For at least 12,000 years civilization has existed in river valleys. Wandering tribes wary from the old ways, wary from the endless trek, made their first permanent structures by the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers. The early Sumerians attributed the fertile soil and plentiful water to Ninhursag, the Mother of Men, and performed blood sacrifices to remain in good standing with the Mother God and the other lesser gods. An entire culture ruled by high priests and god kings, built and maintained by the assholes of fish.
Traditional aquaponics relies on a rotating crop of salad greens grown in long shallow pools separated from and fed by a large tank of living fish. The excretions from the gills and fish assholes interact with nitrifying bacteria to create a nitrogen rich solution. This solution is filtered by the plants roots, producing clean water for the continued health of the fish. However in traditional aquaponics the plants roots and fish assholes are separated by feet even yards which common sense tells me is far from ideal. In FAP (Fish Asshole Propagation) the fish assholes are within inches of the cannabis roots, which all my research suggests is very nice.
-Burner Herzog, CEO FAP Aquaponics LLC
Pretty cool setup. I do Aquaponics and CEA.
You place a plant right into the fish tank then?
Like a dual root zone pot, almost.
Do you have roots that get eaten by the fish?
And is that a remineralization tank there also?
there is a 55gal sump tank under the cone tank that collects any solids and swirls them around… eventually when they get pumped into the upper cone tank it passes through about 10 gallons of floating k1 style media…if that fails, it settles in the bottom of the cone tank. If that step also fails it has to rise through the side columns and then migrate through the tropical plant beds at which point it has a 3/4 chance by volume of being recirculated again. Only 1/4 of the water makes it into the fish tank per 15 minute pump cycle, the rest just keeps getting aerated and re-filtered.
And yeah koi will prune your roots so that’s why I have that stack of 5 gallon buckets, each drilled into a strainer, with a net pot lid for a 5 gal on top. Hopefully all the holes to dead ends and multiple layers will keep most of the roots inside the bucket.
If you had a pond you could probably just make the buckets and stick them in and weight them down just off the bank.
This is a really cool setup, dude! It looks very well done and it has a spa-like feel to it. The cannabis plant on the floating pot is living the dream! I can’t wait to see how it turns out!!!
thank you (stack of weighted buckets drilled into a strainer instead of floating) because the fish liked pushing it around…but the upside is the smaller ones swim rings around it so all that Gill water is getting to the roots as it’s made…gonna have to get a 500w board and then I plan on growing autos in it since I can’t stop light leaks…until then all my veg is done in 8 gal barrels filled with the same fish water…just not butthole fresh
One thing that the extra length in aquaponics systems add square footage for bacteria to grow and thus adding to your waste/nutrient cycling availability.