eatwhatyoubelieve

Yesterday Jeff and I attended Making Brooklyn Bloom, a conference exploring the themes of sustainability and urban agriculture, at the Brooklyn Botanical Garden.  There’s a lot to be said about some of the characters that turned out for the event, not all of it good, but for today I just wanted to focus on a workshop we attended on aquaponics.  If you are wondering what exactly I mean by aquaponics, let me confess that I only vaguely grasped the concept before yesterday morning.  I knew it involved a tank of fish, some plants and a water pump, but beyond that the details were murky.  Had I attended the conference on my own, I probably would have opted for the workshop on rooftop gardening, but Jeff has been consumed with a passion for the idea of aquaponics lately, so off we went to learn more about this mysterious growing practice.

The presenter was Dr. Martin Schreibman from Brooklyn College, who is also known widely within his field as Brooklyn’s own Aquaman.  I’m just reporting the facts, people.  Over the course of an hour, Dr. Schreibman managed to explain in surprisingly simple terms the mechanics through which water containing waste from a tank of fish can be circulated into a vessel in which plants are growing, and then recirculated back into the fish tank after the plants have absorbed nitrates from the tank water.  It’s a little more complicated than that, but not too much.  The examples Dr. Schreibman described seemed to be almost entirely “closed loop systems,” except for the fact that the fish need to be fed, and the water pH sometimes needs to be manipulated.  Otherwise, there is minimal water loss throughout the recirculation process, the plants receive all the nutrients they need, and there is no messy waste removal from the fish tank.  All in all, it’s a brilliant system, particularly for urban areas where it can be difficult to find the land to use traditional growing methods, much less the water for large-scale fish farms.

Dr. Schreibman seemed to believe that aquaponics systems are scalable to almost any size, but he hinted that this growing model is not necessarily financially sustainable (at least not in his own experience – a farm he started in New York state did not succeed).  The environmental implications of aquaponics would be substantial, should it ever be adopted on a large-scale.  Imagine a world in which we could raise vast quantities of healthy, hormone-free fish and plants with minimal waste of resources and environmental impact.  Now think about doing that in major urban centers, where the resulting products would only need to travel a matter of a few miles, or maybe even a few blocks, to reach consumers.  It didn’t take much to convince me this is a possible path to a healthier future for people and the planet.

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