What is the future of aquaponics?
For many years was the aquaponics only domain of enthusiasts in some English speaking countries. Nowadays there are appearing many new half commercial or commercial projects that move the aquaponics growing to higher level. Number of farms and organizations that have aquaponics as one of many activities is rising.
Some of the obstacles of extension of aquaponics growing between farmers are high initial costs, big volume of required knowledge and know-how. Even though aquaponics firstly started gaining popularity in north American environment, which is very different from the European one (market, agriculture conditions, land costs), the number of subjects dealing in aquaponics is also rising in Europe.
An issue is relative difficulty of operating an aquaponic system and large requirement of knowledge about its functionality. This could be solved in the future by developing intelligent sensors and applications that would give full and understandable information to the user and helped with controlling and running the whole system.
One possible application of aquaponics is a city vertical farm that could use many linked production systems and renewable power sources.
If the issues of an aquaponics are able to be solved in near future, we can expect its expansion as a new source of producing certain foodstuffs. But for that there will be one required the most important thing, stable demand for ecological, local and fresh foodstuffs. Exactly what an aquaponics can offer.
Aquaponics on Mars
The aquaponics is talked about as a technology that will be used in conquering the space, because it is highly effective in space, water and material requirement. Aquaponics could be the first technology that would produce animal proteins as fish meat to future colonists; however, it will not happen in the first phases of Red planet’s colonization. First settler will have to be strictly vegetarian and mostly use highly effective hydroponics growing.