It’s amaz­ing to think that accord­ing to some report, good nutri­tious food is unavail­able to nearly 22% of peo­ple in Phoenix. Think about that, out of nearly 1.5 mil­lion peo­ple, 330,000 might not get a good meal today. Instinc­tively across our city peo­ple are seek­ing solu­tions and one is to grow food locally. We all know that locally grown food is good for you and bet­ter for the earth. It is called being sus­tain­able. That is har­ness­ing and enhanc­ing our social, envi­ron­men­tal and eco­nomic resources so our fam­i­lies and soci­ety may sur­vive and pros­per for the short and long term. Allow me to briefly elaborate.

By edu­ca­tion and train­ing, I am an agricultural/environmental sci­en­tist. A big part of my job was to work with farm­ers to use less water, less energy and less fer­til­izer while mak­ing more money. Back then, this was called “Low Input Agri­cul­ture.” Today, it is called “Sus­tain­able Agri­cul­ture.” – just new words for the same con­cept. I’ve always worked on big farms, 600 acres min­i­mum. So, the 10-foot by 10-foot plot my wife cre­ated in the back­yard was beneath my notice. That is until she started bring­ing in these sinks full of greens, car­rots, let­tuce, toma­toes and other fruits and veg­eta­bles every other week or so.

Now Angela is a busy per­son. Pro­fes­sion­ally, she is the head trainer for her com­pany for three coun­ties, includ­ing Arizona’s most pop­u­lated Mari­copa. So for her to focus on this, it must have been impor­tant. After a while, she started to change our meals as well. It seemed a lit­tle spare at first. You know, min­i­mum salt, reduced red meat and a whole lot of salad; but before long, I started to like it. Simul­ta­ne­ously, she per­suaded me to take bet­ter care of my health, so it started to improve. Won­der of won­ders. The kids even like it!

All of these changes were inter­re­lated, one with another, begin­ning with the gar­den. So, I swal­lowed by pride and asked the ques­tion, “Um…Angie, if we bought all of this food you grow from the store, how much would it cost us?” Well, I don’t know about you, but $700 is $700, so I am now a convert.

Since my con­ver­sion to urban farmer, I have learned that friends of mine have been doing this for a lot longer than I have. For exam­ple, my friend Abraham’s entire yard is con­verted to food. Called edi­ble land­scap­ing, instead of grow­ing plants to beau­tify his home that only look good, he makes sure they taste good as well. We are exper­i­ment­ing with this process also. It is not as easy as it looks, but we are get­ting the hang of it. The same is true with using fruit trees as land­scap­ing and as shade for your home. The fruit you can eat and the shade reduces the heat load­ing on your home–so it helps to keep those sum­mer power bills down.

Our list of crops is get­ting exten­sive. It includes sev­eral dif­fer­ent kinds of car­rots, corn, toma­toes, pep­pers, cel­ery, let­tuce, beets, cilantro, squash, greens, cucum­bers, loofahs, mel­ons, water­mel­ons, grape­fruit, pome­gran­ates, beans, peas, flow­ers, gar­lic and onions. So far, so good; but man does not live by salad alone; and this is where the aquapon­ics comes in.

The tra­di­tional ani­mal crops that one can raise in the back­yard, depen­dent on your local zon­ing, are chick­ens. How­ever, with chick­ens, I love to eat them, hate to kill–let alone clean them. Fish how­ever, are dif­fer­ent mat­ter. Aqua­cul­ture is the farm­ing and hus­bandry of aquatic ani­mals and plants and aquapon­ics is a spe­cial­ized way to do aqua­cul­ture that is cost effec­tive in urban set­tings. In aquapon­ics, the fish pro­vide nutri­ents for plants and the plants clean the water for the fish. When done prop­erly, this closed sus­tain­able low water use farm­ing method pro­duces great veg­etable crops and fish for your table at the same time. We are now using aquapon­ics in com­bi­na­tion with our back­yard land farm­ing and edi­ble land­scap­ing efforts. Our goal now is to grow enough food so the money saved off­sets our annual power bill. How­ever, our back­yard is not the end of the story.

My busi­ness part­ner and James Hicks and I took some time and mod­i­fied the tech­nol­ogy to make it sim­pler, eas­ier to use, less expen­sive and eas­ier to build. This new “Pop Up Aquapon­cis™” tech­nique can be installed in a busi­ness or restau­rant park­ing lot with no soil any­where near, up and ready to grow food in less than a day. The first of these installed at the Val­ley View Orchard Com­mu­nity Learn­ing Cen­ter is already pro­duc­ing great basil and pep­pers and we antic­i­pate crops of the African fish tilapia, giant fresh­wa­ter prawns, toma­toes, cucum­bers and mel­ons in the next few months. Most impor­tantly it will soon be used to help ele­men­tary school stu­dents to learn Sci­ence, Tech­nol­ogy, Engi­neer­ing and Math. It amaz­ing how much biol­ogy, botany, math­e­mat­ics, chem­istry, engi­neer­ing, busi­ness, civics and more a child can learn from grow­ing a tomato. Wish us luck. All you need is the desire. I encour­age you to give it a try. Start small and you will be amazed what you can do.

Sci­en­tist, activist, pub­lic speaker and entre­pre­neur, Dr. George B. Brooks, Jr. Ph.D., is a co-founder of Righ­Trac Inc., a com­pany focused on sus­tain­abil­ity and new appli­ca­tions of Aquapon­ics. He may be reached at info@nxthorizon.com

A. NOTES:
Greet­ings. A cou­ple of times @Bob has requested more infor­ma­tion on how our sys­tem works. Good and fair ques­tions. How­ever, I wanted to take a moment to delve into the why of our aquapon­ics rather than the how. We will get to the how but a lit­tle later. I’ve been in the science/art/business of aqua­cul­ture now since 1980 and my part­ner Jim and I work­ing on it since 1998. The Holy Grail has always been to find a method to move it (aqua­cul­ture) cost effec­tively into urban areas. Aquapon­ics clearly is a Sus­tain­able way to do this. The pri­mary focus of this cur­rent project was to increase the gen­eral public’s access to aquaponcs and to deter­mine if back­yard aquapon­ics could actu­ally help to feed a fam­ily of 4 and by how much? So to answer these two ques­tions, here are a few of the things we set out to accom­plish:
 

1. Keep the costs down as far as pos­si­ble.

2. Use 100% off the shelf mate­ri­als (if it takes longer than 2 days to get it or if MUST order it you don’t need or want it (does not include fish and shrimp but that would be good too))

3.Make it big enough to poten­tially feed a fam­ily of four and to make 1 to 1 com­par­isons to a “square foot gar­den” to cre­ate an hon­est judge of how effec­tive the tech­nique is.

4. Keep design, con­struc­tion, oper­a­tion and main­te­nance as sim­ple, fast and easy as pos­si­ble (KISS) (1 to 2 days con­struc­tion time)

5. Use as lit­tle energy as pos­si­ble and to replace needed energy with solar appli­ca­tions if pos­si­ble.

6. Make the sys­tem as resilient as pos­si­ble (power, fail­ures, mechan­i­cal fail­ure, dis­ease, tem­per­a­ture fluc­tu­a­tions, nutri­ent defi­cien­cies, pH fluc­tu­a­tions etc).

7. Cap­ture as many oper­a­tional syn­er­gies as pos­si­ble. (find those sit­u­a­tions where 1+ 1 = 4 and max­i­mize them.)

8. Deter­mine new plant­ing sched­ules

9. Develop tech­niques to grow foods peo­ple actu­ally eat or sell within their com­mu­ni­ties. 

10. Max­i­mize safety

11. Be scaleable

March 2013 will mark our 24th month of work and we have actu­ally accom­plished much of what we set out to do. To do so though we have bro­ken a num­ber of the aquapon­ics rules as sug­gested by this inter­net site, but have and will have learned a lot. We will be host­ing more classes soon as well as watch out for some upcom­ing news releases. How­ever, so the pub­lic can have access to the results of our work beyond reports at sci­en­tific con­fer­ences like Aqua­cul­ture 2013 (If they accepted the abstract, Aquapon­ics and STEM edu­ca­tion in Phoenix Ari­zona), or blog post­ings, we are work­ing on a book about our experiences.

George B. Brooks, Jr. Ph.D.
President/CEO at NxT Hori­zon Group
Owner, South­west Green