Doing Your Test Grows, or “How Do I Know What To Grow?”
You can’t make money with aquaponics if you grow the wrong things. Not everything will earn you the same return, and guessing is deadly. Especially guessing [Read more…]
Marketing Your Product: Research First!!
How To Drive Success: Don’t just “grow something” and hope you can sell it; make sure you do test grows, market research, financial projections, and develop a marketing strategy first to see if it’s a good choice or not. [Read more…]
How To Get Started:
We do this “what-if” exercise with the class participants in our 5-day live Commercial Aquaponic and Solar Greenhouse Trainings: “Imagine that when you go home, you’ll have 50,000 square feet of greenhouse aquaponic systems, all ready to go. [Read more…]
After Your Test Grow, What Do You Do With The Information?
Test Grow information can be potentially confusing, and it can be difficult to figure out which are the most profitable crops; unless you use a “Friendly” tool to organize and compare the information in an easily understandable form.
(Below) The “Friendly” Projection Tools are MicroSoft Excel spreadsheets (you need Excel to use them). We include a link to our “Spreadsheet Lite” right after this image (there are two additional spreadsheets that come with our 5-day live trainings; this is the free one). The second link right after it is the instructions for how to use this free spreadsheet. A screenshot of the “Spreadsheet Lite” tool is shown below.
Click this link to download our “Spreadsheet Lite”.
Click this link to download the Instructions for our “Spreadsheet Lite”.
The “Multiple Crop” spreadsheets, which come as part of our 5-day live trainings, come in two flavors: “with” outdoors growing included (for seasonal growing in an outdoors aquaponics system in conjunction with your greenhouse), and “greenhouse only”. They can handle four separate growing seasons in a calendar year and ten crops per season, and is specifically for those growers who understand seasons and scheduling required for multiple crops from the same aquaponic system (or for those growers whose partners understand spreadsheets really well!). Both these spreadsheets and the instructions for them are found in your DropBox folder.
These are awesome tools, and will tell you if something is a good idea or not before wasting thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours growing it. You must do your homework during your test grow and record cycle times and weights accurately; the numbers these spreadsheets generate are fantasy if not derived from actual vegetable growth data from your location. Some of these numbers must come from the homework you did during your market research (see the Market Research topic in The Business Of Aquaponics section of this manual) and found out which of your test grow “winners” sold for the most money as compared to other crops.
This Can Be Your Aquaponic Failure:
First, if you’re interested in starting a commercial aquaponics operation, the most important thing you should know is this: one person can easily run 2,500 to 3,000 square feet of aquaponics system, [Read more…]