Welcome to Friendly Aquaponics!

Do you know how to grow your own food? Do you earn your living from growing food, or from some other business that is less than dependable in these difficult economic times?

• In addition to running our commercial aquaponics farm, Friendly Aquaponics teaches how to build and operate your own aquaponics systems, from indoor tabletop systems, to backyard home systems, to full-sized commercial systems of thousands of square feet. With four years of experience doing this, and hundreds of systems built using our materials, we know that our courses and DIY manuals work.,

• We know because thirty to forty percent of our students have built and are successfully operating commercial and home aquaponics systems. Both our live trainings and our DIY courses give you state-of-the-art aquaponics systems at a fraction of the cost of “kits”, AND with much better technical and operating information.

• None of the people selling these “kits” operate a commercial farm for their living as we do. Our aquaponics information comes directly from our real-world experience growing and selling vegetables for a living. In addition, all the “kits” sold by these people need to be assembled, just as our systems do, so they don’t save you any work. However, you can buy the equipment and materials for our systems for one quarter to one-sixth of the cost of the “kits”. Get the idea?

• Because of improvements in seeding, germination, sprouting, planting, plant nursery systems, and grow-out systems that my awesome wife Susanne has come up with in the last year, our commercial systems hold 4.3 times the amount of plants per square foot as the Nelson and Pade and UVI aquaponics systems do. This means our systems put out four times as many plants per square foot as “kit” systems based on these designs do, in the same time, and our systems only cost one-quarter as much to build. If you do the math here, you will see our systems grow sixteen times the number of plants for the same cost to build.
  

This is because our courses are developed from our real-world experience, and are tailored to give you useful and practical aquaponics knowledge rather than simply “book learning” and formulas (although those ARE included also in our trainings, based again on our real-world experience making money with aquaponics). Both our live Hawaii aquaponics trainings and our Do-It-Yourself aquaponics instruction packages are a wild success, based on the number of people who have successfully built and operated aquaponics systems using them as the foundation. And that’s what we’re basing the measurement of OUR success on, the number of aquaponics systems getting built and operated; rather than the number of students in our courses and packages sold.

If you can’t make it to Hawaii for an aquaponics course, or you’re interested in building a smaller system than the large commercial systems we operate, we’ve developed Do-It-Myself aquaponics packages for apartment/condo, backyard, family, and commercial systems that make it easy to grow food for yourself or for a living. With the easy-to-understand instructions, drawings, and information included, it’s easy to build and operate these productive aquaponics systems yourself. Our plans and information packages have been tested for success in the real world, the way our farm systems that earn us our living have.

What you need for commercial success in the real world is an aquaponics system and technology that is affordable and makes more money than it costs. This also holds true for backyard aquaponics systems: if you could buy the same produce for less than it costs you to build and run the system, then there’s no economic incentive to grow your own food as there is with a good system design. If you begin by spending more than you need to, it will be difficult or impossible to create a successful commercial (or backyard) aquaponics operation.

Our family farm, Friendly Aquaponics, Inc, is the most commercially successful sustainable organic aquaponics operation in the world. We are also the only aquaponics facility we know of that teaches ALL of our knowledge openly and transparently to others. We do not hold any information back so that we can hire out as “consultants” later and make more money. Our commercial aquaponics trainings and commercial DIY package include everything we know about aquaponics success in the real world, and we update the information in these manuals at least twice yearly with results from our ongoing R&D program. The complete information in our courses and DIY packages makes it easy for you to start a commercial aquaponics operation and be successful right from the beginning without an expensive learning curve. Because of the innovations we’ve made in the last four years in energy-efficiency, ease of construction and construction cost, you can build and operate these aquaponics systems for a fraction of the expense that turnkey commercial “kits” for large aquaponics systems from others cost. In addition, our systems and growing processes are the only ones that are certified organic, which certification will bring you from 50% to 100% more for the same produce on the wholesale market.

Because we have to make our living from the food these aquaponics systems grow, we have been forced to continually become more efficient and stretch our knowledge in all areas of aquaponics production, processing, and marketing. You benefit from this information that is in all our aquaponics training packages.

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.
• Aquaponic systems with mosquito fish eradicate mosquitoes in a LARGE surrounding area!
• 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 four years we’ve been operational, coming up with valuable new technology such as our new organically-certified 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. Our main interest in aquaponics has always been to make it sustainable in the real world and this is what really sets us apart. We are among the first to take the wonderful research that has come from the university setting and adapt it so it earns us a living. Our course materials 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, Florida, 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 (seven of our students have gotten organically certified as of April 2011), and we know of four others from the same course that are under construction.

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 aquaponics systems become more economical and efficient, backyard aquaponics 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 aquaponics; 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 in aquaponics 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 big sailboat that is our dream to build.