Stefan, a German who has been in Puerto Rico for 22 years, recounts the birth of Antilles Food and Vegetables: “The idea was to do something aquaponic, and one of the partners had this space in Bayamón available and we decided to do it there. There is always a need for food in Puerto Rico. The idea was to use that space to do something within the metro area, so that people here could get their fresh, healthy and local things.”
This showcase was done in Bayamon Puerto Rico in an aquaponic farm. We treated one aquaponic bed with two AgroSonic units and did not place any AgroSonic units in the bed next to it. Stefan utilized the same methods on both water beds. All inputs were the same with both beds. We decided to do a 5 week period to see the difference in growth from the two beds. The only difference in SOP's was the two AgroSonics in one of the aquaponic beds. He used floating tablets that had 64 holes in each tablet and filled each hole with a plant.
We used two AgroSonic units to treat 5 floating tablets. We put the AgroSonic units about 4 feet apart from each other in the middle of the floating tablets.
We noticed pretty early on that the plants being treated with AgroSonics looked generally bigger and healthier. As the weeks went on the same observation held true where we saw the floating tablets with AgroSonics treated plants generally much more full and healthier looking, with more vegetation and uniformly larger the floating tablet without AgroSonics treatment.
By the fourth week Stefan had to harvest the Tropicana and Mesclun because they were staring to bolt and were ready to be harvested, while the control was still half the size and still grew for two more weeks without starting to bolt. In essence we cut the harvest time for these plants by two weeks and providing a larger vegetable product. Stefan has never seen Mizuna grow as big as it did which you can see in the video. By the fourth week the Mizuna also showed a couple flowers indicating that it was also time to be harvested. We did the numbers and showed that you can get about 2 times the amount of biomass of vegetable product, and an extra 5 harvest in a year by using AgroSonics, thus giving him a 2 1/2 - 3 times increase in value.
One side note we noticed that the duckweed increased in production significantly every day! It is literally like a carpet of duckweed on top of the water. He had to shovel out every other day duckweed that he used to then feed his fish. Not only was he able to increase his vegetable production, but was able to get another resource for inputing into the aquaponic farm.
