Aquaponic Farm Blends Education and Sustainability

In a corner of a greenhouse that was once part of a huge Frank’s Nursery operation in Carleton, tilapia swim quietly in a big round tank. Nearby, green onions grow in water in flat beds topped with Styrofoam sheets. What’s going on here?

You’ve probably heard of hydroponics, growing plants in water. You’ve also likely heard of fish farming, also known as aquaculture. Aquaponics combines the two symbiotically, based on science developed at the University of the Virgin Islands more than 30 years. Still, it remains relatively unknown.

“You can’t go to university or college or even school right now and learn about aquaponics,” says Ken Chio, co-owner and CFO of Aqua Growers of Michigan. He and founder Jim Gill started the company with a mission of feeding people, and teaching them how to feed themselves. “Our humanitarian mission is to make this technology easily accessible to individual families or communities worldwide to empower them to feed themselves and others at a grass roots level,” the mission statement reads.

In addition to raising fish and food, Aqua Growers offers training, consulting, design, installation and sales. “We try to be an A-through-Z aquaponics facility,” Chio says. In four-and-a-half years in business, they’ve worked with schools, urban farms and individuals who want to learn how to get into aquaponics.

So how does it work? A series of tanks, each a bit lower than the one before it, hold fish. Water is pumped up to the highest tank. Gravity feeds it down to the lower tanks, where the fish are kept and fed. Then a separator removes the solids (fish waste) and a bubbler removes gases from the water. The solids go onto the compost pile. The remaining water feeds down to the plant beds.

“What comes into the grow beds is the ammonia from the fish,” Chio says. With the help of microbe inoculation, this turns into nitrates, which the plants utilize as food. Thus cleaned of ammonia, the water recirculates back up to the top.

“If you don’t understand the science and math behind it, you won’t succeed,” Chio says. But once it’s up and running and carefully monitored,

"Your harvest times are shorter because this is such a nutrient rich system; the plants are getting all they need around the clock.” No pesticides or chemicals are used, so the system is “inherently organic.” 

The plants are started from seed in coconut fiber, then transplanted into the grow beds, where the Styrofoam sheets keep down evaporation. “The advantage to this is we can grow more per square foot than in soil,” Chio says. “Any nutrient you put into the system will stay put.”

Last summer Aqua Growers grew herbs, lettuce, Swiss chard, tomatoes, Chinese cabbage, Chinese celery and peppers. They sold their produce at farmers’ markets and schools. They’ve also sold fish and expect to do so again in the future.

But in addition to providing food for market, Aqua Growers is involved in training others to do the same. “To me the education is just as important as the product itself,” Chio says. “We’ve kind of done trial and error, so we like to teach people on the mistakes we’ve made.”