Aquaponics is an emerging farming technique that produces year-round vegetables, herbs and fish on a small or large scale.  A constant local food source like this seems like the future of the food industry.  Consumers are already demanding for locally sourced meat and produce, but our current monoculture farming industry has conditioned us to depend on distant and even foreign sources for our food supply, and in the process we have lost the art of small agriculture.

Aquaponics is the future of the food for both the local organic gardener and the small impoverished villages of the world.

Because of the extreme scalability of this closed-loop system, it can produce high crop yields to feed a small family or a large community.  Such high quality, organic and local food sources in such abundance benefit everyone involved.

Not only is it an easy food production system, it is also far more sustainable than the average backyard garden.  It requires 80-90% less water than a traditional growing system, which is shy aquaponics has grown exponentially in Australia, where drought has always been a major obstacle to growers.  In the US, it is a growing trend, although just as much in a science classroom as in residential applications.  But for the enthusiastic backyard gardener and the “green crowd”, the aquaponics solution is a giant fix for the problems that face our current farm-to-consumer production process.

Travis Hughey, a self-proclained “agri-missionary” who hopes to help feed the developing world, offers a free step-by-step plan to build your own Barrel-ponics system at home (already downloaded over 15,000 times since 2007).

There is something exciting about aquaponics that inspires a blend of entrepreneurialism, environmentalism and survivalism. One can just imagine a day when aquaponics set-ups are built into every new apartment complex, fed by municipal waste and run on geothermal power.  It gives everyone the chance to be self-sustainable, and that is something we innately enjoy.