The Oneida Nation recently set up an aquaponics system with funding from the USDA. Food from the system goes to the Oneida Nation School System. They expect to produce 5,000 heads of lettuce and 500 pounds of fish a year.

 

Lexi Harder from Oko Farms in Brooklyn, New York tells Ecocentric blog that, while greens like lettuce and kale are the most popular crops in aquaponics, she’s making a New Year’s resolution to experiment with much more – from lemongrass to bush beans!

In news out of Philadelphia, several area high school students will work with experts from the College of Engineering in Temple University’s aquaponics labs at the Ambler Campus. The students have an eventual goal of setting up units at their own schools.

W. De Pere High School, in Wisconsin, is in the process of setting up a new aquaponics system, being built behind their greenhouse. The sytem focuses on mixed salad greens and herbs that the kids eat in the school’s cafeteria. The 625-gallon system will hold 300 to 400 fish.

From Brethren.org, the Global Food Initiative of the Church of the Brethren made a grant to Haiti to support an aquaponics system built with support from colleagues in New Orleans. The system is a prototype and will eventually be replicated throughout Haiti in conjunction with the Haiti Medical Project.

 

Cultivating Change, a grant program that gives local farms resources to upgrade, invest in and implement sustainable technology, is awarding a total of $75,000 in funding to a handful of winners across the nation — with $20,000 to be decided by an online popular vote. Purewater Aquaponics, a Lake Zurich, Chicago farm owned by Teresa Johnson, tells the Chicago Tribune that she would use the money to add a new greenhouse and a barn that would house saltwater shrimp.

The first aquaculture program in Maryland schools started about 20 years ago in Carroll County through a partnership with Maryland Sea Grant. Now, there are aquaculture programs in 23 schools in 14 counties throughout the state. A few schools are taking the process one step further with aquaponics, as described in this Baltimore Sun article. Students at many schools are growing striped bass and perch, two species found in the brackish Chesapeake Bay.

Friends of the Earth, Center for Biological Diversity, Center for Food Safety, Food and Water Watch and Recirculating Farms Coalition have sent a letter to NOAA about its decision to provide federal funding assistance to industrial ocean fish farms in domestic waterways without first conducting any environmental reviews or consultations. The decision was made without fulfilling NEPA or ESA requirements.

Chef/farmer/entrepreneur Yseut Berlingeri of Lantana, Texas, along with her partner/assistant kitchen manager Betty Beard of Lewisville, Texas, run MY Epicurean Farm – an aquaponics farm in Denton, Texas, where they produce organically grown vegetables and herbs. The two tell the Cross Timbers Gazette, “Chefs order our greenhouse trays of plants…We teach chefs where to store the plants and how to harvest with small scissors as needed.”

Geoff Gray, the owner of Primal Gardens in Seminole, Texas, had trouble finding clean food to feed his family who follow a mainly Paleo diet, so he started his own aquaponics farm. As he told the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal, “Good quality, real food is hard to come by…We just saw how difficult it was to acquire. So we decided to do something about it.”