Land based fish farming

The salmon you buy in the future could be farmed on land

The facility, called the Bluehouse, opened its first phase last year, and intends to be the world's largest land-based fish farm.

Targeting an initial production of 9,500 metric tonnes of fish per year, its owner - Atlantic Sapphire - plans to increase that to 222,000 tonnes by 2031, enough to provide 41% of current US annual salmon consumption, or a billion meals.

There are all sorts of issues around this - pollution, resource and energy use, animal rights etc... but once you get past that, I find these technological intensive farming solutions to be absolutely remarkable.
 A billion meals will be produced by a site covering just 160 acres. There are obviously external cost and resources being used (where does the fish food come from?) but it is still amazing. Ocean farmed salmon are notoriously polluting of the open water, vulnerable to diseases and requires routine use of antibiotics and medications.

ThanetEarth Glasshouses
We have a huge glasshouse arrangement near us, that grows something like 50% of all fresh tomatoes consumed in the UK. The use grow lights and some supplemental heating (waste heat from a power generator to local homes) to ensure year round production of ripe tomatoes, peppers and the like. They collect and use their own rainwater, and have their own water treatment facilities on site. The yield per acre of land is astronomical, and their system reduces the need for intensive agriculture elsewhere.


Anyway, my uncool/un-permie opinion - mechanisation and intensification of agricultural systems (when done well) can be a force for environmental good, by reducing pressures on natural ecosystems.

Michael, I feel that it's neither uncool or unpermie.

I feel that when we make such statements, we're required to zoom our focus in on tiny little bits of systems, sub-systems of sub-systems of the greater system, being the earth.

As Permaculture is about resilient, regenerative, systems of systems working together to produce more together than they could as a sum of their parts, such reductive thinking is anathema, except where it comes to figuring out small, finicky sub-systems, where you need to create a local externality, like a fertigation outlet for an aquaponics system that produces more nutrients than the in-line hydroponic crops can handle. To the aquaponic system, an externality is being created, at least locally. This doesn't mean that the fertigation can't go to growing a crop that, directly or indirectly, feeds back into the aquaponic system.

What if the "externality" was fertigation for an insect-feeding tree crop, that, with the aid of a well-placed fan and light, blew the attracted insects into the pond for the waiting fish, defraying feed costs?

Personally, operating in this fashion, I would still try to keep the "externality" as close to the system that produced it as possible, physically and in terms of resource feedback. I would also try to keep the technology employed as appropriate to the need as possible.

Honestly, though, if the "externality" in every case like this was a compost pile, or better yet, a distributed layer-composting process that yielded soil on broad-acre terms, I think everyone raising their own fish using these function-stacking techniques would be the best thing we could possibly do.

-CK

In terms of the permaculture "zones", I guess that intensive high tech agriculture is an extension of "zone 1" - the area closest to the house, which gets maximum human input/intervention.

I mean, I could see a way where a system could be designed where you have an aquaponic system paired with a wild/natural or naturalised system including filtration and nutrient-uptaking plants that buffer the system sufficiently that you don't need much human intervention on the day-to-day, but I think that would depend on a favourable climate.

-CK