 Hi, my name is Molly Smith. I'm the Outreach Programs Coordinator in the School of Horticulture. Right now we're at the EW Shell Fish Center at Fisheries in the North Auburn unit. We're looking at the Auburn Aquaponics System. So aquaponics is the use of the fish culture water to furtigate vegetables or other plants. So right now we're feeding and culturing Nile tilapia. We grow them to about one pound using commercially manufactured feed. They ingest that feed. They excrete waste across their gills. And then the bacteria in the culture tank converts that ammonia to nitrogen in the form of nitrate, ultimately. And we use the fish water to water the vegetables and get a bonus of vegetables out of our fish production. Fish are typically fed a percentage of their body weight per day. So based on the biomass in the fish tank, we feed between 2 and 3 percent of the fish body weight every day. We think this technology is good for fish farmers who are already feeding fish by incorporating aquaponics into their fish production. They recover some of the cost of the feed. Feed costs can fluctuate and be a burden to fish farmers. But if they're recouping some of that cost in the form of vegetable production, then we think that that's a win-win for fish farmers. So the food that we're getting comes from Cargill. It's from a plant in Franklinton, Louisiana. And we order about three times a year. The fish food already has fertilizer applied to it when it was either corn or soybeans. So we're not escaping the fertilizer use as much. But once the feed comes here and we feed it to the fish, we do negate a lot of fertilizer use downstream. So there is some fertilizers applied, obviously, to our raw ingredients in the beginning. But afterwards, we can generate fertilizer here that relieves us of the need of chemical fertilizer downstream. So the fish act as a giant battery obviously for vegetable production. So there is a market for fish. It's not in line with what this system is capable of producing. Ideally, fish would stay here six months. And so they would go from a five-ground fingerling to a 450-gram food-size fish, marketable fish, and then we would sell them. So we're on a staggered market, some because of demand, not outstripping supply. Some fish will end up staying longer, but ideally six months. So after the fish leave here, half, about half, 100 to 200 pounds a week go to local live markets in the area, and then another 120 pounds are filleted for use on campus. So this tank is about 25,000 gallons of water, can support a standing crop of 5,000 pounds. So we could have 5,001 pound fish, or we could have 10,000 half-pound fish. So just depending on the size, but we do not exceed 5,000 pounds in the tank at any given time. So for the fish side, obviously this water goes a long way. So we've determined that this tank here can support three additional vegetable greenhouses. So right now we just have those three vegetable greenhouses supported by this single tank. So the large body of water, 25,000 gallons, makes a very stable culture system for us. There's not much fluctuation in temperature, pH, ammonia level. And so by having this large body of water, we can have confidence that not much is going to change in the culture environment. We kind of run into trouble is having different sized fish in the same large body of water. So to combat that, we have installed some hapas, basically a net in the fisheries world are called hapas. And we have different size classes sorted throughout the different hapas so that when we need a certain size class, we can easily go in and get the proper size fish. These tanks were donated to us and we were really lacking in replicated aquaculture research here. So we installed these nine large tanks are going to be used for replicated aquaculture research. And then these two tanks are just kind of to increase our water volume to give us extra water and to do some solid removal. Okay, so we do produce vegetables for campus. And this is what you see in this house. We're producing cherry tomatoes and bell peppers for campus. We've been partnered with them since 2015 to provide produce for campus. And this is just some of the production that we do. So we try to match our production schedule with the campus schedule, obviously. And that does coincide pretty well. Summertime, obviously in Alabama is hot and there's a lot of production competition from outdoor gardeners. So we tend to stop about mid-June and get out of the house. We take everything out and solarize the greenhouse. And then we go back late June with our transplants and in preparation for the following year. So cherry tomatoes, we could plant early July in the greenhouse and we could grow them all the way until next May. Bell peppers similarly, we can't grow them quite that long, but we could do two crops. Starting again early July and then in preparation for the big fall semester and the rush of students on the campus. So horticultural research has been easier to obtain than fisheries research just because of the ease of having individual plant units. So we are able to do horticultural research. Our main focus has been on cucumbers. They seem to really like the fish water and campus likes them as well and we were able to produce them fairly easily without many problems. So right now we're doing about 240 plant cucumber research comparing aquaponic water, hydroponic water and kind of a nutrient boosted fish water as well. So this is just solids that come from the fish tank and they get on, obviously they stay on top and the water passes on through but then they'll just grow like an algae on top. We do, we have a passive kind of filtration system but it doesn't get all the solids and we've actually found that the micronutrients like to stay in these solids. So they may not be even present in the water but our plants are not deficient. So that's one of the unique aspects of the fish water. So each of our plant greenhouses is equipped with hydroponic controls as well. That allows us to compare hydroponic water with aquaponic water. This is the brand Dosatron and we've been very happy with that brand. Similar to other injectors out there, we simply for hydroponic controls mix a fertilizer A solution and a fertilizer B solution and then they're injected into the water line. So part of our production for campus has included Romaine lettuce. We produce about 400 heads of lettuce a week for campus. That's helped us practice with our lettuce production and timing and it's also giving campus a lot of returns from their investment here in the aquaponics system. For leafy greens we're producing them hydroponically for food safety concerns. In leafy green production the edible part of the plant does contact the water and for that reason we're using city water with the hydroponic controls rather than the fish water. This table is simply used to germinate new seeds to be transplanted in our greenhouse. Here we're germinating peppers. We're also germinating okra and you see the past germination of cucumbers there. We're almost finished with the planting season for now. Maybe by the middle of July, middle of June we'll be starting more seeds. So this is pretty much it for now. One of the benefits of aquaponics is that we're reusing water for multiple uses. So we'll use the fish water, obviously to grow fish. Then we can use it in the greenhouses to grow a high value crop. Then we can actually catch that water, bring it outside and use it in raised beds to grow some of the less valuable but still highly desired crops like squash, okra, peas, things like that that you couldn't really justify putting in a greenhouse. So me being a fisheries person and then the rest of my colleagues being either horticulture, biosystems or food science, we don't have a lot of experience in pest management. But believe it or not pest management comes into play a lot more than you would imagine or ever hope in greenhouse production. So Dr. Ayanova has played a critical role being that extension person to come out, give sound advice, give some critical guidelines in monitoring pests and treating them before they become a problem. For anyone starting an aquaponics operation, I think my main advice would be to really consider why you want to include fish. Are you a fish farmer that wants to include vegetables or are you only interested in the vegetables? If you're only interested in the vegetables, you may consider doing hydroponics first and then including the fish later. There's a lot of the expanse that goes into starting a fish operation that would not exist if you were just to do hydroponics.