The Definition of Aquaponics

By slywoman, on November 15th, 2010
It could have been a real hornet’s nest.
Kobus Jooste Kobus Jooste
Last week a courageous member of our Aquaponic Gardening Community, Kobus Jooste from South Africa, decided to start a forum discussion to define the term aquaponics.
Getting a group to agree on just about anything can be challenging.  Getting them to agree on the definition of something they are passionate about could be way passed challenging.  Getting a group of 565 passionate people with various experience levels who are scattered around the world that can randomly come and go from the conversation to agree on that definition is, well, a superhuman task.
Kobus did a great job of keeping the discussion on track, and miraculously a workable definition that was generally agreed upon, emerged by the end of the week.  If like me, you monitored the discussion all week long, then you likely enjoyed the wild ride.  Here is the result:
“Aquaponics is the cultivation of fish and plants together in a constructed, re-circulating ecosystem utilizing natural bacterial cycles to convert fish wastes to plant nutrients.
This is a natural food growing method that harnesses the best attributes of aquaculture and hydroponics without the need to discard any water or filtrate or add chemical fertilizers.”
Is it perfect?  No.  But I think it is very good.  Improvements? I’d probably swap “using” for “utilizing” and “solid waste” for “filtrate”, for example, but that’s just my minimalist style. And in a process like this, I find I should pick my battles selectively.  The substance of the definition is what matters.
Here are a few things we consciously left out, but only after some vigorous debate:
Soil-less – Some argued that once a media based system has been running for a while, and there are fish solids, and red worms, and an active microbial community, what really is the difference between this and soil?  (For the record, coming from the hydroponics side I’d probably include “soil-less” as part of the definition, but I bowed to the group.)Organic  feed sources – Most fish feed has fish meal and thus doesn’t fit with how most people define organicOrganic growing system – The term “organic” is so overused and abused that “natural” seemed to have more meaningSelf-sustaining – This implies that the system necessarily generates the fish feed.  In fact some might, but  a system need not be self-sustaining to qualify as aquaponic
I’d love to hear your thoughts.  Is this a definition of aquaponics you can adopt?  How might you change it?
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