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Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

I am greatly encouraged by operations such as this one: http://www.montereycountyweekly.com/archives/2014/0227/upsta... which is pushing aquaponics. A lot less net water use and plenty of food.

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MMM has an excellent guest post on how to get started with aquaponics here: http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2014/10/20/aquaponics/

The author is selling his "Zero To Hero" design plans for a shockingly reasonable $10 here: http://www.frostyfish.com/shop/aquaponics-plans-2/zero-hero-...

And if you want to buy a 4x8 kit, he also has that for about $400: http://www.coldweatheraquaponics.com/shop/aeration-2/zero-he...

I've been wanting to try it, but have not as of yet.

People tend to overlook the necessity of feeding the fish. So your resource chain goes fish food -> fish -> waste (nitrites) -> plants -> human food. Applying nitrites directly to the plants would be more efficient.

The downside being its not scalable. You need an entirely artificial setup to get aquaponics up and running, motors, pipes, and chemical cleaning. Don't get me wrong aquaponics is a great technology, I think it needs some changes in order to make it feasible for the large scale.

That is what they are tackling, the scalable aspects. Their goal is to get to thousands of equivalent acres and they are looking at the places where the system runs into scaling issues. I don't know if they will be successful but they have a heck of a start.

In one of those interesting coincidences there is a well funded and ready market for intermediate versions from the marijuana folks as well. There are a number of venture firms putting money in that space.

When my wife did the solar panel installation boot camp (back in 2001) (a week of training followed by work on a job site installing panels) roughly half the students were there from pot farms as well.

Yeah the marijuana community always seems to be on the cutting edge of growing technology, much the same way the gaming community often leads use of cutting computing technology.

Anyways, a 'thousands of acres equivalent' solution would be absolutely fascinating to see implemented.

Also reminds how porn industry is often on the cutting edge on content delivery and analytics as well.

I wonder if the legalization of pot will end a lot of the experimentation. From I understand, the point of a lot of the technology of pot growing came from trying to get good yields "under cover" so to speak. If growing in a field just like corn is legal, will people still push technology?

Artificial light is still required for year-round cultivation. Growing outside in the winter, even where possible in the U.S., still presents a problem because of the light cycle. If there is not enough light, the plant will go into a budding cycle before it's large enough to support a healthy yield.

The scale is achieved through the local communities. I understand we would still need large scale farming ventures, but local communities can use aquaponics to be more self-sufficient. A large "regular" ag business can support many smaller satellite aquaponic setups. Much like a distributed computing system achieves scale.

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