Challenges of Commercial Aquaponics in Europe: Beyond the Hype

Abstract

In recent years, aquaponics has been receiving increased interest globally as a commercial food production technology and aquaponics start-up companies have been formed in most European countries. Between 2014 and 2018, the European-funded COST Action FA1305 “The EU Aquaponics Hub-Realising Sustainable Integrated Fish and Vegetable Production for the EU” created a strong network of researchers and entrepreneurs. However, surveys show that the aquaponic production in Europe is still very limited, and very few companies are economically viable. In order to obtain insights into the barriers to early development of commercial aquaponics, two surveys were carried out—one in Europe, which included France, and one in France alone, with a different protocol. Henceforth, for simplicity, the former will be referred to as Europe and the latter as France. The results reveal that the development of commercial aquaponics has hit the level of “disillusionment”, caused by numerous challenges facing commercial food production. As the understanding of the processes involved in aquaponics is increasing, it will be very interesting to follow the developments in the field over the coming years in order to ascertain whether aquaponics will follow the phases outlined by the “Gartner’s Hype Cycle” and thus proceed to become an established technology, or whether it will remain an “one hit wonder” and disappear in the “Trough of Disillusionment”.

Exploring economic and legal barriers to commercial aquaponics in the EU through the lens of the UK and policy proposals to address them

“…Despite many hobbyists and researchers with aquaponics systems, in Europe, there are fewer cases of commercial success. A 2017 survey of the European sector by Turnšek et al (2020) identified 60 participants involved in commercial aquaponics. Amongst these is an often-cited example of commercial aquaponics success, Bioaqua Farm, which is a medium-sized facility based in the UK.…”

“…A survey of European commercial facilities highlights two major challenges: raising initial investment and administrative/legislative obstacles (e.g. environmental regulation) (Turnšek et al 2020).…”

“…Failure to raise initial investment is particularly problematic for the industry because economic viability is dependent on size, with small facilities unable to compete effectively with large-scale projects (Bailey et al 1997;Turnšek et al 2019). Only when they reach scale can aquaponics projects prove their profitability, but they cannot reach scale without investment and cannot raise investment without demonstrating profitability (Turnšek et al 2020).…”

“…Demonstration aquaponics projects such as that presented by Baganz et al (2020) show the potential, but a 12-year payback period is too long. Without the learning process involved with real-world deployments, it will be impossible to ever reach the economies of scale needed for aquaponics to achieve financial sustainability (Goddek et al 2015;Turnšek et al 2019;Turnšek et al 2020).…”

Biocontrol of Phytopathogens under Aquaponics Systems

“…Aquaponics has been compared with aquaculture [2,7,8] and hydroponic [9][10][11][12] technologies in terms of production and profitability. Up to now, the research on aquaponics has been focused on sustainability [13][14][15], economic optimization [16][17][18], functional setup [19,20], stocking density [21,22], cultivation media [23,24], water recirculation [25,26], food safety [9,27], fish-plant pathogens [6,28] and beneficial microorganisms [29,30].…”