Food scares are becoming legion. Salmonella in salad greens. Staple crops and luxuries like cocoa and coffee are imperiled by climate mayhem.
The megafauna have mostly gone extinct and the herbivores we breed to replace them on our plates are numerous and gassy enough to change the climate even more. The oceans and lakes are massively overfished but fish farms pose environmental and humanitarian concerns . Enter the scientists at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev with an advanced aquaponics system to grow fish and vegetables together more efficiently in a closed loop system.
The paper by Dr. Amit Gross with Dr. Ze Zhu and Dr.
Uri Yogev from Ben-Gurion University and Prof. Karel Keesman from Wageningen University in the Netherlands was published last week in the journal Resources, Conservation and Recycling. The ultimate goal is to improve food security.
They are working with the barramundi, a popular Australian fish that is also widely grown in fish farms. Hydroponics is growing veg in water, no soil. Aquaculture means growing fish, no veg, no soil.
Aquaponics combines aquaculture and hydroponics to grow veg hydroponically together with fish. It is with aquaponics (fish + veg) that we engage here. Truth is aquaponics has been around for some 60 years, yet remains neglected, Gross says.
For most parts it wasn't efficient and wasn't developed onward. Their new system is unique in being almost completely closed and not only exploits fish feces and vegetable waste, extracting nu.