Microbiologist devises a model for sustainable urban farming
Posted by Greg Rienzi on the JHU Gazette August 1, 2011
There’s something fishy going on at Baltimore’s Cylburn Arboretum, and the results could be delicious—and sustainable.
Earlier this summer, David Love, a microbiologist and project director with the Center for a Livable Future at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, began work on a demonstration aquaponics farm housed in a greenhouse at Cylburn, a nature preserve located in north-central Baltimore.
Aquaponics, a relatively new and unknown sustainable food production system, is the merger of aquaculture, or fish farming, and hydroponics, soil-less plant farming. The system utilizes fish wastewater as a resource by circulating it through hydroponic grow beds, where plants uptake the waste as their primary nutrient source. In the system, a symbiotic relationship is formed between fish and plants, with fish providing most of the required nutrients for the plants, and the plants in turn cleaning the water for the fish.
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