[NoLinkToMe]

I love the idea of hydro/aquaponics and built a system as a student more than a decade ago. It’s a fun project.

But as a form of agriculture it’s a spectacularly bad idea at home.

This setup is about 1 square meter of NYC space, that’s about $18k. Meanwhile agricultural land goes for about $2/m2, or 9000x less. Then you spend $700 in parts to set up the 1 square meter, even if you put the system on cheap rural Kentucky land. Then you pay $170 a year to power the system for again, 1 square meter.

Meanwhile the 1 square meter produces like less than $100 in annual produce.

Green house farms like in the Netherlands have perfected this growing method and it’s quite effective. Home food production is a joke by comparison just like home anything production of a commodity product.

So fun DIY projects but as a serious way to grow food it’s terrible, not economical or sustainable. I tore down my project the same year I built it, taught me a lot but made no sense to continue.

[ryukoposting]

Who cares?

When you buy a couch, are you thinking "will this couch offset the value of the square footage it occupies" or "will this couch be comfortable and match my décor?"

I'm glad someone is doing something fun in their home.

[marcosdumay]

Yes, when you decide to buy a couch it's because you looked if it's the best use of the space you can do.

[ornornor]

A couch is more comfortable to sit on that an hydroponics system, all else being equal. I’d pick the couch every time.

[davidkoenit]

I always grow some kale in my house just because it's a fun thing to do.

[slfnflctd]

Yep. I initially looked into it as a potential avenue for sustainably producing some of my own food, but the math absolutely did not make sense.

Growing a bunch of potatoes in a barrel would be a lot more bang for your buck with that goal in mind. To really optimize costs and labor, though, as you say, you need a greenhouse and/or a big old field, just like always. There are no small-scale shortcuts. Not yet, anyway.

It makes me a bit sad that even with modern tech we haven't really made it much easier for people to produce their own food. But it's a reminder that our food production requires large scale collaboration and cooperation. Maybe that's a good thing.

[coffeebeqn]

There are a lot of cool growing technologies but it’s really hard to beat the sun and rain and soil on cost. Once you go inside you have to provide the medium, the energy via lamps, watering system and all the micro and macro nutrients. Gets more expensive naturally

[dandaka]

Why are people obsessed with idea of "produce their own X"? When we learned to specialize, we have achieved low cost, scale and sophistication.

[voakbasda]

As a small farmer, I will tell you that, without exception, home-farmed food is immeasurably better than the food in grocery stores. Appearance, taste, nutrition are all superior to store-bought equivalents. Cost is the only metric where store bought food wins.

[mythrwy]

Yep. I grow around 1/3 of my food and most of my produce in the warm months. I have put a lot of effort into selecting flavorful varieties and making a flavor assisting soil medium. I cook based on what is available at the time.

It's a lot of work and not terribly cost effective (if you count labor) but it's also fun work.

But the real payoff is the quality of the food and it feels kind of weird sometimes, like, I'm not uber wealthy, I'm not a movie star nor famous person and yet this is possibly some of the highest quality food available I'm eating. Flavor and probably nutrition as well.

I made this eggplant parmesan last night and everything in it but the salt and oil and breading was from my garden. The tomato sauce, the herbs, the garlic, everything. All fresh picked that day. It's unbelievable how delicious it was I really wish I could share the experience.

Store produce seems like a ghost now, like this faint shadow of the taste produce should have.

[dandaka]

100% with you on the taste and nutrition. I think you forget sustainability at scale. I love the idea of eating local food, but with current levels of personal productivity and home-farmed food costs, there is no way it could work for all of us.

[ctkhn]

It's very fun as a process and it's cool to be surrounded by things you made. We're so disconnected with where things come from (food, clothes, etc) that for me and people I know it's interesting to be involved and see how the process goes even to produce a token amount of whatever it is. I grow my own herbs and cherry tomatoes in homemade cedar planter boxes, sewed my own kindle cover, am sewing replacement covers for my very old patio furniture cushions that I got used, my fiancee knit me some socks and has made sweaters for herself and a few family members, another of our friends sewed an outfit for herself, etc and it really is just fun to do. It also is nice to be a little more self sufficient, not just in a prepper way, but in the sense of not having to get ripped off by some corporation or feeling bad having to buy something new (ie replacing my cushion covers myself instead of buying fully new cushions)

[fellowniusmonk]

1. Tomatoes off a vine crush anything in a u.s. supermarket.

2. I eat unwashed basil leaves and other greens growing outside, I eat them by first putting them under my tongue, my seasonal allergies (I am allergic to everything but mold) have plummeted over the last 3 years of this. The folk remedy of farmers market honey did nothing for me.

I did sublingual drops a decade ago and there was moderate improvement but for medical reasons I can't get a prick test again and I haven't been able to find a provider that will just make drops for me based off my original prick test.

It's impossible to find what plants capture the most environmental allergens on leaves or in edible flowers so I just have a collection, I figured that made more sense than licking a swamp cooler.

Anyway, I've gone from taking Allegra most days to only 2 months out of the year.

[vasco]

The idea of self sufficiency either from individualism or associated with a sense of "being prepared" is enticing. But growing something yourself is also cool in itself. Watching a plant grow, eating the tomato you grew tastes better than the one you bought.

If seen as a hobby it isn't more pointless than 3d printing dragons.

[Freedom2]

I think the problem is that a lot of soil here in the US isn't up to the quality of other countries. It may be tastier and healthier to eat imported tomatoes than ones that we even grow ourselves.

[eptcyka]

It gives you a sense of control, for one. I could repurpose existing software to do most of the things I program myself on my own time. Ikea is way cheaper than most things you can make yourself, but you end up planning around commodity furniture instead of getting furniture that fits your plan.

[colechristensen]

An inordinate amount of the benefits of specialization is sucked up by middlemen leaches and enshittification is very real in the physical world too.

A lot of "specialization" looks more like enforced helplessness where the world around you seems to be full of mysterious magic outside your one specialty and often your specialty is very many levels of abstraction away from anything obviously useful to an end user (i.e. some brand of navigating office bureaucracy).

Many things aren't actually all that hard to do yourself nor do they take up all that much time or energy. And there are many things which aren't actually possible to distribute to end users so what's possible by yourself is so much more than what's possible to sell.

[dalbasal]

So... This is more comparable to a guppy tank than a farm.

Generally, yes you are right. Home farming (eg vegetable gardening) generally isn't economical. That doesn't mean it's not valuable. Besides being fun... I do think home gardening some resilience to the food system.

Aquaponics is, in general, not really a viable commercial method. Or rather, the plants are just a filter for the pinds...not a true secondary product.

Still... aquaponics is fun.

[keiferski]

By this logic, doing anything yourself is inefficient and a waste of time.

However, I think that by reducing it purely to a monetary number, you are not measuring things correctly. Part of the output of doing DIY things is the knowledge, experience, and fun that comes from doing it. If you insist on putting a dollar sign on that, I’m sure it ends up being much more equal.

[gus_massa]

Can I agree with both?

One one hand it's a fun DIY project for some people.

On the other hand, every other year somone rediscover vertical farming that makes no sense except for very niche products.

[NoLinkToMe]

I think you missed the part where I said I built the same system and enjoyed it and learned a lot from it.

[blanched]

People seem to think you’re attacking the article. I read the article but know nothing about aquaponics otherwise, and I was wondering why we don’t see it used more. So I appreciate you sharing your knowledge on the subject.

[Gigachad]

No one is reading this thinking it’s going to replace industrial farming. It’s just fun

[phoghed]

> no one reading this

So probably 99% of the users are clicking directly to the comments and upvoting the inane GP comment to the top, and the “no one reading this” is actually almost no one.

The article itself is clearly just a hobby learning fun project.

[hooverd]

No one reading it /here/. People pitch this stuff all the time/

[RobRivera]

In new york city, the value is managing your sanity

[j45]

It's less about the square foot economics for at-home, and quite often the time to travel between growing space and home, if in the case of an apartment, it was somewhere else.

[dansmith1919]

Nobody is arguing this will replace farming, nobody disagrees with you.

The point is that it's fun and you learn something.

[NoLinkToMe]

You have no clue about the armies of people online who think hydroponic home farms will be a serious and significant source of food then.

[tengbretson]

Yeah. Just think about how much smaller of an apartment they could be living in.