A Forever Young Aquaponics facility broke ground in Jonesboro last Thursday, which will be able to produce food locally for cities around the Southeast including Atlanta. Aquaponics is an agricultural technique that combines hydroponics — growing plants without soil, a technique often seen in vertical farms — and aquaculture — cultivating fish in an enclosed system.
The 70,000 square foot facility is a joint effort between the Andrew J. Young Foundation, the Clayton County Board of Commissioners and WaterFarmers Aquaponics. The foundation also has another farm in development located in Colorado, which plans to have its first harvest in December of this year.
Ambassador Andrew Young was joined with a host of partners at the groundbreaking ceremony. He expressed his excitement and enthusiasm for the development which is predicted to have a 48 percent smaller carbon footprint than traditional farming and use 92 percent less water.
In aquaponics, the byproducts from fish get converted into nitrites by microorganisms which the plants can then use as nutrients. These methods generally fall under closed environment agriculture (CEA), which benefits from limiting external factors, such as weather and insects, and eliminates the need for pesticides. Under such conditions, people can grow specific crops that would otherwise be out of season in a region, eliminating the need to source food from thousands of miles away.
“Fish are very manageable with crops, simply because of the waste that comes out of fish — both respiratory waste and metabolic waste,” said Arvind Venkat, managing partner at Forever Young Aquaponics and Scientific Director at WaterFarmers Aquaponics. “[Fish waste] is naturally water-soluble in its ionic form, so it’s unlike cow manure or other land-based animal manure which may not be readily soluble in water… so its compatibility with plants is very high, because even though [plants] are grown in soil, they uptake nutrients through water.”
Venkat partnered with the Forever Young Aquaponics venture to provide technical expertise. Venkat is an electrical engineer by training, but found himself drawn towards aquaponics years ago while doing postgraduate research surrounding energy system models and bringing food closer to urban environments. He now aids in the development of farms around the world, spanning 11 countries and 5 continents, with the project in Jonesboro being the 57th project to date.
While Venkat has helped implement this method of symbiotic agriculture around the world, he acknowledges the method itself is not novel.
“We haven’t invented this technique; there are several institutions that are pioneering what’s the science behind aquaponics, we’ve just been successful in coming up with an iteration that makes this commercially viable,” Venkat said.
He compared an aquaponics farm to a river ecosystem, with flowing waters that carry nutrients and oxygen through its waters which in turn gives opportunities for plant life to flourish around it.
Ancient iterations of aquaponics are sometimes attributed to civilizations like the Maya and Aztecs, but aquaponics as it is known today is still a relatively new field that’s become more popular in the last few decades. Venkat’s company, established in 2012, and its specific WaterFarmers aquaponics techniques is less than 15 years old.
Part of the success of his company and the industry as a whole, Venkat said, is that water continues to become more scarce and thus using water more efficiently is becoming a higher priority.
“Scarcity drives us the most, and pockets that we assumed were water-rich are very quickly turning into water-deficient scenarios,” Venkat said. “Water has been the single largest source that has pushed us as a civilization towards CEA farming because any method that you take is easily anywhere from 80 to [near] 100 percent water saving methodology.”
Much of water waste in traditional farming goes back to irrigation of crops, where water is lost into the soil. No method of agriculture is “bulletproof”, Venkat acknowledged, but CEA farming has been shown to be simply much more efficient in water usage, while also using less land than traditional farming methods.
Part of that can be attributed to the fact that CEA farming uses closed systems, meaning the water is all accounted for and, theoretically, no water leaves the system but is instead reused and redirected.
Aquaponics and other techniques like it, however, are not intended to replace traditional farming, said Venkat. Rather, CEA farming has potential to complement and augment the agricultural industry altogether.
“Most of the staple crops like grain, and consumables like sugar and corn — these are not the crops that are focused on in these growing methods,” Venkat said. “Most often it’s the quick perishing low-shelf crops like vegetables, greens, herbs… so this technique is not there to offset the soil farmer.”
With farmland worldwide decreasing by either climate change or development, maximizing space and conserving water will prove to be key in cementing aquaponics as part of the future of farming.
“If your population is increasing and you and farmland is decreasing, where are you going to meet that deficit,” Venkat asked. “Commercial-scale urban farming can truly bridge that gap of where and how we can reach quality produce.”
