing, install pumps, blowers, airstones, and troughs. Our 4,096 square foot commercial DIY system costs $21,995 to build, or $5.37 per square foot of growbed area, INCLUDING the cost for our commercial plans; you source most items locally.
Compare the cost of our system to this well-advertised kit system: Nelson and Pade’s 4,096 square foot system costs $82,500, or $20.14 per square foot of grow bed area. Their cost does NOT include crating or shipping, or the concrete bricks, rebar, or concrete necessary to build the troughs from. Our aquaponics system designs are the most cost-effective on the planet!
Unless your information on aquaponics comes from a profitable commercial aquaponics farm, it is less than optimium if you’re concerned about productivity, economy of construction, and ease of operation of your system. Let me explain, starting with the most well-known aquaponics systems in the world: university aquaponics systems. They are under no requirements whatsoever to be profitable, productive, or easy to operate, because they’re funded; salaries and operating expenses are paid by the university, NOT from the income from the fish and vegetables.
They are useful to someone who wants to publish a paper in a prestigious journal, but not to someone who needs to make a living growing things with aquaponics. Before we took the 2007 UVI (University of the Virgin Islands) Aquaponics Short Course, we saw a “pro-forma” budget from UVI that showed a $135,000 a year income from their 2,400 square foot system. At the time, we didn’t know that “pro-forma” meant “as if”; in other words, as if they actually operated it, as if they had that production and those expenses; as if they had that gross income. To be quite straight about it, their budget was imaginary, and not based on long-term real-world experience in a commercial production situation.
However, this imaginary budget of UVI’s was one of the things that convinced us aquaponics could be profitable. Now, with four years of experience operating a true commercial aquaponics farm, we have 5,500 square feet of grow bed area (which is 2.29 times larger than UVI’s); in our colder climate the vegetables produce about 20% more weight per plant in the same time; we are USDA Organic Certified (which UVI is not), so we’re getting the premium organic price of $5.92 per pound wholesale for our vegetables (about 67% more than non-certified produce). Even with all these increases in our production and income over their “pro-forma” budget, we still make only $135,000 gross a year from our farm. We know UVI’s numbers were imaginary, for if they were true, our gross would be $620,000 per year.
Systems from consultants, hobby systems, and backyard systems suffer from the same problems that university systems do. The people who sell these systems don’t have to make money operating them because they make money from selling them to you. As soon as the sale’s done, they’ve got their money, and there’s no requirement that the system be economical for you to build, or easy or productive to operate. It’s your problem now, and you don’t know enough about aquaponics to realize you paid three to ten times as much as necessary for a system that produces a quarter to one-half as much as is possible.
Our systems are different from everyone else’s because they were developed “under the gun” on a true commercial aquaponics farm. If we didn’t make money with them, we didn’t get to keep our farm, and we certainly didn’t get to build new systems to expand our production (we did this out of the farm cash flow in 2009 and 2010). We improved the UVI systems we learned on so we got 4.3 times as many plants per square foot of raft area for the same cost; figured out how to run them on one-tenth the electrical consumption and how to build them for one-fourth the cost in materials. We got the first aquaponics systems in the world USDA certified organic. We grew prawns (macrobrachium rosenbergii) in the troughs. This was all in the first year of operation of the Friendly Aquaponics farm.
Since then we’ve gotten our aquaponics systems Food Safety certified. We figured out how to hatch tilapia eggs with a 95% success rate when the best hatcheries in the world experience a typical 75% mortality rate! We designed and built the first significantly-sized completely off-grid aquaponics system (586 square feet). We shipped an organically certified product to Costco wholesale for two years, the ONLY aquaponics farm to ever do so, then went in a different, more sustainable direction with our produce; now we’re selling it within ten miles of the farm for the lowest possible transportation cost and highest sustainability. Don’t you want the most efficient aquaponics systems on the planet for your farm from the people who run one for a living?
Of course, if you can afford the time and travel costs, our live group trainings or live individual trainings are the highest level of assistance we can offer you to get started in aquaponics. If you are unable to attend a live training, our self-taught packages have all the hard-copy information contained in those trainings.
Your package includes a course manual, computer-drawn construction plans, a construction manual with tons of pictures, and a day-to-day operations manual.
Click Here to Purchase The Commercial Aquaponics System Training & Plans
(Please be aware that these Commercial Aquaponics Systems grow food exceedingly well, but will not magically turn you into a business person. Please make sure you get training on running a business from local sources.)
Because many commercial growers already have an existing greenhouse or space they need to fit an aquaponics system into, we show you how to design and size equipment for your own custom aquaponics systems from 10 to 100,000 square feet in size. This Do-It-Yourself, self-taught course includes complete plans and materials lists for three different sizes of outdoors aquaponics systems: a 1,024 square foot system expandable to 4,096 square feet; a 256 square foot system expandable to 512 square feet; and a 64 square foot system expandable to 128 square feet. In addition, plans and instructions are included for four indoor/outdoor systems from 2 square feet in size up to 32 square feet. These small systems can be operated outdoors under natural light or indoors under flourescent lights, so you can easily build a small, inexpensive system to gain experience and confidence with aquaponics whether or not you have an outdoor space to grow in. It’s easy to graduate to the larger systems after building and operating a smaller one. This training package is designed for people who want to build their own systems to feed their own families, as well as earn an income raising food for others.
Specifics covered are: site selection, system construction and operation, water quality and sources, vegetable and aquatic species qualities and selection, troubleshooting and problem solving of common system problems. $999 total cost includes a 137-page course manual, computer-drawn construction plans, a 49-page construction manual, operations manual, and materials list with contact information for suppliers. We include the construction drawings and materials list for the Family System, and the complete Micro System 64 & 128 manual and plans as part of the Commercial Do-It-Yourself package, to make it easy for you to build one of these smaller systems to learn and gain confidence on before investing in a larger system.
Click here to purchase these plans
More about the Do-It-Yourself Training and Construction Package for COMMERCIAL Systems
With this training package, you’ll learn everything we learned at the excellent University of the Virgin Islands 2007 Aquaponics Short Course, which cost us over $4,000 per person with travel from Hawaii to the Virgin Islands, lodging, rental car, and food.
You’ll also learn everything we learned this past four years building and operating seven aquaponics systems, a tilapia hatchery and nursery, a Health Department Certified vegetable processing facility, and most recently, improved water circulation designs that use as little as one-tenth the electricity for pumping water our original UVI designs did. We will show you how we got our aquaponics farm USDA Organic Certified AND Food Safety Certified (no small feats!). We are certified through Oregon Tilth, and Organic Certifiers of California, and they have said that “as long as people build their systems exactly as Friendly Aquaponics has done, then their certification process will be a slam dunk.”. Seven additional Friendly students have gotten their systems USDA organically certified as of June 2011.
Build something different, and you’ll have to go through the six-month process that we went through, as the certifying agencies are completely unfamiliar with aquaponics systems. Getting our system certified organic actually broke ground (if you’ll pardon the pun!) into an entirely new territory!
We have been continually improving construction economy in our systems for the last four years so that now you can build a 1,024 square foot “small” commercial aquaponics system for $15,000 in materials (in Hawaii), or about $11,000 in materials on the mainland. This type of system construction will save you tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in expense as compared to buying commercial “kit” systems, while giving you the only aquaponics systems in the world that are organically certifiable, something the “kit” systems can’t do. Organic vegetables bring from 40% to 100% more than non-certified vegetables, and this simple fact means that much more income for your farm. Because of the improvements in energy efficiency we’ve come up with, our current systems use about one-fifth the electricity that our original UVI-type systems did. This translates into about $8,810 per year savings for our three commercial aquaponics systems, two greenwater breeding tanks, two Family systems and two Micro Systems than if they were built with the original designs we started with. We also developed a “sloped grading” technology for aquaponic farm locations that are hilly, which saves up to 80% of the grading costs of making flat “pads” to put your troughs and fish tanks on, and that is included with these plans.
We will show you how to build your own tilapia egg hatchery for under $300 in materials, not including the cost of whatever tanks you use. Having your own tilapia hatchery means you save money you would have spent purchasing fingerlings, AND gives you an additional income stream on the farm with the extra fingerlings and young fish you have to sell to others. We spent over $25,000 on our own hatchery before discovering how to build this simple, elegant, and effective hatchery system! We’ll show you how to easily raise tilapia from swim-up fry (which are very delicate) to fairly bullet-proof 1″ fingerlings, which you can then sell to other aquaculturists.
The training covers all aspects of commercial Aquaponics construction and operation, and how to scale systems to build any size system. Specifics covered will be: site selection, system construction and operation, regulations and permitting, water quality and sources, vegetable and aquatic species qualities and selection, meeting bureaucratic requirements, organic and food safety certifications, sales and marketing of your produce through traditional methods or the creation of a specialized niche market.
The Commercial Aquaponics Training gives you everything you need to successfully build and operate commercial Aquaponics systems. Generally, an aquaponics system can pay for itself within the first year of operation (as it takes a minimum of 2-3 months to get the system into full vegetable production after you have fish in your system, and around one year before you have fish ready to market). $999 total cost.
Lifetime Guarantee: We guarantee a full refund of the purchase price of your Commercial System plans IF you have actually used them. If you have built and operated a system and are still not satisfied, we will refund your money in full.
Click here to purchase these plans
Of course, if you can afford the time and travel costs, the live group trainings or live individual trainings are the highest level of assistance we can offer you to get started in aquaponics. If you are unable to attend a live training, these self-taught packages have all the hard-copy information contained in those trainings, plus construction and operations manuals that walk you through construction and operation of these systems.
DISCLAIMER: UNDER FEDERAL LAW, IT IS UNLAWFUL TO GROW MARIJUANA IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. IN ADDITION, THESE SYSTEMS DO NOT WORK FOR GROWING MARIJUANA. We have a report from a friend of a student of ours, who had grown marijuana successfully using hydroponics for years, who tried for over a year to grow marijuana using Aquaponics systems, and never succeeded. Just so you know: When we say “food”, that is really what we mean.
