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Comment by bjelkeman-again | Hacker News Reader

Indoor vegetable and fish farm, i.e. aquaponics, in a fully circular production system.

We are building our pilot installation right now. Additionally we got two government grants: one to set it up monitored with sensors, and a production management system, for future automation, traceability and transparency for the food chain; the other to start taking in food waste and converting into fish food via insect larvae, closing the circle.

Sweden has recently adopted a food strategy which puts a lot of emphasis on local, circular food production, and there is a lot of interesting stuff happinging right now.

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I'm an absolute beginner in all things botany/agriculture related, and don't have much experience in electrical engineering. However this idea is something I find really interesting and I've started researching it more.

I've been playing with the idea of using existing physical infrastructure for building farms. Specifically, server farms.

I'm imagining isolated racks with individually, fully controlled environments down to temperature, pressure, humidity, light, etc. What are your thoughts on the efficiency of a system like that? Is it outside the realm of commercial viability?

Do you think such a system is still worth pursuing outside of commercial contexts (say, in the case where we NEED such systems? ie. space, deserts, extreme cold, etc.)

We live in Stockholm, Sweden, where the average winter temperature is -1.5 C. The coldest days it drops down to -25 C (maybe one or two days a year). We want to have delivery of vegetables 365 days a year from our facilities, which means some type of indoor facility.

To me the smallest size which makes economic sense here is from one hectare and up (10000 m2). The bigger the better. We compete with the average greenhouse grower in the Netherlands, among others, which has four hectares.

For desert coastlines, check out Seawater Greenhouse. I know the founder well. https://seawatergreenhouse.com

Other extreme environments are very interesting to me, but I don’t foresee anything in rack size that makes economic sense. Food requires quite a lot of space to produce. But I could be wrong.

What a cool thing to be working on! What scale does your pilot installation produce at?

We are still constructing it. Total area in building is 300 m2. Active growing area in Deep Water Culture (DWC) system is about 100 m2. 25 m2 packing room, 25 m2 people facilities etc. Estimated production, 600 lettuce plants per week (6000 growing positions). About 9 m3 for fish, rainbow trout, max 200 kg in the system. Total amount of water in the system is about 30 m3. The insect facility isn’t even on the drawing board yet. But we have an empty horse stable next to the barn we use to put it in.

What a wonderful idea! Best of luck and I hope you share your progress on HN so we can see more.

This is amazing.

I've been devouring aquaponics setups on youtube with the ambition to eventually have a huge space for plant growth.

The trouble is that I'm in Nepal and quite a lot of the equipment is difficult and expensive to import. Is there anywhere we can read about your project?

It will be published here (currently Swedish only): http://cirkularodling.se

Incredibly interesting. How can we get more information on this?

I am planning on doing a proper write up in English as we progress. Part of the deal with the government is that we are openly publishing our work and software.

It will be published here (currently Swedish only): http://cirkularodling.se

Can't wait! What got you into this sort of work?

The realisation that we all have to chip in to bring positive change to the world, and I had skills that could make a difference. I used to sell software to companies, like web traffic analysis etc. before Google Analytics.

Then I took a break and (nearly) got a degree in environmental science. That lead to starting https://Akvo.org but before that I had spent quite a lot of time trying to build the business case for Seawater Greenhouse [1]. Recently we saw an opportunity to work on sustainable local food production, which is the aquaponics and associated work.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12658321

This sounds super cool!

I’m currently involved in some work with interconnected mesh networks and have some contacts in this field. Feel free to message me :D

Ideas like this are great and will hopefully some day make a real change in the world, I wish you great success for everyone's sake.

There are tons of these in the light industrial area beside our neighbourhood in Singapore. Super cool

Any advice to an inexperienced person interested in getting started in aqua/aero-ponics?

We started with reading two things:

- Small scale aquaponic food production. Integrated fish and plant farming, FAO, http://www.fao.org/in-action/globefish/publications/details-...

- The Aquaponic Farmer: A Complete Guide to Building and Operating a Commercial Aquaponic System, Southern and King, https://www.amazon.com/Aquaponic-Farmer-Complete-Operating-C...

Then we visited several operating facilities, including:

- Oberous Farms, https://www.ouroborosfarms.com

- Duurzame Kost, https://duurzamekost.nl

Then we have done a ton of research ourselves.

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