Quote:
Originally Posted by Goethe
Interesting. Me and the missus have been looking into starting a small-scale hydroponic farm. We’re heading off in about four weeks to look for a suitable property. The idea is to house the hydroponic systems in poly tunnels and focus on two main crops: spinach and rocket. A small bag of that mix here averages $3.50.
We’re still in the planning stages, but hopefully get the first stage up and running by the end of the year (summertime here in Oz)
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Cool & good luck. I was researching this stuff because my dad & uncle have two adjoining 20 acre plots of land each with a house (so 20 acres each). Due to property taxes costing so much they are trying to get the land zoned agriculture. They've been planting pineapples for the last several years but IMO it's a waste of time/space how they are doing it because there is no solid rotation on when they get fruit.
I was checking out this stuff to see if it's something they could set up and actually make money with rather than waste time with the pineapples. Both my dad & uncle have a lot of experience with fish farms so I figured aquaponics might be interesting to them.
The biggest drawback I saw to a large system like that for commercial growing is it's a lot of baby sitting compared to just growing in the dirt. It's also a lot more expensive to set up and run vs growing in dirt. On the flip side you can grow faster and get a higher yield and maybe grow year round if you can control the temps.