Fishing for landlubbers

Israeli fish farms use new technology to avoid need for freshwater.

By ADAM GONN
fish farm 521 (photo credit: Courtesy of Grow Fish Anywhere)
fish farm 521
(photo credit: Courtesy of Grow Fish Anywhere)
Feeding the world’s fast-growing population has led to sometimes catastrophic overfishing. One way of trying to compensate for the ever-decreasing natural fish stock in the ocean is by growing or breeding fish.
Breeders keep fish either in large holding ponds on land or in closed pens at sea, but both have disadvantages. The sea environment is hard to control. On land, the water in the ponds needs to be constantly changed because the fish excrete waste products such as ammonia and nitrate that are poisonous in large concentrations. Fish in land-based fish ponds also produce more ammonia and nitrate than fish in natural environments because they are often fed a protein-rich diet.
Dotan Bar Noy, CEO of Grow Fish Anywhere, (http://growfishanywhere.com/) tells The Jerusalem Report that his company has developed a method, which allows the fish to grow without the need for a constant source of fresh water.
“We are using zero discharge technology to grow the fish by treating the water with a live machine. Bacteria, in both an aerobic and an anaerobic process, restore the water to 100 percent of its original condition so that the fish can continue to grow,” explains Bar Noy. “We reuse the same water over and over again, only adding water to make up for what is lost due to evaporation.”
Grow Fish Anywhere’s system reduces waste products in a series of microbial processes. The first step involves fermentation: the conversion of complex organic waste compound to low molecular weight organic compounds. This is followed by nitrification: the conversion of ammonia to nitrate. The last step is denitrification, the conversion of nitrate to nitrogen gas and the conversion of low molecular weight organic compounds to carbon dioxide.
The process works in both saltwater and freshwater environments, enabling farmers to grow whichever type of fish they choose. Grow Fish Anywhere also boasts that its system enables fish to be grown without injections of antibiotics or mercury.
Karin Kloosterman, editor of the environmental blog GreenProphet.com tells The Report that fish farming is a positive way to deal with over-exploitation of fish at sea, giving natural fish populations the opportunity to recover their numbers.
Kloosterman adds that if fish can be bred in desert environments, as Grow Fish Anywhere claims, then brackish water can potentially be purified for fish ponds, reducing the need to tap into underground aquifers. From an environmental perspective, she says, that could be an ideal way for desert communities to rely less on farming animals that graze on desert shrubbery, reducing desertification.
In addition, fish farming in the desert could provide a sustainable source of income from otherwise poor value land.
“Aquaculture could be better than fish farms at sea, which is controversial because of the amount of concentrated pollution that the fish can generate in a small area,” says Kloosterman. “There is also the question of how many toxins the fish are absorbing in busy harbors, which often ferry in oil, gas, and other toxic materials that leak into water from sea traffic or water run-off on land and get into the fish.”

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