Water Conservation is one of the most important topics being discussed among sustainability advocates. Right now millions of homes across the globe are on strict water-rationing protocols. In some arid and troubled regions like Sudan, other parts of Africa, Haiti, Egypt and many more including the central California farm belt, water shortages are taking their toll on thousands of human lives. Conventional food growing isn’t even a possibility because of limited water resources in these challenged environments. Recirculating Aquaculture Systems can change this unnecessary and unacceptable situation.

The 3 F’s of Sustainability is a phrase we’ve coined here at Aquaponics Earth.

“The 3 F’s of Sustainability” include Food, Feed and Fuel. In a RAS system, you can grow food for humans, feed for your fish and high-yield fuel-convertible plants. Our brave new world needs to become sustainable in all three of these areas in order to remain productive and viable for the long run.

So what exactly does it mean to be sustainable? Being sustainable means to be able to continually produce that important “something we need” like food indefinitely without it depleting or causing harm to our planet. Mother nature knows all about sustainability. That’s how she designed the entire natural system; and RAS technology takes it’s sustainable food-growing technology from her. In a RAS, the fish breed, the plants seed and the system goes on and on and on using one tenth the water needed to grow vegetables, fish, feed for the fish and fuel. 

The Aquaponics Earth Demo/Training BIO Station will be located in the high desert of Southern California above Palm Springs. We are presently seeking funding to build this Demo/Training BIO Station. We chose this location because it is ideal for demonstrating the viability of a RAS even in what’s considered to be a severe climate like the Mojave Desert where daytime temperatures can reach 120 F (49 C) in the summer and 28 F (-2 C) in the winter. Day to night temperature swings can be as much as 40 degrees F (22 C). Surprisingly so, with the proper environmental controls in place, these arid desert weather conditions, low humidity coupled with lots of heat, can combine to create ideal growing conditions for an RAS.

Training: This Demo/Training BIO Station will be dedicated to teaching RAS enthusiasts everything they need to know to become successful in this lucrative food-growing business. Tours and Classes will be on-going offerings at this Demo/Training location.

A Recirculating Aquaculture System (RAS) is one of the answers; and it’s growing popularity among Agricultural Scientists has come just in the nick of time. Recirculating aquaculture systems, abbreviated RAS, are closed-loop fish production systems that filter and recycle their water 24/7, which allows for large-scale fish farming that requires only a small amount of water and releases little or no toxins into the environment.

About 99.75 percent of the water in a RAS is continuously cleaned and returned to the fish tanks making a RAS's biggest benefit its water conservation. This new farming technology opens the door to commercial fish production in areas with limited water resources like deserts. When RAS technology is compared to traditional fish farming where saltwater species are left in their natural ocean environment but placed in densely populated net-like cages, which allow the bleed through of their concentrated fish waste into the surrounding ocean, it's easy to see that a RAS (which works well for both fresh and saltwater fish) represents an exciting new development in food sustainability. 

But that excitement about RAS water conservation with no environmental pollution is just the first page of the RAS story because in the process of reusing the water many times, non-toxic nutrients and organic matter accumulate. These  nutrient rich by-products need not be wasted if they are channeled into secondary crops that have economic value.

Systems that grow additional crops by utilizing by-products from the production of the primary fish species are referred to as integrated systems; and it just so happens that vegetables and some fruits are an ideal secondary crop in integrated freshwater RAS systems because they grow rapidly in response to the high levels of nutrients called nitrates  that are generated from the breakdown of fish wastes.

So in the last fifteen or so years (a relatively small amount of time considering we've been farming for thousands) an entirely new farming technology has been born that combines fish and plant production in a recirculating aquaculture system. That new RAS technology is called Aquaponics, hence our name, Aquaponics Earth.

Water Conservation is the good news that always comes with a Recirculating Aquaculture System. This food-growing technology uses 90% less water than traditional tillage farming, which brings us to the second big question facing planet earth in the 21st Century: