Portable Farms™

What is a Portable Farm™ Aquaponics System?

Aquaponics systems quickly pay for themselves. Instead of buying groceries that have been shipped and stored in your local store, simply walk to your own aquaponics system with a bowl, select your own organic vegetables and home-grown fish to serve your family for dinner. Not only are the vegetables and fish fresh, your new aquaponics systems is only steps away from your own kitchen.

Although aquaponics (the simplest definition being “the symbiotic cultivation of plants and aquatic animals in a recirculating environment”) has been around in various forms for thousands of years, Portable Farms, Inc. has devised proprietary ways to produce yields that fall well within established production parameters for existing aquaponics systems, but with a much more stable system requiring less intervention, featuring much greater environmental sustainability, when compared to competing technology:

• Our system qualifies to receive an organic label for produce grown in the Portable Farms™ Aquaponics System through the county office of Agri™cultural Commissioner (in the State of California).

• No chemicals (that means no pesticides, herbicides or fungicides), fertilizers, nutrients, antibiotics or buffers need to be added to the system to enhance the growth and the health of the plants and fish, and there is no need to continuously monitor the nutrient levels, pH, salinity, oxygen or anything else in the water or gravel.  Through August 2009, the longest continuously running unit is approaching 20 months of operation from inception without breaking down or requiring anything besides routine maintenance – it even survived an 11 mile journey from its original location to its current location, where the same live fish were reintroduced to the same, reassembled unit and production resumed unabated.

• The system self-regulates in extreme environments, meaning comparable yield is generated even when running Portable Farms™ Aquaponics Systems in hot desert or wintry climate – although a greenhouse or other protection from the extreme elements is required, the ambient environment surrounding each unit does not have to remain within tightly controlled temperature and humidity ranges for the Portable Farms™ Aquaponics System to function well.  With existing grow lamps, Portable Farms™ Aquaponics System can thrive in low sunlight environments, even basements and warehouses.

• Daily operations and maintenance in the smaller units, up to 20′ x 30′, can be accomplished by a responsible 14 year-old in approximately 25 minutes per day. Cleaning the Settling Tank, harvesting and planting are included in this time even though they are not done on a daily basis.  A single person, with proper training, can operate and maintain a single 90′ x 120′ Portable Farms™ Aquaponics Systems. Planting and harvesting for all sizes needs to be done on a continuous basis to maintain maximum production. The larger the system the more seedlings need to be started each week.

• The energy requirement for a 20′ x 30′ (6m x 9m) one tank unit normally runs on 60 to 260 watts, with spikes that never exceed 700 watts (assuming no grow lights are utilized) – normal usage on competing technology is much higher, typically in the range of 1,500-3,000 watts.  As units are aggregated, these savings prove to be substantial.  Portable Farms™ Aquaponics Systems are designed to be compatible with existing solar panels, permitting the use of Portable Farms™ Aquaponics Systems in distant rural locations without access to an electrical grid.

• The system has been designed to prevent catastrophic loss of fish (a common hazard in existing technology) and to minimize greatly the effects of a power failure or technical problem by eliminating the risk of a cascading failure in larger installations.

• Like other true aquaponics systems, fresh water usage and waste is dramatically curtailed (a small fraction of the fresh water required to irrigate a comparable number of vegetables planted in the ground).

• Portable Farms™ Aquaponics Systems aspire to be Carbon Negative in terms of their impact on global warming.  This would be in addition to delivering significant amounts of fresh produce and low-fat protein to local populations in a truly sustainable manner.