By Brent Baughman
NPR
July 3, 2011
Excerpt:
His utopian city is one with Jacuzzi-sized fish tanks on every roof, giving locavore owners more than 100 pounds of fish a year.
Schreibman further sweetens the deal with something called hydroponics. By tweaking his filtration system to leave a certain amount of fish waste in the water, plants can be grown in the same tank.
“We’re talking plants floating on the surface of the water, using the fish waste as nutrition,” he explains.
Lettuce, herbs, bok choi and kale can all be grown this way. The plants float on a foam sheet, their roots dangling into the water below.
“Fish poop a lot,” Schreibman says. “People would be amazed at how much product you can produce in a certain area.”
He says lettuce heads, for instance, can be grown six inches apart and cut in about six weeks. Herbs can be snipped for cooking and continue to grow.
Read the complete article here.
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"I work on what’s called a “recirculating” aquaculture farm. We’re still trying to maximize fish production, but we deal with the waste problem by closing the loop, doing our own water treatment on site and re-using as much of the water as we can. We have very high stocking densities -- let’s say twenty to thirty thousand fish, in tanks the size of swimming pools. Dozens of these tanks can fit together within one warehouse building. The water they swim in is constantly flushed out, filtered or treated in several ways, and pumped back in clean. The solids that are removed in the treatment process are stored and sold for fertilizer. So the water in the tanks “recirculates,” in parallel, and the tanks share a number of supplementary systems that help maintain an optimal growing (“culture”) environment: heating, feed, chemical regulation, and so on. We grow them for about a year, with each fish ending up as about a pound of meat when fileted. The idea is that this basic design can be scaled up to make really huge farms. Ours is a really huge farm."
