FishLife Aquaponics

HI! I am Jeff Nemes, founder, owner, and chief designer for FishLife Aquaponics. My aquaponics journey began over ten years ago on an anniversary get away with a Time magazine article about the growth and importance of aquaculture. As a lifetime avid fisherman my imagination was captured. I have always loved touring hatcheries observing the science of raising fish, but had never considered the idea of farming fish for a living. My research of aquaculture quickly led me to the discovery of aquaponics – this amazing synergistic relationship raising fish and plants together in a mutually beneficial controlled environment. I began to understand the potential of growing extremely high yields of premium quality fish and produce year round in a controlled environment. I was hooked!

I’d like to say it was smooth sailing, but that has not been the case. When I began my aquaponic journey there was not a lot of information available, and while there were people experimenting, there was much contradictory information regarding best practices. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I had begun 10 years of aquaponics “schooling” - building, testing, designing, and operating different systems.

Originally the goal was simply to build a system for my own use as a part of my various farm projects. I explored every DIY web site, every forum, and studied the main models being used by the handful of companies that were trying to develop something. I learned that not all information is created equal and that it is easy to get caught up in different good sounding ideas that aren’t necessarily productive. I have a pretty long list of things I’ve tried that I recommend you don’t do. Over ten years later, there is a lot more information floating around on the internet, but the mix of good and bad, useful, distracting, and just plain worthless information remains. I learned the importance of defining what I actually wanted to accomplish, and of sticking with a well laid out plan to accomplish those goals. Unfortunately a lot of my knowledge was birthed through failures, and I left a fair number of dead plants and fish in the wake of my learning curve.

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As I learned, the desire evolved to design, build, and provide a system that could shorten, simplify, or even by-pass my painful and expensive ten year learning curve for the average person or organization wanting to jump into aquaponic growing. I wanted to bridge the gap between the multitude of DIY backyard barrel systems, and the high budget, customized large-scale commercial systems. I wanted to offer a tested, working system that could be shipped anywhere, and easily brought on-line to serve families, non-profits, and small scale commercial growers.

This meant designing a system package utilizing a reasonable level of technology, that could be easily assembled, complete with build and operating instructions. It also meant cultivating a forum and marketing assistance for long term support. With FishLife Aquaponics I wanted to be able to offer 3 things: 1) a way for people to get their feet wet and try it out – a small intro system, 2) a way for families to provide for their food needs – the base system, and 3) a modular design that allows the base system to be expanded for those who want to engage in small scale commercial growing.

While I believe commercial growing is both viable and an excellent choice for many people, I am not advocating for large scale industrial aquaponic farms. One of the foundational operating principals of FishLife is the need for operators to keep their systems to a scale where they can be intimately aware of the conditions of their system. Although scale of economy does play a role, I believe 10 smaller systems will actually end up with a greater capacity for sustainability, profitability, and long term viability, when compared to a single large system.