aquaponics triponics invention

Discussion in 'Planting, growing, nurturing Plants' started by baleboy, Sep 1, 2005.

  1. earthbound

    earthbound Junior Member

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    Good to hear it's finally arrived Christopher.... :D

    I hope the CD and DVD work ok, you'll be the first mac that it's been tried in that I know of... :? Something I couldn't test without having a mac myself.

    No, I haven't tried Bass Steve, though from what I have just gone and looked up about them online, they sound like they would do really well. My fish variety trials have been hindered by what is available in western Australia, and over here we don't have any native varieties of a reasonable size. There is only whatever is available commercially, or very expensive specimen fish from aquarium shops..

    I did have Black bream in my tank for quite a while, I caught them in the swan river, and kept them alive with a bubbler till I got home to my tank.. It amazed me that the bream could go straight from salty sea water into fresh water with no ill effects, apart from that though the bream were a weak fish overall, and suffered if water quality dipped at all....

    If you make yourself system it could be fun to have to go and catch your fish, seeing that no fingerling are available... Though you might want to make some enquiries as these people were doing breeding trials a few years ago.
    https://www.nativefish.asn.au/basstrial.html

    No, sorry, I haven't got it available at, or to libraries as yet, that requires further steps of getting ISBN numbers registered etc, I haven't gone that far yet....

    Joel
     
  2. christopher

    christopher Junior Member

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    Joel,

    Your (and my) worry about readability was all for nothing. We had no problems on zone things. My DVDs (movie addict, er, afficionado) all come from US and Canada (zone 1), and I was a bit worried that my mac wouldn't read it because Australia is zone something else. It reads fine.

    What an inspirational bunch of info! And you have made it approachable. The soothing music helped me sooth my palpatating heart, and helped calm me down. After I finished my coffee, I was ready to run out with a flashlight and shovel... :lol:

    Your movie also has good production value. It is very easy to watch, and totally engrossing. Christopher and Dawn give it four thumbs (and several big toes) UP!

    FYI, we have decided to forego the pond set up we had written in our proposal and that was a part of the grant we have received, and pursue the aquaponics system instead. Originally we had asked for and received funding for a series of ponds to demonstrate small holder appropriate fishery technology, and we will still do that, but we think that this is more important. This has been Dawn and my decision and we still need to float the idea past the board (get it, float?...) but they will totally agree with the idea. We also have to approach the funders for a change in our usage of their funding, but since it WAS orignially going to be an aquaculture set up, and since his addresses food security in such a beautiful way, I think that they will agree to it....

    The meal at the end of the the Movie "A Continuous Flow System" made me salivate. The Growth Rate sequence is also incredible, and the Flood and Drain part is also amazing. The picture show and unsorted extra bits leave more for those who are still hungry for more (hungry, get it? :lol: ).

    Your website is great, but this is something much much more substantial to sink your teeth into.

    My head is spinning.

    I think your amazing aquaponics system ( :wav: ) is an excellent solution to food security issues in areas of high population densities. You really maximize the calories to space ration. I would suggest you consider putting in a resume with UN and some other development agencies. You obviously love what you are doing and what you have done. You could get paid to do this in places where this type of system is going to provide food for a lot of people who would go hungry otherwise.

    You should also consider starting a nonprofit consulting firm. What you are doing is very important and pioneering work.

    I have to look at your book more, but your DVD is mouthwateringly delectable. I am so much more inspired than I was (that is saying a lot), and making this system happen here just became my numberone priority.

    Joel, your DVD is excellent and inspiring. Thank you for making it, and thank you for sharing it with me.

    Christopher

    PS, I am going off of the farm for a few days to look for worms, vetiver grass and guinea pigs, so you might not hear from me again till Friday. Thanks again!
     
  3. earthbound

    earthbound Junior Member

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    Thanks Christopher...... :oops: :D

    I have had a few people not believe the 'growth rate' movie segment but luckily the photos are all on the CD and they all have their information from the camera attached to them indicating exposure, aperture, time, date etc.. It was a bitch making the movie segments, a very steep learning curve, having to use many different pieces of softwre, and I'm still not happy with the naration sound being fuzzy. But I'll probably never be totaly happy with it.

    It's great to others excited about aquaponics..... And good luck with having your funding changed over, I'm sure you'll be able to win them over as it is so close to what you were doing anyway....


    Joel

    p.s. If you ever decide to chuck in the jungle life, I'll give you a job in p.r. and advertising.... :D
     
  4. Steve J.

    Steve J. Junior Member

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    Joel, no worries re the library, Meg and I will purchase a kit from you later this week when we get a bit of money.

    You can purchase bass fingerlings from a few hatcheries over here on the east coast, they have nailed the breeding and are promoting them as a farm dam fish, not very expensive either at about 18 cents each. As I said, I have them in my dams, I relocated these fish from a local waterway (which is illegal but....) they are really nice big healthy bass from sustainable natural populations. I am thinking I could grow the purchased fingerlings in my dams to a fair size (I don't need to feed them then as the dams provide plenty of food, yabbies, mudeyes, terestrial insectst etc) and then transfer them to the aquaponics set up to work for a bit.

    Steve
     
  5. baldcat

    baldcat Junior Member

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    Just wondering Steve, would there be any benefit in cycling the water from your dams through the aquaponics system, say evey 3-4 weeks ? or does good stuff that has grown in the system ?
     
  6. christopher

    christopher Junior Member

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    Joel,

    I checked your format on the disk, it's Universal Disk Format, which should read anywhere.

    Brilliant Again!

    C
     
  7. baldcat

    baldcat Junior Member

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    you'll find that Movies are the only ones with Region zones on them,,, However in saying that most DVD players now day read all zones..

    The regional zones was are real bad attempt at de-globaliastion (spelling)

    As movies are released in the State and parts of ASIA well before they are release here etc,, they were trying to stop things like mail order, as in some cases, it is out on DVD in the States and ASIA, before it has hit the cinema here... I must that is changing quite fast, probably due to the fact that they don't mean much (zones) Also ASIA and some other countries has very stick rules in what can be viewed and said on movies so you will find there zone / areas movies will be modified.. That will be the case for all you cats that may have some legit 100baht DVDs from Thailand :roll: :) if you catch my drift.. When you go to watchthe Aussie release it more than likely have more to it that the Asian one.
     
  8. christopher

    christopher Junior Member

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    Joel

    We have another winner. CD opens and reads fine. I have opened some of the excel documents and some of the.jpegs. No problems anywhere.

    Your product gets the MMRF consumer approval rating, four thumbs up!

    C
     
  9. earthbound

    earthbound Junior Member

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    Thanks for that C and D...

    It did have me wondering for a while as I can't remember whether I could set anything like regional settings when I made the disk with the DVD authoring software... Can't even remember what software it was now, something free on a demo disk that came with a magazine on movie making and editing, i think.

    Ahhhh those Bali dvds where some guy stands up during the movie in front of the screen... Personally I don't have the time for them, I'd rather wait till they come out on 'real dvd' and rent or buy them...

    And if your going to be a pirate just do it yourself and keep it to yourself, don't support illegal distribution sales. :shock:
     
  10. christopher

    christopher Junior Member

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    Joel,

    CD is as awesom as the DVD. The book is calling me for more.

    Yer awesome (and if I lose interest in farming, I would gladly come work for you in PR and advertising..)

    Christopher
     
  11. Steve J.

    Steve J. Junior Member

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    Christopher, what the???

    PR and marketing in a tie-tied suit, mmmmm it may actually work in Western Australia.

    Steve
     
  12. Steve J.

    Steve J. Junior Member

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    Dan,

    The water in my dams is pretty good quality as it has enough plant/critter life to maintain it that way, no need to use it for the aquaponics. I figure I can collect enough water off the tank covers (garden house) to top up the system levels when the need arises. One of the big attractions for me is reducing the amount of water required to grow my greens tomatoes etc that are in ground production at present, every time I water I loose water, not so with the aquaponics :D

    Steve
     
  13. christopher

    christopher Junior Member

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    Steve,

    Marketing was my first gig. I sold Guatemalan clothes, bumper stickers, pipes and other "tobacco accesories" on tour with the Grateful Dead back in the 80s and into the 90s. I bought my second piece of land with money we made doing that.

    We always bought from the same people in Guatemala, and it was a good business for them, and for us. We bought direct from the makers, cutting out the middle men, and they sold direct to us. We paid less to them than we would have paid the middlemen, and they got more from us than the middle men would have paid.

    Then I worked for Fair Trade/organic chocolate company (since bought out by Cadburies), so marketing is second nature.

    The trick for me is to have complete belief in what your selling, which I did for everything I ever sold except the "tobacco accesories", which sold themselves.

    In my capacity as a director here at Maya Mountain Research Farm, I also have to "sell" our project to our potential clients, student groups, extension training, NGOs, etc, and writing grant proposals is ALL about marketing, it is straight sales! I sell people on the importance of food security and biodiversity when I submit proposals ti foundations. Sometimes I am a succesful salesman, other times what we are selling is not what they want to "buy".

    I would not haver any problem selling or promoting aquaponics :wav: because I believe that aquaponics ( :wav: , hallelulla, amen!) is a serious answer to many problems of food production. I have Joels book, CD and DVD and it is a fantastically informative bunch of information. I think Joel is a flippin' genius.

    You have to know your target sales audience, and I think for this market a beard and tie died tee shirt might work better than a tie.

    and

    Joel,

    Somewhere in your book or DVD you give the dimensions of your aquaponics system :wav: house, but I didn't find it (short perusal), and I noticed you were on line. Dawn wants to know how big it is so we can look into fitting it into the nort side of a south facing plaza/terrace. What are the dimensions of your roof again?

    We are both thinking of more or less exactly dupilcating your design, sinc e we know that works :lol: , and then try branching out once we have a better understanding of the systems working.

    I am loving your book!

    Thank you.

    Christopher
     
  14. earthbound

    earthbound Junior Member

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    G'day Christopher and Dawn,

    The shelter I have the system sitting under is 4m x 8m. Dimensions should be on the CD in the 'plan diagrams' section as pdf files. .. This allows enough room to walk all of the way around the beds, just.. If the sides were enclosed at 4 x 8 then it would be a bit difficult to get my fat butt around some bits. But then that is the way I layed it out. I left a lot of room between the fish tank and the grow beds, and pushed the whole system to one side of the structure, towards the fence....

    Anyway the diagram toward the back of the book show the 'to scale' layouts in 8x4, and the pdfs show different scenarios using different sized shelters with different bed layouts.

    Christopher, when you are looking into parts for your system, there's a different pump you may want to try getting over there, a 'sears craftsman 1/2 hp submersible (model # 390.305000)'. Well proven in aquaponic systems in the U.S.

    Joel
    :D
     
  15. christopher

    christopher Junior Member

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    Joel,

    Did you ever contact CTA in Wagganingen, Netherlands about your book? They could disseminate it widely, and you would be paid for that.

    I meant it about your considering being a consultant and working in development. Over the years I have seen scores of overpaid project jumping international aid money groupie development mercenaries who go from one well funded development boondoggle to the next, leaving behind projects that never quite got off the ground, with price tags that could build thousands of these systems... they tend to have their heads pretty far up their asses, basically career parasites, profiting off of poverty and misery, and you have such practical knowledge that could truly improve peoples quality of living.....

    You could pretty easily turn this into a full time job, with lots of travel to all sorts of places. That is not :maybe", you could do it easily... (am thinking of looking for some funds to bring you over here for a few weeks....)

    As you know, I think aquaponics :wav: represents a huge step forward in
    food security on a local or regional level, and your book, CD and DVD is such an excellent conduit of your knowledge.

    As for pumps, I think I will be looking for a DC pump so that I don't need an inverter (dead inverter? dead fish!). The whole set up would be run on 12vdc to keep it simple, though I would also put a small researcher cabin/aquaponisc office next to the system to enable me to have some space to brew coffee :lol: .

    Christopher
     
  16. earthbound

    earthbound Junior Member

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    Christopher,

    I had a brief look at the website, but was initially turned off by the fact that I saw the publications were all in a downloadable format. I have resisted the urge to distribute in an electronic format because of piracy issues.. This is probably something I'll get over in the future, I guess that the book etc has only been available for the last 3 months or so, and it's all rather new at the moment.

    Of course your going 12V... :roll: I'm very keen to hear what your planning in the way of pumps, and what panels/batteries will be required etc. I tried to find a good 12V pump to make a small solar powered system about a year ago, but struggled to find a pump that seemed to fit the purpose.

    So how does one go about trying to become an overpaid project jumping international aid money groupie development mercenary, going from one well funded development boondoggle to the next? That sounds like fun..... I have spent a fair bit of time trying to work out where this aquaponic thing might take me, or vice versa, I have never liked the idea of growing produce to take to market every day. But did like talking about it, experimenting, building, filming, writing, web pages etc, so thats what I have been doing with no particular idea where this might lead or what I might get from it all at the end of the day. I only wrote about aquaponics because I enjoyed it, there were no real plans, but before you know it I had an assemblance of a book, with further work things started to come together. The CD and DVD followed only because I wanted to find other ways of showing others what could be done and pictures and movies are far easier to comprehend than the written word.

    Things have unfolded the way they have because I've just kept doing what I enjoyed doing, which sounds a little selfish. Now I am at a bit of a crossroads, without fulltime emplyment and no more space to experiment with further systems, I'm looking at getting more land further away for less, so that I can keep experimenting. But to keep experimenting I need some form of income to pay for the basics, hence online sales (though it doesn't really pay for anything much). And to keep experimenting I need to find ways that I can pay the bils without having to go back into full time office work as I normally would. Ultimately I would love to be able to do this stuff and be paid, I just didn't think it would really be feasable.

    So yes, Christopher if you have some general pointers as to where I might start looking I'd love to hear about them as I don't really have the foggiest idea where to would start. I'll begin my heading back to that site again and having a better look... :)

    You can pm or email me personally if you would rather not bore everyone here with details...

    Drink more coffee..

    Joel
     
  17. baldcat

    baldcat Junior Member

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    Mate, I understand your fears about piracy. But if someone wants to copy it they will and there really isn't much you can do about it. The best defence you can do against it, is to only have spoken word, but then you have the fact that someone may record you..

    I think the best method to combat it, is to embrace it. Such as some of the largest rock bands have. By placing free downloads on their websites, with the ability to purchase other stuff at not much cost (cutting out all the middle men)

    My advice to you is maybe producing your documents in say Fireworks or photoshop as an image (this eleminates copy and paste) then convert the images to a PDF file, which is a fairly universal document... To further this you could place a slight watermark in the image behind the text ..

    If you are a little confused about what I just said let me know if you need more clarification, and I can point you in the write direction to getting some open source software that will do the jobs for you (no cost)..
     
  18. christopher

    christopher Junior Member

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    Joel,

    I don't mind boring everyone with the details. Perhaps there is some information here someone might find valuable.

    CTA has a publications distribution center for ACP countries that distributes books to farmers and development workers. Your book fits in nicely with their scheme. I think you would get to control the format they distribute it with as you own the copyright. They would just be distributing your book at no cost to farmers. You, on the oether hand, would get paid!

    Perhaps a good first step is to host some workshops. I know as somone who is intending to try my hand at aquaponics :wav: that I would be interested in seeing your system in person. I would be willing to drop USD40-85 on a ful day intensive workshop complete with a nice plate of food produced by your system.... Having a workshop could be a smple event. You could advertise a day long workshop, complete with organic veggies and fish with a low cost, and see if you can't get 4-8 people. You could advertise in a few places, and do it once a month... or more often. You could do sliding scale on the fee, and you could do "pro bono" work. (We host student local groups for daily training on food producion systems for free).

    I used to do lots of workshops and training about cacao, and farmer to farmer exchanges and site visits are a great way to transmit information. Having an "expert" (money chasing eco ag mercenery Phd. etc) lecture to 20 farmers on cacao management is not half as valuable to farmers as a visit to Saul Garcias cacao grove for an afternoon because instead of thory, they are immersed in practice.

    Then, once you have started doing workshops, offer consultancies to development organizations. The first places I would consider submitting a resume to are UNDP (https://www.undp.org/), Food and Agriculture (https://www.fao.org/) . Also Bothar, an Irish development agency dedicated to small scale assistence to farmers (https://www.bothar.org/index.html) and other smaller scale development projects might be interested in hiring you as a consultant.

    A possible first step is to incorporate a business, or register a not for profit. Actually, this is the second step, but the first step, having an utterly brilliant idea with potentially huge impact in food security you have already reached. Incorporating as a not for profit means that when people talk to you, you are Joel Malcolm, director of "Backyard Aquaponics, Ltd." or "Aquaponics Food Security Consultants and Development", or whatever.

    There are also tax advantages to registering your business, probably, and if your business takes off they may be an issue.

    Next, start writing about what you are doing and WHY it is so important. You touch on many of the reasons in your excellent and informative book, but you need to devote whole magazine articles to the food security implications of what you are doing, putting real food in a context of what regular chemically intensively produced food isn't.

    Get your system, and your self out there. You should be in the local papers, get on TV.

    This may not be your style, and you and others may find this off putting, but what you have in your aquaponics system :wav: is truly remarkable, and moving from that position, which is true, you have to figure ways to get that out there. Being a bit of a shameless self promoter may be in order :lol: . The trick is to believe in the value of what you are doing, which you obviously do, and for good reason, and know that your system is "an" excellent solution to several problems:

    a) Lack of food security in many areas
    b) Fish stock depletion on many water ways
    c) reduced use of water in drylands
    d) elimination of soil pathogens that affect ability to produce crops (nematodes, phytopthora, etc)
    e) lack of awareness of where food comes from and what food is. Your system has massive educational value.

    Work from that position. Starting out with a rock solid conviction that what you are doing is valuable, look for ways to get that info out.

    We are right now working on a proposal to get 12 people from Belize funded to participate in the up coming Permaculture Design Course with Toby Hemenway and Penny Livingston. This is going to be a very valuable information transfer, but we need to access funding to cover the cost of local participation. Because we need to find funding, we are "selling" the course to various funders. We "sell" the concept because we believe in the long term value to Belize in having broad participation, and we need to convince those who might be able to help us disseminate that information that what we are proposing is valuable.

    You are in the same situation if you want to get into development work. You need to believe in what you are doing and pursue that. You need to start thinking "Tsunami relief? Aquaponics would be a great help...", "Food security? Aquaponics is a great potential answer...", "Fish stock depletion because of over fishing? Aquaponics is a good way to deal with sustainable fish production...", "Povertly alleviation? Aquaponics improves health through improved nutrition while allowing access to local makets for vegetables....." You have the product already. You need to start thinking like a consultant.

    Also, I wouldn't enjoy farming if my sweat and labor were transfered into cash because there is a lot of sweat, and the result would be a pitifully small amount of money :lol: , so I understand why you don't want to pursue sales of veggies and fish produced via aquaponics as a sole financial engine for your life. We sell some stuff, but mostly jams and vinegars, value added stuff.

    As far as pumps, I am going to write Windy Dankoff and ask him what pump would work best.... I suspect a 1/2 hp motor is going to be one hungry beast, and a solar system to run it, complete with battery bank may cost MORE than the aquaponics system :wav: so need to pare down to the most sustainable possibility...

    Dang, wouldn't you know it? I ran out of coffee. I'll have to drink tea, or, better yet, fresh toasted cacao beans.....

    Gotto run, wife is hassling me to work on this bloody stone kitchen....

    C
     
  19. frosty

    frosty Junior Member

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    christopher we too thought of running our aquaponics with a 12v pump but it does seem difficult

    latest idea is a windmill ......... but not sure if it will pump enough volume of water

    frosty
     
  20. baldcat

    baldcat Junior Member

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