Or-gan-ic adj. 1. produced or involving production without chemical fertilizers, pesticides, etc. 2. designating or of any chemical compund containing carbon
For some lucky residents of Hawai'i, especially those on the Big Island where organic farms abound, finding locally grown organic produce is as easy as stopping by the farmers' market or local grocery store to grab greens for dinner. Maui fairs a bit better, but for most across the state, we are relegated to a small, sorry excuse for an organic food section at the big-name grocery store. To add insult to injury, the organic produce is shipped in from the mainland. By the time it hits the shelf, we are supposed to pretend that if we choose organic, we actually want to eat soggy, wilted and far-from-fresh produce.
Raise your recycled-material reusable shopping bag in defiance. We want beautiful, fresh and healthy produce and we want it organic. But we're never going to get that from mainland suppliers. In this equation, local is always fresher.
But even at farmers' markets on O'ahu, the population hub of the state, it's hard to find certified organic produce. Why? It takes more than three years to get the red dirt anywhere in Hawai'i certified to grow organic. In addition, many commercial farmers on the Gathering Place are stuck in the monocrop rut: acre after acre of corn, coffee or pineapple.
A handful of Hawai'iís farmers (once again, mainly on the Big Island) have decided to grow organic produce a faster and easier way than traditional in-the-ground planting. They can get certified organic in months instead of years and grow fresher and healthier produce faster and with less energy and physical effort. They are aquaponic farmers.
Never heard of aquaponics? That's because the technology is relatively new, championed by researchers at the University of the Virgin Islands over the last decade and implemented vigorously in Australia. Aquaponics is simply the combination of two farming systems that have been in place for centuries: aquaculture, farming fish and other edible aquatic creatures, and hydroponics, growing plants without soil in water with added nutrients.
The Virgin Islands model is a simple and sustainable gravity flow, closed-loop system. The water is continually circulating, day and night, between a fish tank at the top of the path, flowing downhill with the pull of gravity through hydroponic float beds growing fruits and vegetables, and into a reservoir where a pump sends the water back uphill to complete the cycle.
"We have a completely natural system," explains Susanne Friend, co-owner of Friendly Aquaponics on the Big Island. "It's healthy and robust, all our required electric energy can be carved from alternative energy sources, the same water has been circulating for a year and a half, we don't add water, and we've reduced our waste to zero by utilizing the fish poop and composting byproducts."
Susanne Friend and her husband Tim Mann had no formal farming experience when they broke ground for their aquaponic farm in July of 2007. Through education and research, the two have utilized and improved upon the Virgin Islands method of aquaponic farming and are now the leading commercial aquaponic farmer in Hawai'i.
At first, Tim and Susanne were growing an assortment of vegetables and selling to local markets when Susanne had an epiphany: retool their farm to grow an assortment of lettuce to supply their local Costco with an organic lettuce medley. She was fed up with buying Costco's organic lettuce that wilted in a matter of days because it was grown by a mainland supplier and shipped to Hawai'i compromising quality and freshness. After 13 months of negotiations, Friendly Aquaponics is now growing 600 pounds of lettuce a week for the national chain and looking to stock a greater variety of produce in Costco stores across the state.
The amazing thing is that they produce all this on about a half acre of land. The in-ground equivalent of land necessary to grow that much lettuce a week would be about three acres.
For so much produce, you'd think that a fairly complicated system is required. Not so, according to Tim and Susanne. There are six parts to their system: The first tank is home for tilapia and tiger prawns, which are also raised and sold for profit, an added bonus; The second is a solids settling tank, where large, heavy waste is separated, removed and used as fertilizer; The third tank captures finer waste particles with nursery netting and the waste is also used as fertilizer; The degas tank is next, where bubbler air stones remove harmful gases like hydrogen sulfide and methane gas; Next are the 4'-wide hydroponic troughs where the vegetables grow in little net cups nestled into a Styrofoam floating raft; Finally the water flows into a reservoir tank where it is pumped back uphill to the fish tank.
Essentially, the waste products from the fish fertilize the plants, while the plants filter and remove nutrients from the water that can become toxic for the fish. The process of fertilizing and irrigating simultaneously is referred to as fertigation. In addition to the efficiency of the closed-loop system, where the only input is fish food, it can easily be certified as organic. No chemicals are used like in traditional hydroponics and since fish are cold-blooded creatures, the fertilizer is considered organic because there is no possibility for harmful E. coli contamination as in fertilizers from warm-blooded animals. After that, just plant with organic seeds and certification is as easy as contacting one of the 27 organic certifying agencies, filling out some paperwork and paying the necessary fees. Friendly Aquaponics took it a step further by being proactive and acquiring their Food Safety Certification as a model to other would-be aquaponic farmers.
If aquaponics sounds like a good idea, but the scope of commercial farming a bit daunting, there are small-scale commercial and home applications, which are also referred to as hobby systems in the world of aquaponics. From just a couple hundred to a couple thousand dollars, a family can have a complete system up and running in just two long weekends. One month later, there's food on the table.
"If you're growing for yourself, you're not getting wholesale dollar for it, you're getting retail dollar," says Mann. "It's exactly the same as if you bought the produce in the store, but youíre avoiding that cost. Anyone growing food at home is farming the absolute highest price food there is. It's retail dollar food and the commercial farmer never gets that."
Hobby systems take up very little space and can be as diverse as the produce growing in them. On O'ahu, Glenn Martinez, owner of Olomana Farms, specializes in small backyard aquaponic systems. His systems are a bit different from those found at Friendly Aquaponics and are modeled after ebb and flow technology widely used in Australia. Martinez also uses cinder or crushed rock as a growing medium.
In Martinez's system, the water from the fish tank flows by gravity through elevated 4' x 4' pods filled with black cinders and vegetables. The water fills the pod at a constant rate and a simple siphon releases the water once it hits a certain level in the bin, hence the ebb and flow. It continues this process downhill until the water reaches the reservoir tank where one pump circulates it back to the top. The fertigation principles remain the same, the fish poop fertilizes the produce and the plants remove toxic gas from the water. Glenn also adds another organic element to his system, worms. He plants his seeds in vermicompost, an organic fertilizer.
Martinez has taken the hobby system a step further and designed an ebb and flow system using HDPE food-grade plastic barrels. He calls it the barrel garden. The barrels are cut in half and filled with cinders. Since the system is gravity fed, several barrel halves are situated on a rack with the fish in a barrel at the bottom and a pump that sends the water to the top barrel for its journey downhill.
Both farms offer tours, consulting, materials and plans for their respective systems. With the success Susanne Friend has achieved supplying Costco, she is actively looking for people who are interested in large-scale aquaponic farming.
"All my three kids work the farm with us regularly, with the exception of moving the rafts. Even my four year old does it too," Susanne Friend is excited about the camaraderie she's found with her family through organic aquaponic farming. "We do 80 percent of the work sitting in the shadeóno bending over. We harvest off sawhorses and plant in the shade. It's a paradigm shift away from farming in the ground."
With Hawai'i's reliance on imported food, we need that paradigm shift to happen now more than ever.