Aquaponics Advantages And Disadvantages

Growing food with Aquaponics is more efficient than growing food the traditional soil garden way. In a typical soil garden, growers end up spending hours of their time doing back breaking work on their garden, but not anymore, with Aquaponics the need for any tilling, digging, or weeding is eliminated. Aquaponics combines Aquaculture (Raising fish in tanks), and Hydroponics (Growing plants without soil). The outcome is a working system that provides plants with all the nutrients they need, while using a minimum of space, effort, water, fertilizers, and pesticides. Aquaponics allows farmers to use up to 90% less water than normal farming would use, so instead of watering your soil and having the majority of your water either lost by run off or evaporated by the sun, the water is recycled repeatedly through the system saving farmers hundreds of dollars on their monthly water bills. Also when growing with Aquaponics, much more food can be produced in a smaller space, in some cases growers have produced around twenty times the amount of produce in the

While normal gardening uses soil where much of the water is lost, Aquaponics uses a variety of soil less cultures which eliminate the loss of water to the soil. Along with the soil less culture, the Aquaponics systems recycle the water constantly, so instead of the groundwater being lost in the soil, all of it is circulated back through the system making the water loss minimal. An article called What Are the Benefits of Aquaponics?, states that “Aquaponics uses 1-2% of the water that normal soil gardening uses”. Also, with traditional soil farming, one can have the problem of erosion, but by eliminating the need to plough the soil, many acres of topsoil can be saved from water and wind erosion and waterways can remain free of silt build-up. Overall, the use of Aquaponics reduces water and energy uses by a very large