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Kate Humble: aquaponics is the answer
to our growing food crisis
The Springwatch presenter explains the anger
that motivated her to build the UK's first
aquaponic greenhouse on her farm a closed-
loop system producing food in a small space
Lucy Siegle
theguardian.com, Thursday 3 July 201 4 1 1 .23 BST
Kate Humble, Charlie Price and Becky Bainbridge in the UK's first aquaponic solar greenhouse.
Photograph: Humble by Nature
A collective "ooh" went up as the condensation cleared from a new 12 x 7 metre
structure to reveal the UK's first aquaponic solar greenhouse, in the perhaps unlikely
environs of Kate Humble's 117-acre ex-council farm in Monmouthshire, Wales.
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This is a greenhouse with a surprising wow factor. Inside, you can make out the blue of
the fish tanks containing male tilapia (a species chosen as they grow rapidly to harvest
size and as one of yesterday's visitors put it "taste lovely on a barbecue") and the raised
beds full of fledgling vegetable crops. Of course, there is also much that you can't see
which is rather the point with a closed-loop food production system that needs little
interference; the vegetable beds fill and drain, twice an hour, sustained by nutrient-rich
water from the fish tanks.
That this breakthrough technology with implications for the nation's diet is all going on
on a little farm in Monmouthshire rather than in an agricultural science institution might
seem incongruous, but that has everything to do with the tenacity of the farm's owner,
TV presenter Kate Humble. When the Guardian visited her back in April it was clear she
believes wholeheartedly in the regeneration of small-scale farming, and the company,
Humble by Nature, she runs from this working farm, hosts courses that range from dry
stone walling to keeping pigs designed for people to "leave filthy, exhausted and with
their clothing completely ruined".
Three years ago this farm was about to be broken up and sold on because 117 acres was
considered too small to be useful or profitable. Humble was determined that a farm of
this size should and could work, and became convinced that the science of aquaponics
was key. Determination seems to have been turned into a type of rocket fuel when she
got angry always a powerful motivating force. "I was listening one morning to the BBC
Radio 4 Today programme and I heard an interview with someone from a food bank
scheme in Moreton-in-the-Marsh. He said something to the effect of: 'It's all very well
being surrounded by pretty green fields, but that doesn't produce food.' I thought 'What
the hell is going on?'"
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Kate Humble was driven to set up the aquaponics system by a frustration over food production.
Photograph: Humble by Nature
She is not alone in asking herself that question and nor in her disgust that we
increasingly view rural populations as unable or unwilling to grow food. Fortunately she
discovered across scientists Charlie Price and Becky Bainbridge of social enterprise,
Aquaponics UK, who are devoted to growing more food in less space. "We wanted to
create a model to produce food in a low input way," explains Price, who is also an expert
in biomass energy, "but to do so in a building that required very little energy. Ultimately
it's nothing new, it's a combination of existing technologies put together in a structure."
In many ways it's about taking the heat out of the energy, water and oil requirements
that dog conventional agriculture and even aquaculture and hydroponics. As Humble
explains it: "Youve got your fish in your tanks, tilapia which do well in aquaculture -
shitting away merrily, and that water full of nitrates is pumped through vegetable beds.
The leafy greens love the nitrates and grow like fury, the vegetables clean the water and
back it goes to the fish."
In terms of energy, the passive thermal structure, with a thermal mass wall, captures
and stores as much solar energy as possible, and then releases it into the greenhouse at
night. It requires very little supplementary heating (it also wears a special thermal quilt
at night). In essence this mimics the airflow of a termite mound, in a nod to biomimicry.
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The passive solar structure mimics the airflow of a termite mound. Photograph: Humble by Nature
Feeding is also self-sustaining: the fish are fed primarily on worms from the wormeries
at the back of the structure (which also supply worm tea, used as a pest preventative as
a spray on the plants in the beds) but also from black soldier flies. Whereas conventional
aquaculture often falls down on sustainability by the consumption of fish food from wild
caught fish, the black soldier flies here eat until they pupate, then self-harvest with the
aid of a cleverly positioned ramp and become fish food. And this is a completely organic
system (there are no petroleum-based pesticides). In a naturally balanced system, pest
control is left to species who do it naturally, and techniques such as companion planting.
'We even tried chameleons to eat pests,' says Becky Bainbridge, 'but in fact they just ate
everything, even the good pests.' Now they leave it to ladybirds to deal with aphids.
In terms of yield, even this 'smallholder scale' trial hub promises much. Based on
German trials, it could soon be producing between 30 and 35 kgs of fruit and vegetables
a week and 200 kgs of fish a year, more than enough to supply the restaurant and cafe
on site, redefining local food. The massive boon for aquaponics is of course the extended
growing season it offers; despite lecturing that we must eat in season, there seems little
appetite to adjust our diet accordingly. Aquaponics, in theory offers us a chance to have
our bananas and eat them (all year around).
Could aquaponics, the marriage of hydroponics (cultivating plants in water) and
aquaculture (the farming of aquatic organisms) be key to boosting our food self-
sufficiency and our resilience to overseas price hikes? We do need some answers. A
recent University of Cambridge report tells us at the moment we're running a food, feed
and drink deficit of 18.6bn. By 2030 there will be 70 million of us on these shores and
the researchers tell us we'll face a 2m hectare shortfall in productive land needed to
produce food.
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What's amazing given its potential is that aquaponics has been given so little air time.
You are more likely to find United Nations FAO reports and symposiums on raising
insects for the table (an interesting idea but with huge societal cultural barriers in
western Europe) than a food system like this which addresses the challenges of energy in
food production head on in closed-loop system. "The reality is agriculture since the green
revolution has been focused on monocrops," explains Price, "and putting a lot of energy
into the individual crop and tailoring chemicals to make that crop as productive as
possible. By contrast this is an integrated, multi-trophic ecosystem. It requires a shift in
thinking. There's value in that but also it's complicated. For example if you're doing all
sorts of things raising insects for food, and different crops and species all under one
system, who do you go to for funding?"
In this case to the Welsh government who have funded the project to the tune of
200,000 through the Federation of City Farms and Community Gardens, an
organisation trained on "reinventing common sense agriculture" and through their
flagship Welsh project Tyfu Pobl (Growing People). As well as training up some of their
communities in aquaponics at Humble by Nature they'll be looking to harvest a lot of
data. Essentially what they and everybody wants to know is whether this is replicable
for communities up and down the land. As we speak a proposal for a solar aquaponic
greenhouse 20 times as large as this one is being considered for planning in West Sussex.
Is it time for aquaponics to have its moment in the sun?
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7/7/2014 Kate Humble: aquaponics is the answer to our growing food crisis | Life and style | theguardian.com
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