Episode Notes

In this episode, I talk with Kylie about how she designed her backyard aquaponics setup and how she developed a small-scale food forest in the front yard of her house.

Our guest, Kylie, has a YouTube channel where she discusses aquaponics and gunfighting (https://www.youtube.com/c/AutonomousAlternative), and she is on Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/autonomous_alternative/). She accepts donations for the free content she produces (https://ko-fi.com/autonomousalternative)

The host, Margaret Killjoy, can be found on twitter at @magpiekilljoy or instagram at @margaretkilljoy. You can support her and this show on Patreon at patreon.com/margaretkilljoy.

Transcript

Margaret  00:14 Hello, and welcome to Live Like the World is Dying, your podcast for what feels like the End Times. I'm your host, Margaret Killjoy, and this week's episode I'm talking with Kylie, an aquaponics farmer. And aquaponics is basically, in short, the idea that you can raise fish in order to use their waste to provide you with other food that you grow. And I didn't really know that much about this and I got really excited about it when I first started seeing her videos on the process. I ran across her, she has a YouTube channel that I'm sure she'll talk about on the show. This podcast is a proud member of the Channel Zero Network of anarchist podcasts, and here's a jingle from another show on the network. Da da da daaaaaa!

Jingle Speaker 1  00:59 Kite Line is a weekly 30-minute radio program focusing on issues in the prison system. You'll hear news along with stories from prisoners and former prisoners as well as their loved ones. You'll learn what prison is, how it functions, and how it impacts all of us.

Jingle Speaker 2  01:11 Behind the prison walls a message is called a kite. Whispered words, a note passed hand-to-hand, a request submitted the guards for medical care. Illicit or not, sending a kite means trusting that other people will bear farther along until it reaches its destination. Here on Kite Line we hope to share these words across the prison walls.  

Jingle Speaker 1  01:27 You can hear us on the Channel Zero Network and find out more at kitelineradio.noblogs.org.

Margaret  01:39 Okay, so if you could go ahead and introduce yourself with your name, your pronouns, and then any—I dunno, just like a brief introduction of how you got into what we're going to talk about today.

Kylie  01:52 Okay, my name is Kylie, she/her pronouns. I'm an aquaponics farmer, or a small-time farmer honks farmer, a backyard one. And I show and talk about how it's going to be beneficial for yourself and your neighborhood and everyone else around you to have access to that in your own backyard. As well as doing things like food forests, and reclaiming the land that you do have around house and in your area, in your community, anywhere you can get to.

Margaret  02:25 Okay, so, so what is aquaponics? It's a word that I had probably heard before, but as we discussed a moment ago, before I hit record, I didn't know the difference between it and hydroponics. And I don't—you know, so what is aquaponics?

Kylie  02:40 So the big difference between aquatics and hydroponics is whether or not you're using fish in your system. If you're using fish to provide all the nutrients and everything else that you need to grow your plants, then that's aquaponics. But when you're dealing with hydroponics, usually you're using different types of chemicals and fertilizers in order to amend your water so that can grow healthy plants. Aquatics is really just a mixture of aquaculture and botany, or whatever the word for taking care of plants is.

Margaret  03:21 That's interesting to me, because one of the reasons that I never got particularly into hydroponics is that it seemed like it—if you have to add the nutrients to the water yourself—like you have to go out and buy them or something to add them—it didn't really have a lot of interest to me as someone who is interested in building things that could be autonomous. 

Kylie  03:42 No, and I'm really not interested in involved becuase of that. With the hydroponics you're completely dependent on lots of different industries in order to amend your water. But with the aquaponics, you can make it so that everything is sustainable and you can grow your own fish food, feed fish, and then use their fish waste in order to grow your plants.

Margaret  04:06 How did you first get involved in in aquaponics?

Kylie  04:09 Um, about eight years ago—maybe 10 years ago—I saw my husband out in the backyard digging a koi pond. I said. "What are you doing this for, you know, you don't have enough time to take care of just a koi pond just sit there and look at." And I thought he was crazy at the time. He dug a small one in the backyard. And of course he didn't have much time to take care of it and I started taking care of it and started improving it little by little through the years, and then decided, hey, we have this fish and we have all this fish waste that we're having to deal with all the time. Why don't we just route it through a couple of pipes and try and grow some plants in it? And the first couple of times that we started—we ended up with some lateral systems and those that workout for us, they leaked all the time, it was a huge nightmare. We almost just stopped doing it entirely because it was such a mess. But little by little we tweaked the design and we've ended up with something that's been running strong for probably about four years now non-stop. 

Margaret  05:19 Okay. And so what is the end result of aquaponics? Are you basically, are you raising fish to eat? Or is it more about keeping fish and then using their waste to grow vegetables? Like, what is the—what's the goal? What is the result of it?

Kylie  05:35 The goal is that, of course, you can grow all your vegetables that you need. And then if you want to grow protein as well because I don't know what vegetables I can grow within the system that are going to provide me with protein or fats or anything like that. So if you're looking for a more rounded, a more full diet, or whatever you want to say, growing the fish with it is going to provide that for you. Now, if you don't want to eat the fish, that's completely up to you. That's dependent on you. If you just want to have koi—of course, you're not eating koi, you can just have them because they're pretty in they're big waste producers, that's something that you can do, that's a personal choice. But for me, we probably a few fish a year. We don't eat them that often because it's a little weird when you don't have such a big setup and you see your fish every day, and—it's a little bit more to have to go and harvest them. So usually when they do get too big, we'll either sell them off to other people that are gonna use them for the same thing, or—that's about it. We'll pull a few and eat them but it's not very often for us personally. But it's definitely an option with the system if that's something that you're looking into, because it takes about eight months for tilapia to grow out, for example. So every eight months, you're going to have a fresh rotation of fish.

Margaret  07:02 And what's the advantage of using aquaponics over other methods of like backyard gardening and things like that? Like, what draws you to aquaponics besides the fact that you also get a fish pond out of it?

Kylie  07:14 Well, um, I would say space, but there's a lot of different aquaponics systems and ways that you can go about it. I honestly haven't seen very many people using the vertical system that I've come up with because it takes all the growing space that you do have, even if you have a—you know how these apartments will have like a small five by five little patio in the backyard? You're not going to be able to grow anything in that. You know, maybe it's all concrete, maybe it's there's no grass there, and you can't even have anything there except for maybe a couple of potted plants. But those still take up a certain amount of ground space. With this you cou