After giving up on mangoes

(Written in 2024)

Ahead of February, when the whole family's birthdays fall, the two of us went to the mainland — to visit a leading aquaponics farm we'd been watching closely.

After giving up on mangoes

Aquaponics was a word we'd heard since we started preparing to farm. It uses the cycle between fish and plants: the waste from raising fish feeds the plants. At first we were only thinking about mangoes and weren't interested, but once we gave up on mangoes and turned to many kinds of vegetables, our interest grew naturally.

Expert lectures and site visits

It looked difficult, there was a barrier to entry, and we heard many people fail if they don't study it properly. So we paid to take lectures from a company specializing in the equipment. But we were still worried about what running it would really be like, so we visited a place that has run an aquaponics farm for nearly 10 years and also does consulting and lectures, to see what actual operation looks like.

Conclusion: let's try it ourselves, little by little

After seeing it in person, we decided to go for it. But having a company build the whole thing was too expensive either way. We judged that running it properly would require enough knowledge to install it ourselves, so we decided to study on our own — even looking up foreign books and papers — and install it bit by bit. Tasting vegetables grown with aquaponics, we found them clearly fresh and crisp.

This year's goal

Buying farmland and putting up a greenhouse were this year's goals. We decided to prepare the aquaponics facility together when building the greenhouse, and until then to keep practicing growing many crops in soil.

Looking back now — the resolve then to "study it ourselves and give it a try" actually carried through. In a later story (How the aquaponics we'd only imagined became a real facility) you can see this resolve turn into a real facility.