"How to deal with the food insecurity in Peru in a sustainable and environmentally friendly way ?"

Regarding this problematic, we wanted to come up with an innovative agricultural system that is productive, easy to use and environmentally friendly. Through our research we came across the notion of aquaponics, a mix between hydroponics and aquaculture. Hydroponics is a method that uses mineral nutrients solutions in water to grow plants, without any soil while aquaculture refers to fish farming. The specificity of aquaponics consists in growing plants in water by absorbing fish waste as nutrients through a process named « the nitrogen cycle ». In turn, plants purify the water providing oxygen for the fishes and fostering their breeding.

Aquaponics is not new in itself as this technique was already used thousands of years ago by peoples in the Nile’s delta in Egypt. Even though this is a known method, it is only today that it is seen as the future of farming. It has not really been generalized at large scales of agrarian systems, even in the most developed countries. 

There are many reasons why aquaponics is seen as the future of farming and why we decided to use this technique as the theme of our projects. It turns out that there are many advantages in using aquaponics instead of conventional farming, especially with the challenges that we facing regarding climate change, the limited resources of water and soil, and pollution.

First, aquaponics is a closed system in the way that the water from the fish is recirculated to plants and then flowed back to fishes. As a result, evaporation and plants’ water consumption are the only sources of water loss. It is estimated that aquaponics use 90% less water than conventional farming.

Second, as plants grow and use only nutrients in the water, soil is not required to grow plants and there is no need to leave the land fallow for certain period of time meaning that plants can grow all year long without any stop, provided that the artificial ecosystem allows it.

Third, as waste from the fishes and from plants are used to constitute the plants’ nutrients, there is no addition of chemicals nor fertilizers which underlines the fact that this production process is one hundred percent natural.

Fourth, plants grow significantly faster and larger than in conventional farming.

Fifth, the maintenance of aquaponics is rather straightforward and only requires farmers to spend little time to feed the fishes, control nitrites levels and pH of the water, as well as its temperature and level. The rest of the system functions on its own.

Sixth, we can safely say that aquaponics appears to be somewhat more sustainable than conventional farming in terms of water and soil consumption and gas emissions.