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Bevan Suits,Sustainable Design Group

Bevan Suits, head of Sustainable Design Group and recently featured on Green Streets in a review of  his Aquaponics Guidebook, penned this analysis: “Hydroponics is an industry. Aquaculture is an industry. Aquaponics is not an industry…yet. What current trends will guide its growth?”

As author of The Aquaponics Guidebook, Access to Personal Agriculture, Suits has a pretty good notion about how such questions might be answered, especially by today’s college students.

To make a point, he refers to compelling book on food by Michael Pollan, “In Defense of Food.”

If you have not read the book, this quote tells a lot about his concerns.  “Food. There’s plenty of it around, and we all love to eat it. So why should anyone need to defend it?

“Because most of what we’re consuming today is not food, and how we’re consuming it — in the car, in front of the TV, and increasingly alone — is not really eating. Instead of food, we’re consuming “edible foodlike substances” — no longer the products of nature but of food science.”

Suits believes Pollan’s work appears to be taken as a call to action by many university students attending the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus. Incoming freshmen were given copies of the book for free and seemed happy to think of it as a guidebook.

While what happened with Wisconsin’s students had no direct relationship to aquaponics, Suits, reports there is great potential on the horizon, based on the idea of locally grown fresh food.  “We are clearly on the verge of something with the potential to go mainstream,” says Suits. “I would add that the the volume of students and their level of enthusiasm is striking.”

Green Streets has asked Suits to provide occasional perspectives on the subjects of food and aquaponics. He has consented.

“There is some crossover,” he writes, ” with the worlds of hydroponics, aquaculture and ponds, but as a functioning economic platform, it’s still in prototype form. in other words, this baby is not yet born.

“If aquaponics were to take off, there would need to be a thousand times more experts at it than there are now. This is why education and promotion is the most valuable aspect to pursue. The students of Michael Pollan may be the future leaders for producing food in America with aquaponics.

“Some hydroponics vendors are moving ahead with installations, but for consumers who might like to learn about it and try it out, there is no single resource. There are plenty of websites by people who are aquaponics contractors, with expertise ranging from top-notch to eh. But these are not designed for teaching.”

Stay tuned. More is to come come on the teaching end of the food spectrum.