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Learning What Aquaponics Is

By Alexandra Smith


Learning the meaning of Aquaponics entails having to understand two words that is basically makes up or is the important components onf Aquaponics. By understanding the meaning of the two words, Aquaculture and Hydroponics, it will be easier to explain and know what Aquaponics means. Aquaculture is basically the process of plant or animal cultivation or development under water. This means that Aquaculture is the process of taking care of underwater plants and animals, both salt and freshwater that is. On the other hand, Hydroponics is simply plant cultivation without the involvement of soil as a medium to grow the said plants. Now in order to understand Aquaponics, it is simply defined as a combination of both Hydroponics and Aquaculture. To explain further, Aquaponics is the process of raising fishes and growing plants in an environment wherein both can benefit from each other.

How does this work? Generally, what happens is that, the wastes coming from the fish become a nutritional supply to be used for the plants to grow. On the other hand, the plants become responsible to make the water that the fish live in clean for the fish to grow healthy as well. The process for Aquaponics is simple. Plants are planted in Grow beds. On the other hand, the fishes are raised on the fish tank. From the fish tank where fishes are raised, pipes are attached connecting to the water beds where the plants are planted. Then water from the fish tank is pumped towards the plants in the grow beds to water them and provide nutrients for the plants to grow healthy. The wastes from the fishes are considered as fertilizers that provides nutrients to the plants. The good thing about using these fish wastes as fertilizers for the plants is that it is a natural fertilizer and poses less risk of harmful side effects for the plants. Now the water from the grow beds will pass through a filtering system, consist mainly of stones, sands and pebbles, for it to be clean again and will be pumped back to the fish tank. The water that is pumped back to the fish tank is already clean and has sufficient oxygen content since it came from the plants.

Some benefits you can get in making use of Aquaponics as a method of growing plants and fishes are the following:

- Provides natural fertilizer for the plants. As mentioned earlier, since the fertilizer utilized by the plants comes from the fishes directly, it does not contain harmful chemicals that may have damaging effects on the plants.

-Utilizing the Aquaponics system also helps in water conservation. This is because you don't need to change the water on your fish tank very often since water is recycled, meaning it is cleaned and filtered with the help of the plants and the water-filtering system.

-There are many kinds of fish as well as plants recommended to be grown using the Aquaponics method. Therefore you don't have to worry about the kinds of fish and plants to grow because you can grow almost any kinds of fish and plant using the Aquaponics method.

Aquaponics may be something that not most of the people are familiar with. But this method may be of great help for us to make use of an environment where we can utilize wastes of both the plants and fishes and transform it to be beneficial for each other instead of just throwing it away.




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