Aquaponics as an emerging production system for sustainable production

Abstract

Aquaponics as an alternative for growing vegetablesThe vegetable consumption has been expanding due to factors such as population growth, changes in consumer eating habits and other behavioral trends in the population. In addition, the consumer of vegetables is becoming more demanding, and it is necessary to increase the quantity produced and also the quality of this product, such as, for example, clean production and the implementation of an organic production system, but which maintains the supply throughout the year. With the increasing consumption of food, there is still a significant impact on the demand for water. Studies point out that in Brazil almost half of the water used in agriculture is wasted, 1 which imposes enormous pressure on the sectors involved in food production, in which the optimization of space and natural resources is done development of integrated production systems is necessary. 2,3 The aquaponics (Figure 1), fits into a technological production system, which has as bases, the recycling of water and nutrients present in it, which come from the feeding of fish in cultivation. 4,5 From this technological system, it is possible to create aquatic organisms integrated with the hydroponics system, so that there are mutual benefits within the aquaponic system and optimization of the resources used such as space, energy, water and fertilizers. 6,7 Fish residues are used as fertilizers for plant production, and their cultivation acts to remove compounds, especially nitrogenous, which in excess can harm the development of fish, acting on the quality of the water used in fish farming. 4,6,8,9 Inorganic nitrogen fertilizers also have high values, which leads to high costs of agricultural production. 10 177 ©2020 Oliveira et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and build upon your work non-commercially.