What is Aquaponics?

What is aquaponics? I'll give the quick and easy here. Aquaponics is a symbiotic system that involves fish, bacteria, and plants. Basically fish swim around and around, living their exciting lives. As they live, eat, and poop, they make a mess of their surroundings. This mess, called effluent, contains all kinds of things, but mostly it has ammonia. These poor fish will die in this water polluted by ammonia unless something is done about it.

What we do about it is pump the water out and put fresh water in. Where does the dirty water go you ask? Well, we pour it onto a porous but stout medium, like pea gravel. This pea gravel has a few jobs here. First, it's where the bacteria live that are oh so important to our system. This bacteria changes the ammonia to nitrates. There are a lot of steps involved in changing the ammonia to nitrates, but for the purposes of this blog we'll keep it simple.

The second job of this medium is to hold the plants that we are growing. Along with pumping out the ammonia we are also pumping out all the other goodies that the fish produce. These goodies include phosphorous, an important component of fertilizer. The plants feed off of the fish effluent in addition to the nitrates that are produced by the bacteria.

The third job of the medium is to use the plants and bacteria to clean the water. The newly cleaned and PH balanced water is then redeposited into the fish water. This water cycles endlessly housing fish and feeding plants and bacteria. It is almost a closed system when it comes to water. The plants do absorb water as they grow and we cannot avoid evaporation. Adding water to the system on occasion is much more savvy than dumping water onto plants every week never to see a drop of it again.

This is the basic operation of an aquaponics system. With it you can grow food of two types. Plants and fish. That's right, it's ok to eat the fish. Many aquaponic adventurers grow tilapia, catfish, or any number of tasty underwater critters. There are also many fruits and vegetables that grow well in an aquaponic system. The bacteria, on the other hand, shouldn't be eaten.

This is the absolute basics of aquaponics. I know I oversimplified the system, but not by much. It really isn't much more complicated than I have stated here. This is a great website to read more of the basics Backyard Aquaponics