At 7 kilocalories of food per litre of water, iAVs tomatoes and tilapia are 4,000 to 7,000 times more water-efficient than is high-yield corn grown in Iowa (‘not to mention’ the soil loss, energy, Carbon emissions, herbicides and other pollutants flowing down stream).
And, iAVs is 20,000 times more efficient in terms of water consumed per food value produced than is corn grown in SE Missouri – albeit likely destined for combustion in a SUV engine as mandated ethanol-blended gasoline. Effectively, in the US, we’ll burn absolutely anything, including our food and remaining water resources, just to ‘save’ a few cents on fuel as we drive to Walmart and keep the factories in China pumping Carbon from Australian coal into Earth’s atmosphere.
Wow!
And why is this important?
The global water situation is dire – far more dire and imminently catastrophic than most people can comprehend. And, it’s getting exponentially worse by the hour.
Globally, two billion (or more) people are currently under severe water stress – and, it’s never going to improve even without the ongoing addition of 230,000 future parched throats and desperate mouths added each and every day (2015).
Globally, industrial agriculture is in deep trouble.
Food production is threatened on every conceivable front.
There’s exponential soil loss, aquifer depletion, extreme droughts and floods, die-offs of bees and other pollinators, mineral (nutrient) constraints, ground and surface water contamination, desertification, increasingly frequent and severe extreme weather events, fossil energy depletion/dependence and exponential mass extinction in every critical trophic level (aspect, component) of the biosphere.
All of these constraints and impacts are set against a rapidly rising human population – long ago in overshoot – and mass extinctions of virtually all non-human life. Humans are a (rapacious) subset of the biosphere/ global environment aka ‘web of life’, NOT the reverse … as so-called ‘civilization’ obviously ‘thinks’ (acts). IMO, humans are now the evolutionary/planetary equivalent of full-spectrum cancer. For those who may not have heard/noticed, cancer kills its host … if fact, this is what imparts/conveys its literal existence.
How come I’m 65% water but only 2% interested?
Stephen Colbert
Its impossible to worry about anything else without continual access to potable water – everyone, each and everyday.
http://www.usatoday.com/pages/interactives/groundwater/
“The U.N. also [conservatively] estimates that the world will face a 40 percent shortfall in the global water supply by 2030 unless dramatic steps are taken to improve the management of water. Within a decade, 1.8 billion people are projected to be coping with severe water scarcity and two-thirds of the global population could be living with stressed water supplies.”
-o0o-
Excellent presentation on “How to Build Healthy Soils” by Gabe Brown.
At ~44 min into the presentation, he states that in SE Missouri’s delta region, they receive around 50 inches of precipitation and are applying another 50″ (4.2 acre feet/acre) of irrigation water (plus tonnes of petrochemical based inputs) to grow 200 bushels of corn.
This water use rate equates to 51.4 cubic of meters of water per bushel of corn [NTM expending 10 joules fossil fuel energy for every 1 joule food value ‘produced’ and highly probable significant soil loss, pollution, etc.]
Shelled corn at 15% moisture content is 124 cal/cup or 18.47 kcal/bushel.
50+ cubic meters of water ‘for’ 18.5 kCal = <0.37 kcal/cu m or 0.00037 kcal/liter
Non-optimized iAVs has already produced 7 kcal per liter (as ‘organic’ tomato and tilapia filet) – fully 28 years ago. This is 20,000 times more water use efficient (ntm energy, etc) than the SE MO corn example – btw, likely destined for ‘refinement’ (with further water and energy wastage) into energy negative ethanol (a mandated, US taxpayer subsidized gasoline diluent).
IMO, this corn example is truly Criminally INSANE … yet an infinitesimal fraction of an ongoing run-of-the-mill H. sapiens sapiens suicide development process … as also is all industrial agriculture and other forms of ongoing planetary rape (ecocide). Homo moronicus rex indeed!
“Rescuing humanity from meritorious near-term self-extinction? PRICELESS!”
No worries – I wouldn’t suggest it’s your job to be a motivational speaker – 😀
Hi Mark, thanks for your continued replies (and links and info). Yep, I read through that forum thread and understand why it’s locked. Pity. Meanwhile, I’m in the position of info gathering – without a significant income, [Information is very easy to access online. Vetting (ntm trusting) it is a entirely different matter. Has all the refinement/study of iAVs been done? Not by a long shot! Is iAVs the most vetted/verified data set on the planet? You betcha … in fact, TMK not only is it the first, it remains the ONLY one fully 25 years later.] I have to make sure things work on the scale I need before I commit money to them. Good, that puts you well ahead of too many. Additionally, I find that though I’m relatively educated, the presentation here is in a language I’m unfamiliar with (the terminology, I mean [I’m a professional designer, engineer and scientist. Believe me, I dial-back on the ‘heavy’ jargon for the blog, or try to, Gary often ‘translates’ for me, but not always! Sorry (figuratively) that I’m not an effective communicator or motivational speaker (ask Gary, he’ll confirm)). Maybe there’s also a lack of clarity for how to navigate the site (for example, the subdirectory “/backyard” doesn’t show up on the page menus at the top and yet that’s probably where someone like me should be starting – but without a sidebar list of such tags (ie. “backyard”, “commercial” etc.) to click on, they’re hard to find unless you already stumble upon them… [ I agree and have been attempting to resolve this, and have progress to make] additionally, gave me the link to part 2 but part 2 doesn’t have an embedded link to part 1, etc) [fixed].
Please don’t take this as criticism – I’d like to see you succeed at this and to that end, making improvements on iavs.info will help. [ thanks for your feedback ]
Hi Mark, thanks for your continued replies (and links and info). Yep, I read through that forum thread and understand why it’s locked. Pity. Meanwhile, I’m in the position of info gathering – without a significant income, I have to make sure things work on the scale I need before I commit money to them. 🙂 Additionally, I find that though I’m relatively educated, the presentation here is in a language I’m unfamiliar with (the terminology, I mean). Maybe there’s also a lack of clarity for how to navigate the site (for example, the subdirectory “/backyard” doesn’t show up on the page menus at the top and yet that’s probably where someone like me should be starting – but without a sidebar list of such tags (ie. “backyard”, “commercial” etc.) to click on, they’re hard to find unless you already stumble upon them… additionally, gave me the link to part 2 but part 2 doesn’t have an embedded link to part 1, etc).
Please don’t take this as criticism – I’d like to see you succeed at this and to that end, making improvements on iavs.info will help.
A small sampling of recent food and water ‘news’:
Global drought vignettes http://robinwestenra.blogspot.co.nz/2015/06/global-drought.html
expansive urban water crisis http://www.takepart.com/feature/2015/06/26/urban-water-crisis?cmpid=ait-fb
Food constraints bring chaos, then collapse
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-06-21/uk-government-study-finds-if-nothing-done-expect-civilizations-collapse-2040
“New scientific models supported by the British government’s Foreign Office show that if we don’t change course, in less than three decades industrial civilisation will essentially collapse due to catastrophic food shortages, triggered by a combination of climate change, water scarcity, energy crisis, and political instability.”
… Lloyds released a report for the insurance industry assessing the risk of a near-term “acute disruption to the global food supply.”
“… The global food system, the authors find, is “under chronic pressure to meet an ever-rising demand, and its vulnerability to acute disruptions is compounded by factors such as climate change, water stress, ongoing globalisation and heightening political instability.”
I, many other scientists, and knowledgeable activists (i.e., Lester Brown, Paul Ehrlich, Amory Lovins, J.I. Rodale, John Todd, Guy McPherson, et al.) have been ringing these alarm bells for the past 3 to 4 decades. And, here we are, in deepest darkest doo doo, spouting deluded fantasy woo woo, while actually doing precisely nothing to mitigate, much less reverse, our exponentially dire predicament. Wise Ape? I beg to differ.
(some) Problems have solutions. (otoh) Predicaments have only consequences. Consequences have outcomes.
See http://iavs.info/commercial/dare-to-compare/ for an contrast between iAVs and UVI/DWC
See http://iavs.info/backyard/sand-bio-filter-construction-and-operation-part-2/ for sand biofilter information
A Sunday morning mini-rant (because I can):
Best case Iowa corn (only) is 4,625 times LESS water use efficient in terms of Caloric value/liter than the mean iAVs research findings (non-optimized yields). If (when) including animal proteins (such as poultry, with a feed conversion of 2.5:1 and at 25% of the total Caloric output) into the Iowa corn (+ poultry) water use data, the difference becomes (corn + poultry) is 6,360 times LESS efficient than the mean from documented iAVs research results.
If (when) I were to include UVI’s unacknowledged precipitation volumes into their claimed results, then their water use efficiency would be reduced by at least 50% (aka double the water usage than reported) – thereby ‘making’ iAVs finding 25x or more times as efficient (in kg/cu m). Since UVI dominantly grew leaf crops and not fruits, any comparison based on Caloric value per unit volume of consumption would undoubtedly be far worse yet.
These are measured units vs measured units. Not assumption or guess vs guess. This is the “What”, BUT not the “How” nor the “Why”. I cannot ‘speak to’ or guess about anyone else’s claimed “How” or “Why” assuming they have made any. I could only hypothesize as to iAVs’ “How” and/or “Why” these differences in result arise.
What I do know is the “What” iAVs has documented and what UVI has claimed. And IMO, in terms of efficacy/utility (aka in practical result), what actually matters is the “What” and not conjecture as to a “Why”. Determining the “Why” would require a considerable, protracted scientifically designed set of studies on both (every) ‘system’ being compared and explicitly tracking/documenting all the relevant factors in both approaches impacting on water ‘loss’. Anyone interested in funding such work? Apparently not – still.
Many if not most so-called ‘Aquaponisists’ have, do and will continue to make willfully ignorant and wholly unsupported – if not also felonious – claims of every sort … by the cubic delusion. I/we, on the other hand, present/contrast the summary results of ‘hard data’ from scientifically conducted investigations (supported/vetted by peer-review publication – see “Publications” section).
To my/our knowledge, other than UVI’s dubious if not also deceptive self-reporting, no one has yet documented or disclosed any tangible findings resultant to any so-called AP ‘system’ – at all – NTM has anyone conducted actual scientific research in the past 25 years. I/we have made this point (challenge) repeatedly and to date no one has yet to question its veracity much less attempted to provide any evidence whatsoever that remotely contradicts said assertion. [fully despite burgeoning legends, lore and myth (and lies) circling the globe at light speed in every direction)
One may obviously choose to “believe” (and do) whatever one prefers. Or, one may access, employ and/or develop demonstrable findings (evidence, with explicit criteria/parameters and statistically valid confidence/significance).
One is entitled to one’s opinion(s) but one is not entitled to one’s own ‘facts’.
The foregoing was not directed at anyone in specific – more of a generalized observation and shotgun commentary.
I see!
I’m still looking through what you’ve got on the site here and am trying to visualize what such a system would be like (since I don’t have the experience of AP to compare it to). I need the absolute-beginners primer 🙂
On the APN forum (the locked thread), has anyone mentioned that they’ve built such a system? If not mentioned there, are there any functioning iAVs that can serve as a model?
Wendy. A graphic animation is in process of development. Hopefully, we’ll be able to post it soon. We are encouraging iAVs implementors to share/post their ‘systems’/efforts/results but as yet we have nothing to report. WRT to the locked thread at APN, its locked for a reason (as were several previous ‘threads’ that degenerated into abusive fantasy, egomania, and displays of willful ignorance – IMO ). The “Forum” format does NOT lend itself to presenting informed content, rational discussion, elucidation of complex topics or even ‘basic’ civility. Which is why this site exists. TMK, at APN, member Ravnis is trialing sand filtration – but at this juncture I have insufficient information to claim it as iAVs per se – and Mhaigh is currently building his first system. I have no idea what anyone else is doing – and IMO most don’t even know themselves assuming that they’ve actually done anything at all besides dispense bovine excrement.
I guess I was starting from a place of faulty comparison – thinking equal sized growing beds rather than comparing water use per unit of production. I was just trying to understand how a flooded sand bed would NOT lose more water through evaporation (not transpiration which ought to be equal between systems given the same number of plants) compared to, say, a sub-irrigated system. A list of the relevant factors (minus the treatise) would be interesting, if you have the time.
Of course now I’m having a “duh!” moment after considering that this system allows for recirculating the non-transpired water where a sub-irrigated system wouldn’t…
And, “Can you provide any evidence in support of this supposition?” — nope, not at all, as admission of ignorance was pretty clear in “seem” and “not based on any experience at all.” I’m merely a curious lay person from a dry place – with some gardening experience but more often drought-stressed plants suffering from my conflicting desires to grow food and not “waste” water.
Thanks for replying!
Wendy…..the numbers that we reported were those that were recorded during the trials. Nothing was done to optimise the water use outcomes.
I guess what we’re saying is that anything we might have to say about why the system was so water-efficient would be the stuff of hypothesis. We could offer a range of possible explanations but nothing in the way of data to support them.
Some of the things that come to mind include the observation that once the water soaks into the bed, the surface quickly dries out….so there’s much less water exposed to the elements that cause evaporation. Similarly, the intermittent pumping regime means that the water is in play for less time than with other systems. There are no filters in iAVs (save the sand beds) and there is no requirement for filter cleaning.
Hope this helps.
I’m new to the aquaponics and iAVs conversations so maybe this is too basic of a question (and not based on any experience whatsoever), but how does iAVs limit evaporative loss? A non-linked system that utilizes secondary water sources (ie. greywater or fish tank water) to irrigate something like a wicking bed seems like it would have less evaporative loss, no?
Evaporation per unit production (kcal, yield rate, $ metrics) is ‘limited’ due to several factors. Addressing them would require a treatise as would any comparison drawn. Dominant ‘loss’ is transpiration (unavoidable and variable by location/season and crop as also is evaporation) and a significant fraction is incorporated into biomass (tissues).
TMK, “seems like it would have …” (conjecture) and ‘shown to be’ (evidenced) are worlds apart. Can you provide any evidence in support of this supposition?
“If you can’t show it, then you don’t know it.” ~ Aaron Ra
Gary may offer a more appreciable/copacetic response – – – or edit this one.