Worlds Tech News

Angling for a Better Way to Farm Fish–And Vegetables, Too

Confounded by the inexhaustible array of choices available when you stroll through a supermarket today? Well, here's another one to add to the list: How would you like your environmental degradation? By land or by sea? Whether it's pesticides and fertilizers leaching out of croplands or marine fish stocks vanishing by the boatful, every food purchase carries increasingly visible ecological costs.

Against this backdrop, a growing cadre of academics, farmers and aquaculturists is working to refine and popularize a technique that could slash those costs for both fish and vegetable products. The technique, dubbed "aquaponics," integrates fish farming and hydroponic agriculture in a sort of closed, symbiotic loop--the fish serve as fertilizer factories, the plants as water purifiers. The idea is to maximize food production while minimizing environmentally taxing inputs and potentially polluting outputs--a sustainable approach to growing healthy food.