We often cover the technical side of things in this sub. I thought it'd be fun to explore the financial side. So what's the best way to sell our fish and vegetables? Open our own store? Find a nearby restaurant to supply? Has anyone ever supplied produce to a distributor before? Would it be cool if there was an organic farms distribution network that catered to aquaponics? What do you guys think?
Posted Apr 21, 2015, 6:07 PM UTC
Probably the best way to make money at aquaponics would be to teach people how to do it, monetize your YouTube channel and offer courses.
It's how Growing Power keeps afloat. You can also apply for grants.
There is no money in Youtube. Unless each video is getting millions of views, you'll be lucky to break $1k in a year.
but it will drive interested people to your other offerings.
It can take a LONG time to get subscribers or even numbers of people to view your channel. If you have wordpress and have SEO integrated, then that drives a bit more traffic, but you have to put a lot of effort into quality production web wise. Don't get me wrong, it can be done, but don't quit your day job first.
I dont know about others, but I make around $2 per 1000 views.
It varies, there's lots of variables that go into figuring out the payout for clicks per minute. Then you have to wait for the payout.
At one of the farms I regularly organize field trips to (Next one is on May 16th!), they host interships - people pay them $500/mo to stay at the farm and work a few hours a day. They also do consulting, teach classes, offer field trips, sell worms, eggs, and compost.
Unpaid internships are illegal and in the long run an unsustainable model.
"Unpaid interns" are called volunteers. It is not illegal to volunteer.
If you don't like that definition, consider it time & labor barter for a knowledge experience, it's not indentured servitude.
who said anything about unpaid interships? people come to oahu, pay $500/mo for room and board and learn about aquaponics for a few hours a day. after that they can go surf or whatever.
thats cool! and ya, i don't know where the "unpaid" bit came in. maybe internship was a bad word to use? maybe "classes with hands on training"?
to clarify this - hotels costs $80/night and up. hostels are $30/night and up, so even if you do not want to learn about aquaponics, its still fairly cheap to pay to stay here, work a few hours then go surf. in fact i recall a story the owner told me about a kid who came to stay at the farm. he didnt care about aquaponics but did have an interest in photography so the owner took him out at sunrise and sunset to shoot pics.
Tell that to Joel Salatin. I think they have unpaid interns. However they provide housing and food, so I don't know if that is a gray area that counts as pay, but he has been doing this for decades.
I think that currently and probably over the last 5 to 10 years this has been the most successful model. However, there are a few phds out there and a few aquasheisters selling trainings, and as the field becomes more intellectually developed the aquasheisters will be pushed out, the cost of trainings will come down slightly and the average quality will increase as people move towards the proven and scientifically backed systems and trainings.
Either run at agricultural scale for premium commodity prices, or tap a niche market in some remote area where cost of transportation works in your favour.
Run your operation at an agricultural scale and sell to high-end/sustainable-minded markets. It's notoriously difficult to profit from aquaponics, although not impossible. It's also somewhat difficult to be given "certified organic" to AP produce, so I'm not sure how interested the organic market would be.
But, if you could get certified organic and sell an unusual crop to specialty stores/restaurants or to consumers, one could profit.
I would think it would have a lot to do with location, as well. Fish might fetch a higher price in the Midwest than in Seattle.
Tilapia is also seen as a crap fish in most restaurants. Perfecting the more difficult to cultivate species could be a big payoff. Perch has a high market value where I live and would be a very smart species to farm.
Perch are also much higher in Omega 3's where Tilapia contain almost none. The reason people use Tilapia is that they are almost 100% efficient in turning food into growth. I read somewhere that 1lb of fish food produces almost 1lb increase in body weight.
I read that Perch doesn't do as well in high density stocking levels. If this is true, has anyone figured out a way around it?
Grow kale, bake into chips, sell at mark up prices.
Added value.
Value added products are interesting but tricky. It's hard to match both businesses growth simultaneously, usually one side will be more successful than the other.
You may end up with way more kale then you can bake into chips or dream of selling, and on the same token if your chips take off it'll be hard to suddenly increase your supply.
It's not impossible, just difficult. I think it makes more sense to focus on one product and business before jumping into two.
You'd probably have to consider it hobby money unless you can get a chain of some kind to supply, but you could source local restaurants as clients for the veggies and fish, then be prepared to scale as necessary.
[deleted]
Is there a possibility here to team up? Could we make a platform to distribute our produce to our friends?
Me and some friends started an aquaponics collective and we want to start a food share and a store soon, were out in la
Really? What part of LA?
We have builds throughout la, Culver City, Downey, Temecula though we are based out of downtown area. Are you in La, do you have a system ?
I'm in Gardena, and I don't have a system yet. I've been looking into getting a small-ish system mostly for a hobby. Do you guys ever sell at the Wilson park farmers market (in Torrance) on Saturdays?
Im doing it fine, me and some friends started a collective and we teach people and have workshops at schools, slowly now we have relationships with parts and materials and we can design kits to sell.addition got approached by three non profits to umbrella our collective to efficiently accept currency and grants Organizing around food should be easy because everyone wants to have healthy nutritional food.
recently was paid to convert a pool into a system ill have pics later.
I'd like to see pics of the pool system.
Here are some pics we haven't finalized it, with cutting the liner and adding fish, as we are waiting on it to cycle.
https://justfoodcollective.wordpress.com/past-projects/pool-conversions/
This topic has come up a few times on various forums. Check out mines: http://aquaponicsinparadise.com/APforums/index.php?topic=1170.0
If you have never run a business, its going to be a hard start for you. There's an article about a couple who invested their life savings and grew basil in Pacific Business News. It grew great but unfortunately it tanked because they couldnt sell it. The article didnt cover if they had developed connections with buyers, did market research, or if they just did a "build-it-they-will-come" approach. Running a business is another facet that not everyone has the ability to do, unfortunately. Here are what I've seen people do:
Start a farm with grants, utilize local resources like their department of Ag, SBA, etc.
Start a CSA
Grow and sell at farmers market, cutting out the middle man.