Is backyard fish farming in our food future?

Looking beyond chicken coops and beehives, one group of young locavores wants to add fish to the list of farmed animals dwelling in Vancouver's backyards.

“This is our smart car, it produces more than it consumes,” says Jodi Peters of the Backyard Bounty Collective. She points to a tiny greenhouse she had built last spring on an asphalt parking space behind her rental home off Commercial Drive. “In the summer this becomes a total jungle,” she says.

It’s a cold and rainy February morning and Peters is admiring her robust collards, winter lettuce and parsley poking out of a growing bed attached to something that looks and sounds suspiciously like a fish tank. This is aquaponics, she explains.

“The water is really clear, the fish are really healthy,” she says as she drops a few pellets of fish food into the tank. “At all times in the system, the plants are filtering out the ammonia the fish excrete into the water.

Exploring symbioses between fish and plants dates back to ancient China and western scientists have been tinkering with combining aquaculture and hydroponics since the mid-1970s.

Today, a number of large aquaponics operations around the world produce tilapia and vegetables on a commercial scale. The more sophisticated systems produce nothing but food. Solar panels run heaters and water pumps and fish fatten up from tiny fingerlings to meal-sized morsels of protein within six months. All the while, nitrogen-fixing bacteria turn toxic ammonia into nitrates, and the cleaned water, on its way back to the fish tanks, circulates through adjacent plant beds, which grow food for humans as well as feed for the fish.

Peters has a long way to go to make her system sustainable. Her pump is electric, her fish eat food from a pet store and she has yet to eat anything from the tank. Until she gets her hands on edible species the tank is only growing goldfish and koi. However, the environmental educator, who also set up a similar teaching system at Windermere Secondary School in East Vancouver in 2009, says it’s all about the journey.

“A revolution happens inside kids when they start to understand how food grows,” she says. “It’s really transformative, beautiful work.”

That work is reaching critical mass at Vancouver Island University (VIU) in Nanaimo, where a team of researchers has been raising tilapia aquaponically for the last three years.

“They’re delicious,” says Anne McCarthy, a fisheries and aquaculture technician at the university. “They’re supposed to be for research purposes and the university doesn’t want us eating our research animals, but we have to know,” she says with a laugh. “The flesh is white and mild. Perfect for the North American diet.”

McCarthy says VIU's 200-gallon fish tank grows 20 pounds of fish every eight months–not bad considering the system pretty much takes care of itself.

“They’re breeding in there,” she says. “It’s aquaculture at its best. And it’s easy. I could teach a child how to do this.”