University Place

Good evening! I am so glad you're all here tonight. I am Carol Shirk. I'm the president of the Dodge County Master Gardner Association.

Glad that you're here for our February meeting. I would like to introduce to you our speaker. Mark Krause is here with us tonight. He and his family own Windy Drumlins.

Mark is a native of Wisconsin. He spent nearly 30 years in the food industry working for a number of companies focusing on process improvements. But today he lives on a small farm south of Horicon. He is going to present an overview of aquaponics tonight.

It's a relatively new agricultural technique. He's going to give us an explanation of what it is, how it works, some of the key characteristics, and he's going to talk to us about sustainable lifestyle along with it. Please welcome him tonight.

applause

It's probably inappropriate for the video, but you just did my whole presentation. So I can open it up for questions right now. No? Okay.

As Carol said, my name is Mark Krause. I originally hail from Wausau, Wisconsin and spent my formative years there, of course. And then moved on to Madison to get educated, and that's where I met my wife, Fran, who was also in Madison at school. And everything kind of proceeded from there.

What I'd like to do tonight is give you a little bit of a backdrop with regard to where Windy Drumlins came from, how we hatched the idea a little bit. And then from there, we're going to talk a little bit about sustainability which is kind one of my personal passions. And I think it relates really well to those folks who are master gardeners. I think you're helping that international project along, if you will.

And then I'm going to spend the majority of the time talking about aquaponics and how we got started and where we came from nothing to where we are today. Okay? Okay! So we've already talked about where I came from and a little bit about how we had this kid from the city meet this lady from the farm.

The farm won out. And I'm so glad that happened, because I think the lifestyle is much, much better than the city. Although, we spent the majority of our married life in big cities. So, I'm just glad that we were able to get back here.

And very early on in our marriage we kind of came up with this idea, the 'Dorothy Theorem,' which, as I look across the audience, pretty much every one of you know what that is, I think. But occasionally I'll be with a younger group, and they have no idea what 'The Wizard of Oz' is. And all we were trying to say to each other was, "Look, there is no place like home. And some day we hope to figure out a way to get back there." We spent a lot of years traveling around the world.

We had a lot of opportunities overseas. Particularly I guess, warm in our hearts is Australia. We spent a long time in Australia. And that's a whole other story.

But that's a lifestyle that very much mirrors the kind of lifestyle that we're evolving out on Windy Drumlins. Certainly, for me at least, I think that the biggest change is in me. I guess I grew up in a city thinking that's-- you know, you went to a grocery store to get your groceries and that somehow they magically appeared. My wife of course came off of a farm, and she grew all her vegetables.

So this was a very different approach, frankly. Although back then, we still did have gardens. They don't have much gardens today anymore in urban environment because there simply isn't any room. So here's the gang.

It's a family operation. We had three children, and they're in the business of having children now. And we have all the skill sets in the family to help make this happen. The idea, actually, for Aquaponics that we're going to talk about in a few minutes came from our son who spends what I would say is an inordinate amount of time on the internet.

And he ran across this, and we got to looking at it and talking about it. And it seemed to make a lot of sense, because the vision that Fran and I have is to try to live as much as we can off of the land. We have a small, 80 acre piece of property that we purchased while we were still in California, and when we were able to get back here, which was about three years later, we began developing that piece of property. We intentionally bought what I would describe as pretty much a virgin piece of property.

You can see a picture of it on the left here. It was a few, say-- I think there was about 20 acres that was actually tilled, and the balance was woods and kind of swampy because we're about a mile south of Horicon right off Highway S for those of you who might be familiar with the area. And in fact, the name comes from where we happen to be located. We're sitting right on top of a drumlin.

For those of you who don't know what a drumlin is, that is a glacier. Hence,

our tagline

"where glacial leftovers feed Mother Nature." And in our particular drumlin, I could count the number of non-windy days on one hand in a year. It blows wind all the time. So that's kind of good and bad. So at any rate, that's how the name came about.

So we started with this piece of raw material, if you will. And we immediately started building infrastructure, and it evolved to what you see today. There's a large body of water. I call it a pond; Some people think it's a lake, but it's fully stocked with fish, because our goal, remember, is we want to live off the land.

We'd like to, in a perfect world, get a hundred percent of what we consume off of our piece of property. It's not going to happen. On the other hand, it's a challenge, and it's very rewarding to see just how far you can push that envelope. So we've put a lot of infrastructure in.

It may be a little bit hard to see, but there's a small-- I call it a vineyard right there. It's actually 24 grapevines. There's three different grapes. We don't make wine; we've got enough to do that we don't spend our time making wine.

But we do squeeze the grapes and make our own grape juice and freeze it. You can also maybe spot-- there's a small apiary right there, and there's some more hives sitting right over there because I was a beekeeper before we left the state of Wisconsin. I still love beekeeping, and we're actually going to look at some bees a little bit later in the presentation. But I'm now transferring that over to my son because there's a little bit of heavy lifting in beekeeping that I would just as soon leave to the younger guys to do.

So we're moving away from that. We also raise our own chickens. We purchase the chicks, of course, but then we have a coop. You can see we actually move the coop.

It's the greatest natural fertilizer in the world 'cause we just keep rotating that coop around here. And it's the greenest grass on our property. They kill it at first, but eventually it turns really, really green. And of course you can see the brand new greenhouse that's sitting over here, okay?

So there are some outcomes that we would like to share with you. These are all products off of the farm. This one might surprise you a little. But we don't grow those.

We actually-- that's venison sausage, because we do have some deer hunters that help us with that part of it. Of course the fish off of the pond. The honey, from the bees. These are peaches, actually.

Hard time growing those; we get a lot of peach rust. They're a real challenge. And then of course-- these are pears, and these are apples. This is a little trick shot here.

That's actually a baby oak leaf lettuce that we snuck and put a nasturtium flower on because we thought it looked cool for you gardeners. And then there's my loving wife holding some of the bounty coming out of our greenhouse, okay? You can't work all the time. You have to play some of the time.

So we also consider this our playground, if you will. And you can see some of the things that we actually do over here on the far left. That's actually family stuff. That's my wife's mother and her sister, and they were here and they were painting gourds that Fran grew on the property.

So those are gourds just like here that-- I don't know how long it takes. It seems like it takes over a year to dry those things out and get 'em ready, but we do that. And of course because we're into this sustainability thing, there isn't much that we don't reuse. That person, I don't when they left, but their boots are still there.

And of course we play, and you can see here my wife with a-- she found a fawn one day that must've just been born. And so we have a lot of fun, okay? These are just some more examples. We do try to run or entertain people with training courses so that they can learn how to do this stuff.

My wife is great at making willow furniture. You can see some of the classmates. And this of course, I couldn't resist putting my grandson in there. He made this 55 gallon drum that has a pipe in the center so you actually get liquid compost tea out of it.

But these are some of the-- He was setting up a barrel to grow strawberries. And I think that looks like geraniums on top. It doesn't look like a strawberry flower to me. So you gotta have some fun.

Okay, so what is this thing that I talk about when I say sustainability? Well, it's really quite simple. And it starts with something that's really, really very important. Hopefully as you see those hints there, you've already guessed what I'm talking about.

Because without it, we don't come into existence. It just doesn't happen without photosynthesis. So we have to have that because it's the only way we get biomass in this world-- of any significance, for that matter. And it's simply that taking carbon dioxide, right, for you master gardeners maybe this is a little heavy chemistry, but hang with me here for a minute.

We're just trying to take the carbon out of the carbon dioxide and to build the molecules that make everything or are a part of our body. That's where it comes from. Without photosynthesis we can't, what they call "fix" carbon. It doesn't get into a molecule that we can do anything with.

So it's critical that we have photosynthesis. So, where am I going with this? Well, there are lots of things that we do that are kind of counter to the ability of our Mother Earth to do enough photosynthesis to feed all of us, okay? There are lots of experts out there, and they tell us that the maximum amount of Homo sapiens that we can feed on this earth is somewhere around 10 billion people, okay?

Well, the fact of the matter is, there's 7.2 billion of us out there already, and they say we get about a billion every ten or twelve years. So most of this, most of us in this room are going to see the day when we're right up against our ability to feed everybody. That's where aquaponics is, I think, going to be a big player in that particular activity. In the meantime, what we do need to have people do is think in terms of their personal or carbon footprint.

And we don't have to reinvent ourselves here. There's all sorts of little things that we can do. But keep in mind that out of what we get credit for-- 'cause we get credits for government CO2 production, as well as industry. That's all part of what they add to our personal footprint.

But of that total, 75 percent is what you and I do personally. It's how we interact with Mother Earth. So it's important, and we can have an impact here. Because remember, if each of us only does one little thing-- and my favorite is "paper or plastic?" Ever hear that expression before?

Yes! If we say paper, and 7.2 billion people do that, that's a very much more sustainable choice than plastic. Of course, plastic is convenient. I get all that, but the reality is that plastic is not sustainable.

It's just not going to be there 20 or 30 years from now. If you want to learn more about it shrinkthatfootprint.com is one of the most entertaining websites. It's actually British, but it's a lot of fun. There's a lot of videos, and there's a lot of practical examples of what you might do.

Some of these you're going to recognize. Probably-- well let me get a show of hands. How many people actually can? Lots of you!

You know, that's a wonderful thing because it impacts on a lot of levels, doesn't it? Not only are you putting it in glass, which is a much better container, you're shortening the supply chain to about as short as it can get, right? You walked out to the garden. You picked the green beans.

You brought 'em in the house and you turned them into dilly beans. And you put 'em in the root cellar or wherever you hide them. That's about as short a supply chain as I can imagine. Where I came from in my career, we had supply chains that were 15,000 miles long.

That's not a very sustainable way to look at the world. And as we go forward, we're starting to get faced with the kind of pressures that mean we really need to rethink some of this stuff. But once again, we don't have to go crazy. We just have to do a few little things.

Here's a couple of examples, right? How we cook and the quality of our cookware. There's all sorts of them. This one is one of the tough ones, because I have an audience here that I can see there's a lot of males in here.

And males don't like greens. I'm about to show them lettuces, and they're like, 'Who cares?'. The reality is it's going to be pretty important going forward that we rethink that and make sure that we're making as good a choice as we can, not only personally, because I like a steak too, but also in a larger context. And how much you can or are willing to do, I'll take anything, from my own personal point of view.

And Mother Earth would be quite delighted if you could do a few things. So that one you have to really think about. I will leave you with one thought relative to this page. That's that what you choose to eat really determines just how much you end up eating.

Because experts know that if you eat nutrient-less food, you will not get satisfied. We know that. So if you're eating very nutrient-rich food, you're likely to eat less food and not even think about it. So, think about that.

Of course there're all sorts of other possibilities. I'm going to focus in on the one on the left with my wife there holding some more greens. See what that is behind her? That actually is a little aquaponics operation right there, and you can probably-- I spent a lot of money, but it cost a little less than $100.

It's actually my son's. He's the one who put it all together. But the point is, you can have your own little aquaponics operation if you want. And for me, and I hope for some of you out there, the neat thing is it's a 365 day a year opportunity.

You can do it all the time in your house. If you have an aquarium, you can turn your aquarium into an aquaponics operation if you wanted to. It's really quite simple. Some of these other ones, you probably recognize.

Perhaps there's an idea or two. But the real point here is spend a little time and think about how it is you do things. And maybe you could do something; just one little contribution would be a big deal. What I have here is a swarm.

Has anybody ever seen or been involved in catching a swarm? Okay, we've got a couple people out here. Well this is a little video, and I want to show you how that works.

insects buzzing, Mark speaking indistinctly

our tagline

So this happened last summer, it actually was in early June. And it's right near one of my-- I'll call it my shop.

bees droning

our tagline

I have no idea how many bees are here, but I would say somewhere in the neighborhood of maybe... maybe 10,000 bees, about three pounds of bees, my guess, which is a small swarm. But maybe more are still coming. It's hard to say.

They've all left the hive.

bees buzzing

our tagline

They usually won't stay here more than, say, an hour. But given the time of day, if we're lucky, those bees'll come together and we'll be able to catch 'em before sunset.

Woman

Do you want to talk a little bit about how you're managing to stand in the middle? Well, a swarm is typically, other than the scout bees, young bees. And young bees don't have a tendency to swarm. They're pretty much focused-- or sting, rather.

They're pretty much focused on starting a new hive, so focused on that that there's little or no interest in stinging anything. They're really not paying attention to me at all. Except the one crawling on my neck. As you can see, I can get in pretty close and they really don't, really don't bother me.

There's little pockets of bees up here and on all the other leaves. Eventually all these bees should come together into this swarm, and then we'll be able to snip the branch and take all the bees at once. Here's once that landed on my finger. They might mistake me for the tree and start landing on me.

You can also see there's quite a collection on the ground. I don't think there's more than three or three and half pounds of bees. You could reach right in here, and you could put your hand by the bees. They don't really pay any attention to you at all.

Oh, I can see the queen! Oh, really? Well, hold on. It might have been a large drone, but it really looked like the queen.

But normally the queen would be hidden. See they're landing on me. Here's a bee with-- must have been a field bee coming back. It's loaded with pollen on the tip of my finger.

But you can see how uninterested in me they are. They just cling to each other. There's all sorts of bees in there. You can reach your hand in there.

Don't know what to make out of you. (bees buzzing loudly) So a couple of things. Of course I was in shorts and a short-sleeved shirt. Swarms are all young bees, and it's the way they sustain themselves is by dividing.

And so it's on one hand it's kind of like reproduction, if you will. They have one hive and they split into two. They create another queen. The old queen leaves and finds a new house.

The new queen gets to start making house in the existing hive. But it is a type of sustainability that is really at risk. For those of you who haven't followed it. It's kind of hard not to, if you're in the business you're in.

It's the bees-- it's a big issue for bees right now. It's quite a challenge for beekeepers. And I give all these guys a lot of credit because they lose a lot of bees, and they have to replace them or they have to split them. There's just a lot of work to create that opportunity for the rest of the ecosystem to be sustainable, right?

They're the ones helping pollinate things and helping seeds to be created so that we can plant then again the following year. So it really is a huge deal. But that's probably, by itself, an entire presentation. Okay, so now let's get to what we really wanted to get to, and that's aquaponics and see what exactly it is.

First of all what it is, and then we're going to-- I'll show you what we did, and then we'll talk a little bit about just exactly what our success has been and some of the opportunities we still have in front of us to make things even better. I mentioned earlier that the biggest single reason for something like aquaponics is because we have to find better ways and more ways to grow more food for the masses. Now it's a big debate right now just exactly how many of us can be running around on this earth without causing any more problems. But the fact of the matter is, when there were only a few hundred thousand of us, Mother Earth could handle us quite well.

But there's enough of us now that Mother Earth is struggling. It needs help. And so to that extent, things like aquaponics help. We'll get into some of the reasons why.

Some of them we're starting to-- you can see some of those in some of those bullets here. But the fact of the matter is anyone in this room could do aquaponics. It's really not hard. It just requires a commitment to the activities necessary.

And because aquaponics is the marriage between aquaculture, which is on the one hand just raising fish. That's those people who raise fish, farm-raised shrimp, farm-raised tilapia, farm-raised all sorts of things. In any case, that's married with hydroponics which has been around for a very, very long time. And that's simply growing vegetables in water.

Pretty much anything can be grown in water, but that doesn't mean everything should be grown in water. Because some things don't grow that well in an aquaponics environment. Yeah, you can grow 'em. I'm currently trying to grow a banana tree in our greenhouse just because I think it would be wild to say that I picked a banana in Wisconsin in January.

So that's one of the reasons people do, I guess, some of those kinds of things. But the fact of the matter is, you're not going to have a banana orchard in aquaponics. In addition, there is an infrastructure necessary. So it's not simply throw some fish in a tub, throw some plants in a tub and life is good.

That isn't quite how it works. So there is some necessary infrastructure. But it's really not all that complicated. And I'll go through that in a minute.

But let's just briefly talk about the history, because there are a lot of people today that would suggest to you that aquaponics is a fairly new type of agriculture. Well, it isn't so new. It actually probably predates what I was able to find. But for sure, the Chinese did it.

The Incas did it. The Aztecs did it. There was an awful lot of aquaponics going on. Frankly, when you get into the 1200s - 1500s of our world, they were feeding an awful lot of people using aquaponics as an agricultural technique.

So it's already been successful in contributing to the sustainability of our earth. Today there are all sorts of people involved in aquaponics. But it really got started in earnest in late 1960s, early '70s, actually here in the United States, which is to me a little bit ironic since the United States is already well-known for its agricultural prowess. It really wasn't having trouble feeding the population.

Yet, we do do a lot of research in this country, and this is an example of some very meaningful research that was done. And it started at the New Alchemy Institute. And since then coming forward in the early 1990s, then it really started to pop and resonate with people. So there was an awful lot of research done.

And people argue about whether Dr. McMurtry or Dr. Rakocy is the father of modern day aquaponics. But for me, I don't think they probably care.

What they really are interested in is having us be aware of it and consider it. And not only that, support any efforts to go in that area because it's a meaningful and I would argue, hands down the only true sustainable farming that we can probably do on this wonderful planet. All other things are going to have their issues sooner or later. In order to do this and make aquaponics successful, there is a cast of characters involved that we really have to make sure are there.

You probably already know the first one, right? You gotta have fish. Now here's it interesting. There's probably almost as many fish being trialed as there are aquaponics operations.

But the point is almost any aquatic animal could be used to make aquaponics work. You saw on an earlier slide back in China, they started with ducks, and they used the waste from ducks to feed the fish who fed some more fish who then fed the rice paddies. So you can make it as simple or as complex as you'd like, and you can do it with an awful large variation of fish. That's why I said earlier, your aquarium, if you have one, could probably be used in order to generate enough fertilizer to grow some plants.

So that's the first and-- I don't want to say any one of these is more important than the other, because the next one of course that we need in an ecosystem is we've gotta have some bacteria. Now by the way, these are the same bacteria that are in the soil. So, there is no question that, while those people who do farming in soil may take exception to those people right now that do farming in water, they're both using the same ingredients, for the most part. It's just a different infrastructure, if you will, that's going on.

So if we have fish and we have bacteria, I think what you know what the last one is, right? The last one are the plants. They're all critical. You take any one of those out, this is a house of cards.

But this is how our ecosystem on the earth is, too. If you take any significant element out of our ecosystem, it's gonna fall apart. So we have to be very aware, or more aware, I would argue, today than they maybe had to be even when I was a child because, my goodness, the population has more than doubled since I was a child. In fact, I think it's tripled.

So now there's a lot more. So now all of a sudden the resources that we have, which are limited, have to be managed more carefully. So these three folks have to get together because you know what? Plants don't exactly like the same environment that fish do.

They don't like the same temperature. They don't like the same pH. Think of it as one likes sweet and one likes sour kind of thing. So we have to get 'em to compromise.

The bacteria are actually probably the most flexible in the group, although they've got their own idiosyncrasies. These are what are called 'nitrifying bacteria' because they take waste in the form of something I'm sure you've heard of, called ammonia, and they will convert ammonia. But it has to happen in two steps. So these are like kissin' cousins, okay?

What they have to do is they have to take that waste that's created-- and by the way, how does a fish create waste in an aquaponics system? Well, of course we feed them, right? And once we feed them-- and that's essentially the only input in aquaponics. I'm going to get into some more specifics in a few minutes.

But the fact of the matter is, the feed is the most critical component, and it drives everything. So once we feed them and this waste is created, fish, interestingly enough, are probably close-- at least on a multicellular organism, one of the most efficient food-converters there are. So when you feed a pound of food to a fish, you can expect about 1/3 of a pound back in terms of biomass. They're that efficient.

We would need at least ten times that much. Probably more like 20 or 25 times more. So there's a lot of differences in the metabolism here. So if they put us in the water and they tried to feed us in the water and maybe we had some way to breathe in the water, we wouldn't be quite as helpful, because it would take us an awful long time for us to get anywhere.

So now, the Nitrosomonas, that really kind of a tongue-twister there-- that first bacteria is the one who takes that waste from the fish and just so happens, if you think about it, they swallow ammonia, but they have waste, right? They must have waste. Well, their waste is called nitrite. That's this substance right here.

It just so happens, their kissin' cousin, nitro back there, loves nitrites. So they gobble up all the nitrites, and their waste is nitrates. For those of you who don't know what nitrates are, that's kind of a fancy word for fertilizer. And it's actually the nitrogen in there that the plants are after from a biochemistry point of view, because they need that to make protein.

It's a building block, right? It's very, very important. Now all of these items, the ammonia, the nitrite, and the nitrate, are poisonous to fish in a high enough concentration. So when you start the system, how does one get this started?

Well, you put the fish in the tank, and they start generating waste, but there's no bacteria yet. Well the answer is, early on, you have to change the water until the bacteria get established. They will come. They're natural.

They're all over the place. They're probably on the bottom of your shoes, okay. But it takes them a while, 'cause they're real slow growers. Nitrifying bacteria, by their very nature, are slow growers.

So it takes a while. It can take, in our system, which is about 12,000 gallons in size, which is about as small a commercial operation you might find, we're still settling in and we're a little over a year into it. That doesn't mean we're not growing plants, 'cause we are. They're wonderful, and I've got some here that you can see on the table.

But, in order to get that ecosystem stabilized where you can kind of sit back and take a sigh of relief, we're just now getting there, okay? Now each one of these... these guys, if you think about, are cleaning the water for these guys, 'cause they're creating this, and that's a problem for them, as well as the fish. And so they clean it up and they create a problem that's bad for other guys, including the fish, but the plants say, "Mmmmm, sounds good to me." So they, literally, clean the water.

Think of the plants like filters. Now what ends up happening in aquaponics system that I'm going to show you in a minute is there is water recirculating continuously, okay? Constantly, there's water going. For those of you who might be thinking about it, boy that could be a lot of energy,

imitating buzzer sound " ENNN "

Woman

Wrong answer! I'll show you in a minute how little energy is required, because we get some free energy. And I'll explain that to you in a couple of minutes. Now I do want to spend just a minute or two on 'Rodney Dangerfields', and that's because one of the degrees I have is in microbiology.

So I love microbiology, and I think it's a darn shame that nobody, and I mean nobody if you go to any kind of aquaponics training is going to talk about the 'Rodney Dangerfields', but they're absolutely critical. Because what they do, is they take all the micronutrients that plants absolutely need.

You know some of them

iron, magnesium, manganese, boron, zinc, copper. The plants don't need much, but they can't just take a bite off of a chunk of iron and take it in and work with it. It's got to come through the roots. So it has to somehow be put in a form that the plants can take in and use, because there are a number of micro ingredients that are necessary for photosynthesis.

So if we don't have these heterotrophs running around, right here, these guys, which are natural, again. And it takes time. If you don't have them this thing is going to fall, again, in a heap. So we have to get all that stuff established, okay?

Now this is the end in mind before we started our project for aquaponics. So let me just briefly take you through it. Here's the building, of course. Here's our grow-beds.

That's the biggest part of the building. This is what's the greenhouse here. And this wall here separates the greenhouse from what I call the fish house, where you have your tanks, then we have some settling tanks. They have some fancier words for 'em like 'clarifiers', if you ever hear that word.

They're just going to clarify the water. It's like clarifying what you just said to somebody, make it clear, that's all we're trying to do here. And then of course we have our packaging and our storage and sales area that we planned for before we started building. I mentioned a few minutes ago it's really kind of simple when you think of the components.

What did you just see in that last graphic? You saw some fish tanks. You saw the clarifiers, or those settling tanks. This is an early picture-- that's what a grow-bed looks before you put the liner and the water and all the piping in there.

And then you have to have the pumps. Now this particular pump is one I haven't talked about yet. I feel like a lot of information I'm giving you, you already know. But I need to tell you that we know fish need dissolved oxygen to breathe, but you know what else needs a lot of oxygen?

Plants. Plants consume a great deal of oxygen in order to do their business. So when we aerate the water, we need a pretty sizeable pump. This is the one that is kind of, from an energy consumption point of view, is kind of the pain in my side.

That one takes a good bit of energy. Moving the water doesn't take much, and I'll explain in a minute why. So those are my components. But before we get to the building, remember I said we were on a drumlin, and there's a lot of steep curves and things?

We had to flatten things out. So we had to do a good bit of excavating. So we spent essentially-- you can see moved quite a bit of dirt here. It took one week from field to pad.

So-- meaning I now had something I could build on, okay? So that took about a week. This is now in 2013. Then we started construction, and we're going to start at 12 o'clock here, and we're going to build this building in about a minute, okay?

So we first had to lay out all of our piping underground so I wasn't stepping over it. I went to a lot of aquaponics places, and they have the piping, but it's above ground. Now it's nice to have it above ground, 'cause you can get to it if you have a problem. But you don't usually have a problem.

But you do trip on that pipe a lot when you're walking around trying to take care of things. So I decided in our design that we were going to put that underground. And I decided to go all the way and put it under concrete. But I knew I was going need to heat in this climate.

Some of the time I have to heat. So I put radiant flooring in the building. But I put it-- on the one side-- this happens to be the fish house. It's all covered.

In the greenhouse I only put the heating under the grow beds, 'cause I really only need the plants' feet to be warm. So I made sure that the heating elements were underneath the grow beds. So the rest is pretty straightforward here. Of course, construction.

Here's the fish house. Then we're starting to fill it out. You can see my fish tanks in the background here, and the clarifiers haven't been hooked up yet and there's no piping here. That all came later.

At zero o'clock, right here in the center. I want to just spend a minute, because you're going to see the greenhouse right here. Notice the radius beams. I couldn't find anybody to build those for me.

I tried real hard. So we built them ourselves. So we went in the shop. They're 28 feet long, so they were kind of awkward little things to hang onto, but they're laminated beams.

There're six layers in each beam, and there's 24 of them, every four feet in this building. So we now have a building. And then I found the seven or eight friends, they're no longer friends, but that I had at the time

laughter

You know some of them

and they helped put the plastic on. Now in our case I went with a very specialized plastic called ETFE. And they call it that because it really stands for ethylene tetrafluoroethylene, and nobody wants to say that. But it happens to be a very special chemical.

It's only 100 microns thick; it's very thin. But it's really almost indestructible. You can slit it with a knife real easy, but short of that, you can literally walk on it. I haven't tried that, but I've seen videos of it.

Because it has great memory and it's a wonderful substrate because it lets the light through better than anything else. So we wrap the building with this plastic. We built our grow beds. Now you can see the grow beds.

Now the liner's in, and see those cords there? That's air lines. On the end of each air line is an air diffuser, like you'd have in an aquarium, only it's a lot bigger. And that's where our air gets into the water.

Along with into the fish tanks, we also have aeration in there. But the other aeration is all along-- Every eight feet we have an air stone on all the grow beds. Then of course we started filling it with water. And my wonderful wife got the project of laying all these rafts.

And I brought a raft for us today for you to look at. I'll pass it around later. But this is what I call a 55, because it has 55 holes. You'll never guess what a 32 has in terms of holes.

laughter

You know some of them

So she was laying out all the rafts. This was at the very beginning. This was in late October of 2014. And we then filled it with water.

That was very cool. They look like lap pools. They're all about 90 feet long, and there's four of 'em roughly. So we actually have 326 running feet of grow beds.

They're all four feet wide, because this is a four foot sheet of food-grade polystyrene. And that's what the plants ride in. So with that, I thought you might be interested in seeing a little bit about what's actually inside. So I made a couple of really short videos, and we'll be about wrapped up.

Mark Krause narrating

You know some of them

All right, guys! We're out here in the fish house this morning. Just checking the water temperature. It's 23 degrees Celsius.

This is kind of the engine of the operation. Without this, plants won't grow. So the system's pretty simple, actually. The water chemistry's a little complicated, but the actual what happens here is pretty simple.

We have three fish tanks. Each tank holds about 900 gallons, and there's approximately 150 fish in each tank once we get up to full speed. Right now we're a little bit less than that, but we're getting there. Essentially what happens here is we feed the fish.

The fish eat, generate waste that's consumed by the bacterial that converts it into fertilizer. So the flow, it actually comes from out in the greenhouse back in the fish tanks. From the fish tanks, it comes over to these three clarifiers or settling tanks. The whole idea here is to settle out the solids so that it doesn't plug up the grow beds.

Once the solids are settled, it simply flows by gravity through the piping out into the greenhouse. And that's it. Okay, so that's the front end. The free energy that I talked about was the gravity.

It was in the video, but I probably should have mentioned to you to take a look at it, to watch for it. Because it's a little bitty pump and it takes 90 watts, a little less than a 100 watt bulb. And it's all it pumps, that water through the system. It pumps at about 10 to 12 gallons per minute.

But all it has to do, if you think about it, is raise the water from the floor into the tank. From there, gravity is pushing that water through the entire system, okay? So that doesn't cost anything. Hence, the reason why this particular style-- one of the reasons why this particular style of agriculture is so cost effective.

So now let's step under the greenhouse side so you can see the greenhouse, and then we can wrap up.

Mark Krause narrating

You know some of them

Welcome back, guys! We're now in the greenhouse. This is where the real rubber meets the road, and we can determine very quickly how well we're doing in the fish house. On top here, we've got a group of micro-greens that we actually start in the fish house, in the dark.

And after about four or five days, once all the seeds have sprouted, we bring 'em out into the light and they shoot for the sky, so to speak. And they grow out in about 10 to 15 days actually. We have finished product that's ready for market. Down below are the grow beds.

We have enough space for 5,248 holes. This is what is referred to as a hole. And in each hole is a plant or a small group of plants. Sometimes we'll plant one seed.

Sometimes we'll plant two or three seeds. We plant them and once they germinate, they simply flow to the beds. And you can see they're varying in sizes. And by the time they get down to the end, they're full grown.

Right now we're about 2/3 to 3/4 full. And because of the lack of sun this winter, we've actually started installing supplemental lighting that you can see here. These are 1000-watt fixtures that generate additional lighting in the early morning and late in the afternoon so that we get enough photosynthetically- active radiation, otherwise known as PAR, enough of that kind of energy to the plants so that they can convert it into what you and I eat every day. So that's kind of it.

Okay, so that's the greenhouse. The acid test is, do you have any plants growing, right? So that's where you tend to go and make sure that you have that happening. Otherwise, you know something's wrong.

Or you can look at the plant, if it's yellow of it the leaves are curled, there might be some other issues. Now I kind of lied to you a little bit. I had one last clip I just put in late today because I thought maybe you haven't seen ladybugs before. Because you probably noticed on all those slides, we are organically-certified.

So we don't use any chemicals of any kind, but we do use nature against nature. And so I thought I'd show you a clip about what ladybugs, how they come. You know, you can buy them on the internet just like you can buy pretty much anything on the internet. It's a very short clip, but I thought you might get a kick out of it.

Man in green shirt speaks indistinctly

Mark Krause

But unlike a green lacewing or something, which you may or may not have heard of, that's a little bit different bug that you buy the eggs. But the green lace one will eat all stages of the insects that it eats. A ladybug only, I think, eats the larva stage. So if it's an adult, it's going to get to breed because the ladybugs are going to leave it alone.

But when the larval stage comes back around, then the ladybugs are going to get at it, right? So, you're already kind of going out. So what I do, and you know, kind of like at church, I just, like, spread 'em out. Gives 'em a chance to go find what the heck they're going to do.

I probably lose a lot in the process. When I get down low like this, I'll just toss it near one of the plants and let those guys get out. I'll put some over here. They do fly around, of course.

There's a second one in here, and this is where all the ladybugs are. So you're going to see a lot better. We're going start getting into some serious ladybugs now.

Other Man

Yeah, there it is.

Mark

See. And you can see how they start flying. Anybody else want pictures of that? Okay, so that's ladybugs.

You can buy 1,000. I buy usually 9,000 or 4,500 or whatever trips your trigger. But that's one of the ways we get rid of bugs. And I actually do it as a preventative.

So I do it every three months or so. Because I don't want to have-- by the time I figure out that I have an aphid problem, it's probably too late. So you saw the nasturtiums, if you knew what they were. Wonderful.

It's one of the few plants that's totally edible

the roots, the stems, the leaves, and of course the flowers are ab solutely spectacular. And of course there's some of our lettuce varieties. We typically have anywhere from 15 to 20 growing, because we shift varieties through the season. But we typically plant around 1,200 plants a week of about 12 to 15 different lettuces.

Okay. So there's another shot of our lettuces. You can see the little guys over here. And they get bigger as they go.

So I'll be available afterwards or when we're done here to answer questions. But there are some characteristics, I think I covered them all. Aquaponics uses almost no water. It's one of the huge ones.

That's why the love it in Africa, for example. Very low energy. One of the things that gets lost, I think often, is it's incredibly scalable. Very easily scalable.

You can go from small to as big as you want without much angst. You can add a few more fish, or you can do something maybe a little bit clever and all of a sudden you're two or three times the size. And of course it requires no soil. Our soil gets pushed hard enough.

Eventually, we keep putting more and more in there just to get things to grow now. Of course, in Wisconsin to be able to do it 365 days a year, that is, sorry to say, very cool. Okay? Thank you very much.

I hope you enjoyed the presentation. And if you have any questions, I'd be happy to entertain 'em for as long as you want to talk about it.

applause