Ecolonomic Life

You have all seen the show on Discovery Channel called Myth Busters, right? They pick topics like – can Jaws really bite through a boat, or can you put high explosives inside a cement truck mixer and clean it out. Then they use made for TV experimentation to either prove or invalidate the “myth”.

To some extent, in a much more programmatic manner, that is what we are doing on a daily basis in our research program at IOE. So what are the myths we have busted? Specifically in the infant technology of aquaponics, where we have been conducting a substantial amount of research over the last three years, we have at least raised some questions about a variety of myths. I know that as you read some of these you are gig to gasp, or maybe say –
heresy!! But anyway, here goes:

– trout will not survive in aquaculture systems when temperatures consistently stay above 25 C.
– multi-species fish culture in the same system is not practical.
– limited spectrum fluorescent lighting will not work efficiently with indoor edible plant production.
– water quality in aquaculture systems cannot be effectively managed by simple bio-mimicry methodology.

Well, how do you like us now? How can we call ourselves scientists? Hold on, let us defend ourselves. In the next period of time we will provide very detailed and scientifically validated data regarding the above conclusions. You just need to keep coming back to these posts and see how we save or reputations. We hope you will give us this chance. You will be glad you did. Till next time, just remember, you cannot call yourself a fish farmer until you have killed a million fish.

I am laying here on my bed in a hotel room in Lethbridge, Canada, watching the conclusion of the US Open Golf Tournament from Pebble Beach in California.  I am missing my wife and kids back in Colorado here on Fathers Day, but am also enjoying a part of the world I have never spent time before.  It is going to be a great week here in Canada as we work on an exciting project with our new Canadian friends.

I thought I would write a brief post just to honor all of our readers that are fathers.  You are all so important to your children and to the legacy that your children will create for you and for the planet.  Just keep on loving your children and respecting the planet.

As fathers, we are stewards of our children and we should also look at ourselves as stewards for the planet.  We should think of ways that we can “father” little things that are in our lives.  For me that means caring for our sustainable agriculture systems.  I have talked a little about our aquatic programs, and today I want to shift gears and show some pictures of a few of our “furry” children and where we and our “children” live, work and play at the foot of the Rocky Mountains in what we call Mountain Sky Ranch. 

Is this pretty or what? Looking down into the Meadow Hollow Creek valley at Mountain Sky Ranch in early June, 2010.

The Lodge at Mountain Sky Ranch. This is our home, a bed and breakfast and an education and events center.

This is Sky and Pete, two of our precious Golden Retriever kids. Sky we bitten by a rattlesnake just two weeks ago here at the Ranch, but fortunately he is tough and he is doing fine. He is also a proud new papa of 8 puppies here from our girl Rascal.

Well, here is mama Rascal just a couple of days before having her 8 healthy puppies. She is being a great mom, and the puppies have the love of many in our extended family. Rascal is holding her 4th place ribbon she won last fall in the Golden Retriever National Championships. She is a proud girl.

Here are two of our new baby Pygoran goats with their mama, Fluffy. We recently had 5 healthy Pygoran kids that will become fiber and milk producers. These are championship quality breeding goats that are in our genetic improvement program.

Well I thought I would end with this one. Here I am with Java, one of our sweet alpaca "children". She is what we call our PR animal. She loves people and loves attention. She is also an incredible breeding female who we beleive will greatly enhance our genetic improvement herd.

Well again, Happy Fathers Day to all fathers.  You are so important to your families and the Planet.  Give a bunch of hugs and kisses.

Have you ever had one of those days where everything just seems to go bad?  Well,  that is what the last 24 hours  has seemed like to me.  I left Colorado yesterday evening for a long driving road trip to Alberta, Canada.  First, the rental car company gave me a very hard time about my rental situation.  I used my GPS to pick my driving route – shortest time – and I must have found every construction project in Montana that slowed my progress by hours.  There was no cell coverage right when I was supposed to be making an important conference call.  Oh, and then there was the email this morning from one of our scientists in Colorado saying that he was sad to tell me that a tragedy had happened with the rainbow trout in one of our aquaponic systems!

I guess our Facility Manager, Dave, had found a large number of fish floating on this particular system when he got to our reseach building at our Meadow Hollow campus this morning.  He observed that the water pump on the system was not working, and when he checked the power plug he found it was not firmly plugged into the power outlet.  When he pushed it into the outlet the pump immediately started working.  After further review the guys determined that all but one trout in the system had died.  So they measured and examined all the dead fish for any obvious issues and did not find any.  The apparent cause of death was oxygen deprivation.

Meadow Hollow System 4 on June 15, 2010. Fish kill due to pump issue duing the night of June 17.

Now, the rest of the story as Paul Harvey would say.  We had a very severe wind storm yesterday.  The power outlet in this greenhouse-like, fabric covered building is on the exterior wall that had been rattled and rolled all day yesterday in the wind storm.  Even though this system was working properly when it was last observed yesterday about 14 hours before the observation of the fish kill today, it is very likely that the pup plug had been jostled loose from the outlet during the storm, after the crew had left the site. 

So, obiously, we have learned a lesson from this circumstance.  We should put on our checklist to check all plugs of our systems at the end of every day.  What else could we have done differently?  This system has two airstones, and in almost three years of operation, there have never been critically low oxygen levels before (no pump failures prior to this).  Should the system have more airstones?  Should the stocking density have been less?  Maybe yes to both of those questions.  Lets examine this further. 

So as scientists,  what can we learn from this unfortunate situation.  Well fortunately, our scientists do a very good job of collecting daily data on this system and all of our systems.  We know that oxygen levels were adequate for the system prior to the pump failure.  We have an underwater camera in this system, and observations yesterday revealed healthy fish and no unusual water quality situations (excess suspended solids).  These fish were aggressively feeding, and the water temperatures had been consistently been close to optimal for the last several weeks (15 – 17 degrees C).  Fish growth had been exceptional since these fish were stocked into this system. 

Lets examine the economics of this loss.  These fish cost us $50.00 to purchase as fingerlings (80 fish initially).  They had consumed about $7.00 of food since they were stocked, and used about $8.00 of electrical costs for the pump and air stones.  Labor costs for their management to this point were probably about $10.00.  With the anticipated upcoming environmental conditions anticipated for the system these fish would have been harvestable with an additional investment of about $15.00 in food, labor and electricity.  Therefore the total costs from stocking to  harvest would have been ~$90.00.  We would value these fish at harvest at about $175.00 ($5.00/lb. for 70 fish at 1/2 lb. each average).  Therefore our net profit would have been $85.00.  If our stocking density would have been 50% of what we used we would have made net profits of about $30.00 (remember labor and power costs are really no different for the lower stocking density).  Now if we restock at the same stocking density we originally used and we expend the same costs to harvest, we would basically break even for the fish over the course of the two fish production periods.  If we completed a second production period with the 50% density we would cumulatively make $60.00 compared to the breakeven for the failure and success combo.  This would seem to be a no-brainer, right?  We should have reduced the stocking density!!

But wait.  Do we know that the fish with lower stocking density would have survived the short term pump failure/  I do not think that we do.  Also, aren’t we forgetting something?  What would 50% fish stocking density do to our plant production?  Again, we do not know, but I suspect it would greatly reduce our plant production.  Where are the profits from our plants under the two scenarios? 

Well, we will be restocking this system next week with a density similar to what we previously used.  We will be quantifying our plant production at the end of our fish production period, so we will have those economics.  Then we will be able to run another experiment with the 50% stocking density and we can then quantify the plant production under those conditions.

So wow, this current tragedy will actually give us the chance to learn more in the long run.  Our bad day today will become a contributor to great days to come as we use science to learn more about this exciting aquaponics technology!!

Good Morning all.  We are having one of our somewhat more frequent wind storms right now here in Northern Colorado.  They do not call what we have hurricanes like near the coasts, but when you have sustained winds over 60 miles per hour and gusts over 80 miles per hour I guess we will just call it scary!!

I wanted to talk briefly today about IOE’s philosphy about building materials and construction design for ecolonomic solutions.  Again, our current focus is mainly on sustainable agriculture construction, so that is where our hands on experience is, but overall our philosphy remains the same for all areas of life and business. 

We believe that recycling, reusing and refurbishing existing materials are always preferrable to buying or using new materials.  We are actually passionate about this belief, and it is demonstrated in much of what we do.  For example, we have just finished construction of the first phase of a medium scale commercial aquaponics system in one or our greenhouses (which we obtained because they had been abandoned by a previous user for over four years – Reuse!!), and here is a description of some of the major elements of that system that are reused (pictures below):

• 450 gallon biological (bacteriological) treatment tank previously used as a water reservoir for a hydroponic system.
• several thousand square feet of carpet used for insulation and protection of liner in our raft plant bed. The carpet was obtained free from several local carpet stores that would normally throw it in their dumpsters – landfill bound.
• Several hundred feet of dimensional lumber (2 bys) used for the bulkheads in the plant bed.  This lumber was previously used on abandoned tables used for ornamental plant production (just a little labor to deconstruct).
• 55 gallon plastic barrel used as a sump for the system.  We obtain barrels from a number of sources free that again would normally end up in landfills.
• Miscellaneous piping and valves from previously used systems.
• 4000 sf greenhouse with a refurbished natural gas space heater.

Carpeting, reused 55 gal. barrel, rused sump tank for a commercial raft aquaponics system in our Northern Clororado Greenhouses

Reused carpet, lumber and tanks for a commercial aquaponics system in our Northern Colorado Greenhouses. Also ~4000 gallon swiming pool used as our fish tank.

Another view of our ~80'x8' raft plant bed in our new aquaponic system in our Northern Colorado greenhouses.

The second dominant philosophy that we have about ecolonomic construction is that we do not always accept what historically might be reported as “fact” regarding the use of some types of materials for construction.  Instead, we will do our own research on building material types that includes:

• thoughtful research of available information by our professional scientists and construction managers;
•  “proof of concept” testing at first a laboratory level, then a pilot scale level;
•  and, finally actual utilization in a full-scale production system. 

 An example, in this system shown here, is the use of 6 mil poly (the same material used as our greenhouse covering) for our plant bed liner rather than much more expensive materials such as EPDM and PVC.  Also, we have used for this system a $200 Walmart purchased portable swiming pool rather than a multi-thousand dollar fiberglass, plastic, metal or more traditional tank construction material. 

I know, some of you reading this are going to say – “these guys are nuts.  This system will never last.  Workers will destroy it, and so on and so on.”  Well, you may be right, but we do not think so.  As we said earlier, we have already tested everything we are using for construction materials on this full-scale system previously in first a laboratory level, then a pilot scale level and for some materials we have ample examples of previous full scale applications.  We beleive we are using a proven R&D model and strategy to design systens that are both carbon friendly and economic – wow – Eolonomics.

We will be reporting in future posts about the specific costs of this commercial system as well as the results of its operational efficiency and efficacy.  We will report on the good and the bad as we see it.  Again, please give us your thoughts and comments.

This is a big day for all of us here at the Institute of Ecolonomics (IOE).  Starting today, we will become regular BLOG ADDICTS!! We have been doing so much at our Northern Colorado Ecolonomic Development campuses that we felt it was time to begin to communicate with you on a very timely basis.

We are going to start this increased and improved communication process by using our Ecolonomic Life Blog, and as time goes on we will be adding other media as additional communication tools (podcasts, webinars, subscriber based research sites, etc.).  There will be new information avaiable here and in other places almost daily, so please check here often.  We want to make sure we are adding value to your lives as we continue our efforts.

What about the Endings?  Well we are ending our drought of inconsistent communication for one.  We are also ending our silence about some of the really exciting projects we have been pursuing for the last couple of years. 

So lets get to it.  What are we up to here at IOE?  Well, we are working hard to establish ourselves as a private non-profit research and ecolonomic development business that can assist many entrepeneurs suscessfully launch and build their businesses that will improve the planet.  How are we doing that?  For one thing, we have developed some world class incubation locations here in Northern Colorado.  Today I am going to begin to introduce one of those campus facilities - the Campion Warehouse.

The Campion Warehouse is located on the South side of the city of Loveland, CO, which is about 45 minutes north of Denver at the base of the Rockies and just east of Rocky Mountain National Park.  This facility is 5000 square feet in size with about 1000 square feet of offices and conference room facilities, and 4000 square feet of an indoor laboratory. IOE uses the office area for our corporate headquarters offices which is shared with Mountain Sky Group, LLC.  The pictures below show some of the office and conference areas in the Campion Warehouse. Oh yes, there are three of our really key people in these pictures – Melissa Morris our unblievable Office Manager and my Personal Assistant, Paul Golden our most recent addition who just received his Masters in Engineering from Stanford, and Matt DeMassino who is our lead aquatic biologist.

Melissa in our Reception Area

In the laboratory we are doing cutting edge research on indoor sustainable agriculture technologies.  Currently we are working with aquaculture, aquaponics, coral culture, seed germination in alternative systems, low energy lighting alternatives, vericulture and innovative water treatment technologies.  We conduct ongoing experiments using acceptable and reproducible scientific methods. Dr. Wayne Dorband, IOE President, directs this research activity that is managed daily by a group of five scientists and our associated construction group.  At this point we are conducting the following specific experiments as well as others at the Campion Warehouse:

• Effects of worm additions to substrate based aquaponic systems (System 1).
• Efficacy of fish species polyculture  in small scale commercial recirculating aquaculture systems (Systems 1-4).
• Feasibility of rotating bed hydroponic plant production for commercial systems (System 9).
• Indoor aquaponic plant production using low energy alternative lighting (Systems 1-9).
• Potential for using aquaponics as a filtration source for home aquarioum systems (System 8).
• Potential of culturing South American Pacu in relatively low temperature environments (Aqua System).

As the results of these experiments are obtained, we will briefly describe them here in this format, and we will be publishing more formal scientific reports detailing the experimental outcomes.  We have been conducting research in the Campion Warehouse for almost three years, and we have conducted close to fifty different experiments like the ones described above during that time.  Again, we will be describing results of those efforts through our future reports. In the pictures that follow you will get a glimpse of some of the current systems (see the experiment descriptions above)  that we have here at the Campion Warehouse. We will be providing more detailed photos in future posts.

System 1 at Campion Warehouse. 300 gal. fish tank with trout and tilapia. Flood and Drain Aquaponics.

System 8 at Campion Warehouse. Raft aquaponics with minimal bacteriological surface area and T12 flourescent lighting.

System 9 at the Campion Warehouse. A Volksgarden rotating culture system from our partners in Canada.

System 3 at the Campion Warehouse. Flood and drain, with sump and fish tank above.

We feel we have a large obligation to the planet right now in this critical time in history.  We know that many are probably doing more than we are, but we are trying to do the best that we can.  We look forward to sharing what we learn with you and hope you can appreciate what we are doing. Please comment on our reports and give us experiences of your own.  Till next time.