It may look nothing more than an oddly shaped greenhouse, but the "Globe (hedron)", a collaboration by food futurists Urban Farmers AG and and designer Antonio Scarponi of Conceptual Devices, is a concept for a self-contained rooftop aquaponics dome that its designers hope will help address global food security. The company is seeking funding to turn the concept into a prototype.
Aquaponics is a marriage of aquaculture (farming aquatic animals, like fish or prawns) and hydroponics (growing plants in water). Effluents from fish (and their food) accumulate in the water. When channeled to plants these are consumed as nutrients, purifying the water in the process before it becomes toxic to the fish. In the Fishy Farm, we saw the principle applied to fish tanks, and though obviously not aquaponic, the veggie-roof chicken coop works on a similar symbiotic idea.
Urban Farmers has set up a crowd funding page on Kickstarter-alike IndieGoGo, seeking US$15,000 to turn the idea into a prototype. According to the page the rooftop domes would have skeletons made from renewable materials (bamboo is proposed). Perhaps the biggest surprise on the page is the claim that a single Globe could feed a family of four year-round, providing it with all the fish, vegetables and herbs it needs. Unrealistic? It sounds a very optimistic estimate at any rate.
And the effectiveness of the approach to crowd sourcing adopted here aside (Urban Farmers is merely offering prints of its designs - why not offer a full-fledged prototype for $100,000?), the idea of a modular rooftop farming system founded upon aquaponics seems perfectly reasonable, concept or no.
Source: IndiGoGo page, Urban Farmers AG, Conceptual Devices
Any fish farm should also produce the fish food which should be similar to their actual former food.
Personally I wouldn't eat a farmed fish, shrimp if you paid me as they will feed anything to them and they do. Especially Asian imports but the west isn't that great either.
Here in Fla all the non commercial fish are thriving so much they are actually jumping in my boat last time ;^P
Seriously our fresh water fish are overrunning our waters . The salt water are not quite as abundant but close.
The smart thing instead of fish farms, why not just help the wild fish recover? It cost much less and produces much higher quality and quantity .
Just alternating fishing areas with reserves that are not fished has done wonders where used. And cost nothing other than not fishing 50% of the water.
It's fishermen overseas that have done this mostly reviving their fishery to increase their catches and it has worked well, increasing catches 4x's + in many cases. And being able to keep that harvest up forever is such a better, lower cost idea.