My wife and I visited an 'Urban Farm' in Milwaukee last winter where they do the combined Fish/Hydroponics, where the dirty fishwater is cleaned by and feeds the plant levels up above it.. really cool system, didn't use a lot of water, as it recycles and refreshes for a long time.

http://www.growingpower.org/aquaponics.htm

It also uses a vertical structure, so you're getting a lot of food growth out of a modest 'footprint' .. These are long lined trenches (30 feet x4, x4?) in a Greenhouse, with two shelf-tiers above for seedlings and so on..

I was just told by a local grower how easy goats have been for them to keep. They're not trying this in Cul-de-sacs, though, this is out on open land..

How fast the mercury would dissipate is another thought I had, if the sources of contaminations go away. The catch is that there are a bunch of natural sources of contamination, like volcanos, so it likely won't all go away.

But it would seem to me that perhaps lakes and streams might clear up before oceans, because the lakes and streams drain into the oceans--that is just a guess, though. I know that pesticides that were banned years ago still show up in fish, so it doesn't seem likely that any change will be very fast, even if my conjecture is correct.

Below is a table (I tried to turn it back into one, I guess it didn't work, the first number after the fish type is mercury ppm and the second number or range of numbers is the Omega-3 fatty acids, ND is none detectable) from the American Heart Association

It almost reads like an add for wild caught Alaskan fish, which include everything in the first grouping except catfish and canned tuna. So, unabashedly, I will recommend eating good wild Alaska caught fish as long as you can still get it. The embedded petroleum costs will remove this choice from many soon enough. I do have family and friends that make a living as fishermen up here--I thought I should add that in.

Mean mercury level Omega-3 fatty acids
in parts per million (ppm) (grams per 3-oz. serving)

Canned tuna (light) 0.12 0.17–0.24
Shrimp ND* 0.29
Pollock 0.06 0.45
Salmon (fresh,frozen) 0.01 1.1–1.9
Cod 0.11 0.15–0.24
Catfish 0.05 0.22–0.3
Clams ND* 0.25
Flounder or sole 0.05 0.48
Crabs 0.06 0.27–0.40
Scallops 0.05 0.18–0.34

Other common seafoods

Lobster 0.31 0.07–0.46
Grouper 0.55 0.23
Halibut 0.26 0.60–1.12
Oysters ND* 0.37–1.14
Mahi mahi 0.19 0.13
Herring 0.04 1.9–2.0

Fish with the highest levels of mercury
(about 1 ppm Hg)

Shark 0.99 0.83
Swordfish 0.97 0.97
Tilefish (golden bass or golden snapper) 1.45 0.90
King mackerel 0.73 0.36

Fish with about 0.5 ppm Hg

Fresh or frozen tuna 0.38 0.21–1.1
Red snapper 0.60 0.29
Orange roughy 0.54 0.028

Arthur,

I assume you men pest species rather than weed. Where are these fish found in Aus? Are you allowed to farm them?

oh and as a side note if you raise duckweed with the tilapia, and other non-fish pond can be used to grow it, it can be used to add nitrogen and phosphates to your soils. humans can eat duckweed, I've munched on it in the past, I grew it for sale, and fry haven.

Charles
BioWebScape designs for a better fed future

Those are interesting ideas. I suspect the simplest ideas are most sustainable for the long term.

I listened to the open blue seas video. It is an interesting idea. To scale this up, you would need lots of big cages--also food to feed the fish, and a reasonably fast and inexpensive way to get back to a market. It would seem like the cages would work best where they are not too far from markets--but this may not be the best place to put them. Air freighting them long distances in the future is probably not something to plan on.

Aquaponics has been around for a while. There is some guy in one of our northern cities pushing it, a retired football player, if you look on youtube under worm farming you might see his videos, I don't have a link.

Its a good idea, if you have the power to run the system. It is a good way to use a parking lot where you can't recycle it into a garden you just build on top of it the greenhouses and the fish tanks. You need piping, pumps and lots of things that might not be sustainable after a crash. If we have a smooth down slope then sure it is a great way to feed yourself and those around you, you need workers and people who can fix plumbing problems.

I joked a few months ago about putting a fish tank, chicken coop, and raised beds altogether as a working system in my back yard, I might have posted it here or just been talking amoung offline friends.

If we put our heads together and didn't try at all the greed and graft that goes on I am sure we could in a Prefect world feed ourselves on systems like these. For all the doomers notice I used the word "IF" at the beginning of that sentence. Most people on here know that I hope for a better outcome than the doomers do to this whole mess.

I don't have much of those fish breeding days left but the books now in storage, but there are plenty of fresh water fish you can keep in tanks and small ponds. It is a bigger thing for people to do in other countries than it is in North America, we get kinda lost in our own little world at times.

Charles,
BioWebScape designs for a better future.

Thanks for your thoughts about Japan. I know fish have been very important to many people. I know my ancestors are from Norway, and there, too, fish was a very important food. We are so spoiled by Supermarkets and an abundance of food or all kinds today, that we don't appreciate how appreciate have important fish was, and still is, to many people.

With higher price oil, you are right, there will probably be some cutting back on fishing, especially from great distances. This may help fish stocks replenish, but it will be harder to get adequate nutrition for those who depend on them.

Pi;
What does the whale-hunting issue look like from where you stand? Is it debated over there, or more defended as a cultural right, etc.??

Bob

"Little by little the high oil prices will choke off the business of these large boats"

Sorry but it will be too late by then, by this time some say we will only have jelly fish left. Atlantic bluefin tuna stocks have fallen by 60% from 1997 to 2007. Stocks have fallen by about 85% since the industrial fishing era began.

Disappointingly the Japanese have worked successfully to block a CITES motion to ban bluefin fishing from the Atlantic Ocean and Mediterranean Sea. Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama ‘‘I think it was a good decision,’’ told reporters, expressing hope that prices for the fish would not rise further. Japan consumes some 80% of bluefin tuna catches from the waters against the backdrop of strong demand from sushi restaurants and others.

schoff, I grew up in Brazil and raised various species of cichlids that we called "Tilapia" in multiple connected 500 liter water tanks. I have to admit to taking my hat off to you for raising them in Pennsylvania...(I used to dive at Dutch Springs quarry when I lived in NYC)

If you do decide to tweak your system to a lower temperature I'd love to hear how you do!

Cheers!

I've raised trout on and off for 25 years, and other fish. Trout are some of the more easily trainable to feed on artificial feed. If you have a springwater source, it's relatively inexpensive. I have earthen ponds, but these are the worst from a production standpoint. In addition to being more difficult to harvest(tho much more fun as much is via dry fly), these have been subject to large predation losses for me. Ospreys are notorious, I've had them grab 36 inch char and get airborne in front of me. And the char usually remain near the bottom. Herons are a nightmare, often missing, but leaving the fish with a hole drilled in it's head or back, to die later. Eagles are a pest also. And we haven't mentioned the mammals yet.

Maintaining sufficiently cold water in the summer is a problem, so the pond must be deep enough for self shading. In much of my growout ponds, I use large plastic stock tanks(1000 gal or more), which can be covered cheaply with netting for birds, and large tarps for the summer sun. Prior to the plastic stock tanks hitting the market, I would fiberglass the old metal ones. Galvanized metal is extremely toxic to fish.

As one learns the fish and pitfalls, you can tweak the guides. A no no is ponds in series, but with diligence you can modify your operations. I have up to 3 in series, with fecal collection via gravity, in between. It does get real dicey in the summer as water holds less O2 at warmer temps, and metabolism is surging. Easy to lose a 1000 fish a day, so I don't recommend it. The guides are grounded in reality. I have both a fish house (converted old milking parlor) for fry and fingerling growout, and outdoor tanks and ponds for fish growout. The fish house and outdoor tanks are located on high ground, the outflow is used for gravity irrigation in the pastures. Solid waste is spread in the gardens.

Edit

Should add, since I'm in the midst of it now, another drawback for commuters is swimup stage. Fish must be fed 6-8x/day. After a period determined by temp, yolk sac is absorbed and the fry swim up to the surface. It's a period of high loss anyway, and all the deformities/fused embryos/etc show up. But the fish must fed almost continually, as there is zip stomach for storage.

I agree, eeyore. Not sure why Gail asked this question. World natural fisheries are all in crisis. Do we imagine that we can replicate the seas in private mud-ponds?

being defeatist is one way to look at it, looking for solutions is another way to look at it. While I could just go kill myself and get it over with, I prefer to seek a few more days of growing things, planting trees whose fruits I may never eat. If I were to die today, someone else could eat what I had planted, or the fish I stocked in my pond.

I get gloomy at times, but that is my own depression talking, those blood clots back in 2005 didn't help that much, but I still love to bake bread, test new recipes, taste new plants, and hug my friends, and maybe getting better at playing pool along the way. If I die in the next heartbeat so be it, but I died once, so what I have now is gravy.

Charles,
Biowebscape designs for not being dead just yet

You have some good questions and there are answers to them, if may suggest, take a look at this operation that I already liked to up thread, they address most of your questions at least in a general way.

http://openblueseafarms.com/who_we_are/our_company.html

We recently had an interesting TV program in Australia about farmed salmon:
(Script) http://www.abc.net.au/7.30/content/2009/s2766962.htm
There's an ongoing environmental controversy and some startling facts came out, for instance that a dye has to be put into their food to make their flesh turn pink.

I still think it's better overall than eating sashimi tuna though. Those poor suckers are doomed and I'm not even a doomer!
;-)

Salmon are getting depelted because of their spawning grouds being ruined, and because of over fishing of their wild food fish.

When we started sending factory ships out into the world's oceans we were killing our future. The big dredge nets kill not only the fish the factory ship wants to harvest but it also kills everything else along with it, hundreds of species are affected. As Pi says above, if Japan is fishing in Iceland's waters which are in another ocean altogether then there is a problem.

If it gets down to us eating jellyfish, which is eaten in some regions and has been for a long time, then we have gone down a road we might not recover from in most of our lifetimes. Not all jellyfish are of the edible kind, and there is an uptick of the kinds we can't eat when you kill off all the fish that eat them. Like killing all the hawks and getting an over population of rats to eat your grain bins dry. Just because we can eat some jellyfish does not mean we can survive on them for very long.

Charles,
BioWebScape designs for a better fed future.

-Why can't we take hundreds of squared kilometers on the ocean with a fine mesh as a the farm barrier (something the fish won't get caught in), and carefully control the food chain down to the algae? -

The cost of controlling nature would be prohibitive, if it is even possible at that size. Food webs are immensely complicated. 100 kilometers sounds a lot. But we have about 7 billion people to feed.

You want more fish? Kill 5 billion people.

Wild salmon will probably get more exercise, they will also have a different diet.

repared raw salmon contains a lot of stuff that keeps our cognitive function sharp and our arteries saturated with good cholesterol that drives out the bad cholesterol.

And right there is your market for farmed fish. You sell it to "well off" parents for their kids and point out how the fish are not in the natural Mercury filled world.

Can a non-doomer give me a rational answer based on your understanding of fish farming. I know a lot of salmon is now coming from controlled fish farms and that the quality is supposedly not as good as wild salmon.

The explanation is that all the world's oceans are being fished out by giant factory trawlers. They are working on the last of the fish stocks, and when they are all gone, you won't be able to get wild fish any more.

This is not fishing as it is historically understood. It is fish mining. When all the fish are gone, they are gone and they won't come back because there are no fish left to produce the next generation.

People don't realize this because they aren't looking at the global situation. They only see their own little piece of the elephant. It's a classic "Tragedy of the Commons" situation, and fishermen only are interested in what they can get out of the Commons, not what is happening to the commons as a whole. They can't see that the elephant is an elephant, they only know what their own little piece is like, and they only realize that they can't find enough fish to make a living any more.

So, after all the wild salmon are gone, all you will get are farmed salmon. That's the classic solution to the Tragedy of the Commons. Privatize the Commons. You can't fish on someone else's private fish farm, and that's the only place there will be any salmon once the Tragedy reaches its final act.

Note that this is the non-Doomer explanation. A Doomer would say, "We're all going to die because there will be no more salmon." I would say, "Shut up and eat your farmed salmon; it's the only thing you're going to get."

You really need to be careful what your going to eat doesnt come out of a polluted waterway. The canal here is teaming with fish but is connected to the river Maas. The river is polluted with heavy metals and there is still a lot of industry upstream in Belgium and France using the water to offload waste. Occasionaly we wake to find dead fish floating all over the canal.

In order for this idea to be self sustaining, an outside source of energy (photosynthesis capture) must exist.

Like plants or algae and sun light?

BTW you think industrial fossil fueled based raising of cows or chickens on corn is more or less sustainable than say aquaponics?

We could all start eating snake, down florida way they have a problem with pythons, we'd want to start there on our food chain hunt first.

Snake is a really good food, nice white meat, lot of ribs though...

This last winter was very cold down here in Florida, the reports I'm getting from the snake control people is that it has put a very major dent in the python population out in the glades.
I'm sure there were a few survivors and they will come back but for now they are pretty much gone. Those gators are starting to look pretty tasty though ;-)

and gotten blank stares.

This is more evidence that Tony Wright is right in his book
Left in the Dark

Our dominant Left hemisphers evolved to deal with endocrine disruptors in fruit. The dominant Left is malfunctioning, hence the blank stares.

Hence you haven't a clue what I am on about.

"Give a man a fish and he eats for a day. Teach a man to fish and you end up with the tragedy of the commons."

That wins my quote of the day award! :)

Greenish,

It sounds to me like a few tilapia (or other vegetarian fish) in an unused swimming pool might work in warmer climates. I know one person I talked to who is involved in permaculture puts both fish and plants in some small ponds on their farm (where they hold rainwater for later use in gardening)--I presume the fish are for eating.

Your take on the immediate impact of peak oil matches up with mine. Fish will be relatively easy to catch, and it is difficult to enforce of treaties and fishing license rules, so there may be more fishing than planned is some parts of the world, at least temporarily making fish supply worse.

I am an unabashed doomer.Regards the food chain anybody who can find a copy of Colin Tudge's book "So Shall We Reap" (penguin) will save the down time arguing.
On the fish thing I would like to add a few points just to get it off my chest once and for all.
In 1986 I went back to Uni (their token geriatric admission) to do a diploma in Aqautic resource Management.Two years later I dropped out.My nickname by the staff was "farmer".This was not an accolade but derision.I came away more aware of the issues re fishery farming.
Penned factory farms have to be way off shore out of the migratory paths of wild stock.This would go some way to countering infection transmission and reducing the need for antibiotic use which plagues feedlot operations.
Deep sea cages have their place and problemns.These can be managed and the existing fisheries fleets have no option but to address these and get with the program.The conventional fisheries world wide are critically threatened with a host of challenges and as endangered as the remaining species they predate.
On the local level and here i include freshwater options these invariably are local concerns and each has its solutions and problemns.
Farming is essential to all species survival.I have run a dairy Barn and there would be no cows left if not for farming.
Turtle farms in Mexico are viable and the cringe about this and any species being farmed is beyond the scope of my patience to address.The world wide explosion of "jellyfish" will need to be met with turtle farming the jellfish predator.
Tilapia I have seen breeding in the most polluted water imaginable near the land fill in Honolulu on Sand Island.They make brilliant fertiliser if your reluctant to eat them.They are are a threat to native species as they are the aqautic cockroach and will out compete most anything else.
The humble Australian yabby (a freshwater lobster)is a great choice for apartment dwellers and DIY aquaculture.
It all takes energy (that is why I visit the Oildrum) research and is site specific.Aeration of standing water is the big input.
The literature is out there in mind numbing redundancy.
Obstacles exist (mostly government regulation) and as the financial catastrophe overtakes common sense and mindless breeding by human beings aquaculture is an ancient and honourable endevour that can be made to work for you.
For the sailing enthusiast Alan Bombard's research on plankton nets and nutrition in general is axiomatic to getting your head around this incredible aspect of our environment.

Gregorach,

Links? Details?

Don't some of the big boats do canning on board? Or do they just refrigerate them and bring them to shore?

And in some states - if you can't drain the pond it is treated by law as the same as a 'natural lake'.

So the 'farm raised' catfish, trout, perch - you'd be subject to no nets, daily harvest limits, and length limits.

It seems to me that the rather obvious conclusion would be to stop eating fish

It is obvious ! We need to simply do the right and painful thing - decrease industrial fishing until stocks replenish

I am not a doomer but I think this one will be self solving - a child born today will see the oceans fished out

Sadly big pirating boats with miles of driftnets will probably be able to afford diesel far longer than small 200 fathom net permitted and regulated family gillnetting operations. Fish and game has done a decent job regulating the fisheries in Alaska, unlike The Fed which it took over from after statehood. Factory fish traps decimated many rivers back in territorial days, but back then the high seas were not near as thoroughly strained as they are today and recovery only took good local regulation.

Sounds great!
I couldn't resist adding bass to the mix.

Don't forget that cattails can be part of a waste water management scheme.

A few comments to add:

Tim Matson's Earth Ponds is a great resource and also a fun read.

I'm putting in a teeny tiny pond or two on my 0.4 acre village lot in the NE US. No code restrictions in the village on ponds. This is one of those areas, I believe, where it pays to start small. I've had an aquarium running in the house for about three years and the inputs in terms of maintenance, food, energy, cleaning, etc. are pretty high. Definitely looking for the low-maintenance mode. This pond will be above my veggie garden so I can feed nutrient rich overflow water down to it by gravity feed. Looking at aeration options such as solar or wind-driven pump. Not sure how to heat in winter, but my dad developed some sort of heating system such that his fish overwintered and bred.

I visited an aquaponics set up at UMass last year at the NOFA conference. Again, lots of inputs, and the hydroponic veggies were plagued with white flies. One take-away from this was that ornamental species (koi) way out-perform food fish in current economics! This may reverse when food becomes more of an "equalizer."

So it seems to me, at least in humid areas, that ponds, covered ponds and solar greenhouse covered ponds are much more efficient than tanks and aquaponics. Then again, anything can be designed so badly as to be completely inefficient.

Grass carp are invasive here in the Great Lakes area, and war has been declared, so best to avoid breeding more of them.

I like what CEOJr1963 suggested above- integrating greenhouse, fish, chickens and raised beds. As a protein source, fish are much more efficient at converting to protein, as they don't have to fight gravity as much as land animals in search of food.

Back several years ago, two of my uncles and my grandfather built a medium sized (five acre??) lake on their farm. I don't remember too many details. I believe that they got government money to build the lake--flood control, or some such thing. The lake was spring fed. I know they stocked the lake with fish, and had fun fishing there, but I don't know much in the way of details. It didn't seem all that hard, from what I heard.

The self regulation of the North Atlantic lobster fishery by the fisherman themselves is an ongoing classic success story of shepherding a resource. Kudos to these fisherman.

Instrumental is a very selective harvest, self imposed by fisherman, and a reliance on low tech, discrete traps. This opposed to modern trawlers which can't even distinguish by catch. I, perhaps foolishly, believe that removal of corporate fishing from other stocks to reliance on individual fisherman would allow those stocks to recover.

I say foolishly after observing the effect of native spear fishing on coral reef communities, but that itself is tempered by their recent introduction of reef preserves and those effects.

7) High quality, omega3 rich healthy-to-eat fish is going the way of expensive wine.

... which means that fishing pressure on these will likely increase as their numbers plummet.

This consumer report shows that farmed fish may also be fed animal waste products such as meat and feather meal.

"And in addition to their main diet of fish meal and fish oil, farmed fish may be given rendered meat, bone, and feather meal. The goal: to fatten animals as fast and as cheaply as possible. "

http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/food/food-safety/animal-feed-and-food...

That we would be using petroleum to grow corn to feed chickens to feed fish - it's beyond reason.

In an energy-constrained world, when there is limited petroleum for growing corn, I suspect chickens will go back to eating insects, and fish will drop off the menu as too energy-intensive to feed artificially.

Put another way - what is the EROEI of farmed fish ?

"Sustainable fish farming"

...sustainable.... gd buzzwords. What's it mean? Any definitions?

Not to pick on seanlbrennan, but rather the whole idea. Farming is mining. Some of us are just slower than others. To a degree, we're all cotton farmers of the early south, who will have to move on, some faster than others. The alternative, hunting and gathering, a slower form of mining by farming, will starve all.