By Lee Koelzer | Director
Fish are adorable, delicious, and create fantastically fertile liquid fertilizer. At the farm, we are experimenting on ways small scale farmers can use crude aquaponics systems to grow both their own fish AND veggies!
The first system we are working with involves recycled water bottles, a drainage rack, and a water tank. In this case, the water tank is a barrel with the side cut off. The fish (tilapia) live in the barrel and are fed a mixture of soldier fly larvae and duckweed- both of which are easily grown at home in buckets. The fish produce an insane amount of poo- which is filtered out of the water when we scoop water from the barrel to water the plants. The soil in the plants strains all ther fertilizer out of the water, and as the water trickles out and flows through the drainage system back into the barrel, it gathers the oxygen that the fish need to survive.
The Hyacinth serves to help shade the fish, provides roots for fish to hide in, surface area for algea to grow, and as an added bonus it helps pull polutants out of the water. Hyacinth is great in small doses, but best not to dump it into a lake!
The second system we are trying out is cemented ponds. These are bigger and of course more labor intensive. The fish are introduced to the pond and fed he same diet of duck weed and soldier fly larvae. The ponds are aproximately 15ft in diameter with the deeper side reaching 6 feet. Sand is added to the deeper water as tilapia will breed in captivity. This means that we can be eating the mature fish, and have a plentiful supply of baby fish to take over! Tilapia are also amazingly fast growing so they can go from baby to 1 pound in aproximately 6 months. Exciting!!!
Hyacinth is added to the pond as well, and water is scooped from the pond and used to water the crops on the farm. After, the pond is refilled with buckets of clean water carried from our borehole. Once we get a proper irrigation system we will be able to pump water directly from the pond into the irrigation tank.
Our aquaponics are all systems that the average Ugandan should be able to do at home. It is all a learning curve, but we are lovin the experience!
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