Flow-through Aquaponics to Improve Water Quality and Generate Income

This project will demonstrate the potential of aquaponics as a low-cost, low tech sustainable part of a diversified, aquaculture production model. Aquaponics is the integration of fish and plant culture where fish culture increases nutrient concentrations of irrigation water and plant culture uses those additional nutrients to produce food or ornamental plant crops.

Additional benefits include water quality improvement as effluent nutrient concentrations are reduced after passage through the aquaponics system. This project will demonstrate to fish farmers and others who generate large volumes of dilute nutrient enriched liquid waste how to generate additional income while reducing non-point source nutrients through aquaponics. We expect there to be measurable improvements in water quality of the effluent released from the fish farms with aquaponic systems. We will quantify changes in total suspended solids load, and the concentrations of ammonia, nitrate, nitrite, and phosphate before and after passage through the aquaponic system. We expect the cooperating farmers to produce and sell marketable crops thereby generating income that will offset the initial infrastructure costs and produce profits in later years.