🐟 Aquatic Microbiology, Natural Farming AI, and Home Aquaponics, with Steve Raisner

3:14AM Jan 28, 2025

Speakers:

Jordan River

Keywords:

aquaponics master class

AI chat bot

natural farming

IPM expert

root aphids

aquatic microbes

nutrient deficiencies

fish toxicity

molybdenum

aquatic plants

tilapia benefits

food safety

water conservation

aquaponics systems

microbial diversity

Greetings growers from around the world. Jordan River here back with more grow cast. You can find me tending to the fish. Today, we have the fish master himself. Steve raisner is back on the line potent ponics, and he's here to talk about his new master class for aquaponics that he has coming up, as well as his work on his AI chat bot and so much more. A lot of good natural farming talk, a lot of good aquatic micro talk. I always love sitting and rapping with Steve before we get into it, though. Shout out to AC infinity, baby. AC infinity.com. Code growcast One five to get your savings and keep the lights on. Here at growcast, we appreciate your support, and we love AC infinity. They make the best grow tents around extra thick poles. They've got nice, durable, thick siding now. They have the new side ports people have been asking for those in AC infinity list. And plus, they've got everything else you need to grow. They've got lights and pots and fans and their oscillating fans, the cloud Ray system. Check out their humidifiers, the cloud Forge. How nice is your humidifier? Maybe it's time to replace that. The cloud rays are my favorite oscillators on the market. And of course, their cloud Line series, where they got it all started with all those years ago when we were partners with AC infinity, all they made were those inline fans, and they're the best in the game. So shout out to the entire AC infinity suite. They've got everything you need to get growing from fans to tents to lights. Code grow, cast one five works at AC infinity.com. You support us, and you're getting some badass durable grow gear while you're doing it. So thank you to all you listeners using code grow, cast one five, and thank you to AC infinity. All right, let's get into it. Steve, thank you for listening and enjoy the show. Hello, podcast listeners who are now listening to grow cast. I'm your host, Jordan River, and I want to thank you for tuning in again today. Before we get started, as always, I urge you to share this show, turn someone who grows onto growcast. It's the best thing that you can do to help us out, or turn someone onto growing if they're a smoker, that's how you can help out the overall mission of overgrow, and we love to see that growcast podcast.com for all the things, the seeds, the classes, the Membership Special, thank you to all of the Grow cast members. You make this possible, and I am grateful for you. Today, we've got a great friend of the show back on the line. It's been a minute. He's been on growcast tv a few times. I popped in for a recent double feature, but it's been a second since we've had a one on one with the aquaponics expert, IPM expert, microbe expert, and so much more. Steve is here potent ponics on Instagram, from growing with fishes. You know him. You love him, and he joins us now. What's up, Steve, how are you doing? Man, good. Man, going Yeah. Doing good. Thank you for coming back on the show. I appreciate you making time. You've been a busy man. You've been working on consultations, you've been working on that AI natural farming and IPM chat bot that you've been crafting. You've been working on a new aquaponics master class. Tell

us what you've been up to, man, yeah, and really busy. So I have a bunch of projects going up this year. We have a project with one of the Native American tribes Oklahoma, so that's coming along. We have, we got a grant last year for a couple $100,000 to build out a pretty large greenhouse facility that they already have. The greenhouse is there, but it needs a little bit of TLC, and then we're going to put a big aquaponics system in it. So that'll be really cool. To make a new education space for the tribe out there. Got a couple of other projects here and there with different cannabis facilities and aquaponics facilities around the country. So been working on that. We've been doing all kinds of different neat stuff. Been working really hard on this master class. We have aquaponic master class in May, May, 22 through 26 it's in Beggs, Oklahoma, so that'll be in May, and that'll be five days, intense, of course, we'll have a lunch provided for everybody each day, and then we're gonna do a barbecue on Friday. Kind of make it a really fun experience for people, but that's going to be the longest class that I've taught to date, and the most extensive class, over 1000 slides and really kind of trying to cover every last little thing that there is that will also be available as an online course here in a couple of weeks. After that, in June, we'll be launching the online version of that, which I'm currently recording most of that as we speak. So yeah, we'll get that up as soon as we can. But lots of cool stuff we have on top. I have a top for teaching with all of branch aquaponics in Oklahoma. Both of us have actually worked on aquaponics facilities in Africa, so we both have some pretty unique experience when it comes to large scale, commercial aquaponics at the multi acre scale. We both worked on those types of facilities in Africa, so that's really cool to have that kind of CO teacher with, and it's a guy that I've worked with for quite a few. Years in Oklahoma on different aquaponics, and actually Texas as well. We've done some projects there on different aquaponic vegetable and food production facilities. So that's been really cool. I'm just excited about that. I'm just put a ton of work into updating all that with the latest information. There is an aquaponics. There's so much crappy information out there. And then we'll also condense that down to a short course as well. So there'll be, like, a cheap, you know, I know nothing. I just, I'm interested in the backyard system kind of thing. Yeah, that available, but as a separate shorter course, it'll be a little bit cheaper. But for now, we're going to do the master class, and then the in person one, and then have a slightly longer version that'll be, you know, maybe an extra day or two long. And like for the online course, it'll also be provided. And if you buy, if you come to the in person course in Oklahoma, you'll actually get the the online course for free. With that so busy,

busy, like I said, Now I like that. You're going to condense that down for each one, right? So you're, I'm sure, like you said, you could probably do 2000 slides on this type of stuff, but to get the aquaponics application into the home growers hands, I think that's, that's the big one man. That's a key that I think a lot of people would take advantage of if it was just a little bit more

accessible, you know, Oh, yeah. And I actually have a whole, like, a query in aquaponics, like a one hour presentation on my YouTube channel. I don't remember exactly where it is, but it's on there somewhere one of the podcast episodes. I think it was actually, I don't remember which one, but we did do a presentation at some point.

That's cool, though. Man, I do think that's really neat. That's where a lot of the magic lies. But speaking of home growers, can we talk for a second about this AI chat bot? And you know, you've been working with it, but you're working with it from the back end, so you get a glimpse of something very, very interesting, basically, A Glimpse Inside the Mind of home growers and professional cultivators alike, I'm sure. But like, I guess what I'm asking is, what have you learned looking at the things that people engage with your AI chat bot with about you know what I mean? Does that question make sense?

Sure, yeah, a whole bunch of different cool stuff. Working on the AI. I've been doing a lot of the data compiling, and then also, like the making sure that AI is answering people correctly so going back and reading the conversations and making sure that the AI is doing it right, because we train use that data to train the AI to be smarter each time. So Right? And we have a whole new version working on training, so it'll be available offline as well. To download it, I'll have you on your phone, and you'll have the library, you know, local lease. You won't have to have an internet connection if you don't need it. Don't want to do that, which is super cool. But what we've been doing right now is in this beta phase training the AI, it's been really, really interesting. We had someone try to scrape all the data from it, which we had some safety precautions in it that kind of prevented them from doing that. It's interesting to see them try to try to make it give the answers that we didn't want to give. That was funny. Okay,

which one of you was that? All right, knock that off. Someone, someone would listen to one of your appearances on a show like mine, tried to scrape the data. That's crazy.

Yeah. Well, we knew it was gonna happen. It's fine. Or some company could have been a company could have been just some good call, some troll, who knows it's been interesting. A lot of people asking, like, what's the best plants to grow in that particular area, sure, and that's not something that we had thought of in terms of data sets that it did a really good job answering, but it wasn't something that we had pre built data for. So I thought that was really neat. And then also, it's come up with some really cool answers, like the nutrient IPM or IMO. So it's making IMOs, like, I am a three and four using nutrient specific inputs for that to kind of get a final result that puts out faster nutrients. Wow. And that's the whole angle that like is not anything Chris came up with, isn't anything that is traditional natural farming, and just an AI was like, Hey, why aren't we doing this? This makes sense. Geez. So that was a really interesting kind of insight, that you can kind of combine composting, to a lesser extent, with specific crops and get nutrient outputs, you know, at least theoretically. And then we've tested some of them, but we haven't tested a whole wide range of them yet. But it is interesting to kind of see that, and it makes sense, too, if you have that level of microbe concentration, to rapidly make it bio available. And why wouldn't it? So it's been really interesting to kind of see how the AI digests the data on that, and then lots of like hyper specific plant disease problems that are like diseases that are specific to like individual plants or plant genuses. So that's been kind of something we weren't quite expecting as much some people being, like, freakishly friendly with it, saying they, I they love it, and how, you know, just like, like human affection towards the AI.

I mean, it's a farming AI. I right, it's not that's the cool thing about collecting this data. It's not like you're tapping into their hopes and dreams here. There's nothing personal. It's you're learning about farming in specific locations. The first one you said made a lot of sense. You know what to grow in my area. I think garden planning is like, a huge topic on people's minds, especially in poly cropping, outdoor scenarios. And it's overlooked. Garden planning is overlooked. A lot of people just kind of go by the seat of their pants. I love when I see members posting in our Discord. They have, like, graph paper and they have their garden drawn out. I think that's great. And something like your AI chat bot would certainly help with garden planning. So that makes sense to

me. Yeah, it's been, been really interesting. And then people asking, like, how to do terrain work on their property. They live on a hillside, and need to know what to do. Are people asking, like, what's the prevailing wind their particular place? Or just stuff that it's kind of interesting to kind of see if the AI can answer it or not. You know, based on little data that they gave them, it doesn't have, like, a geo tagging or anything. You know, it doesn't know where you are when you are when you connect to it, unless you tell it. So while that's intentional, yeah, but if you tell it where you are, it tries to give you good answers on that kind of stuff. You know, this month, it's this direction this month, it was kind of interesting to kind of see it answer some stuff that was not at all, you know, necessarily built into the AI data set. So wow, it was pretty cool on that. Just went through a bunch of these yesterday. I'm trying to, I about 300 more left. I have to go through that. Are different sessions, but that's really neat. A lot of like, what to do for aphids. So a lot of

that, oh, aphids becoming a problem right now, I could see that. I mean, I'm sure aphids are a problem all the time, but don't you find Steve that when you help people? I was just talking to Mary Beth Sanchez about this, if you, like, consult with people or diagnose pests or issues. Don't you feel like problems come in waves? I'm not sure if it's just a phenomena of, like, random things obviously establishing random patterns, or if it's like, you know, aphids are bad this year, right? That's the thing that happens, too. But do you ever notice problems coming in waves?

Yeah. I mean, you have insect seasons, right? So like in the spring here in the States, you're going to have lots of aphids, and they're going to kick off, and then once it heats up a little bit more, like in later half of spring, early summer, then the white flies start to come out and become more of a problem, true. And then once the mid summer hits, then you got the grasshopper butterflies start to be a problem, and caterpillars have to be a problem. So, you know, you have different seasons for each of the insects, and you start to think of it that way, you can kind of preemptively hit them a little bit more. I know, in Jamaica, for instance, may is butterfly season. Like, legit, like, there's just millions of them. It's crazy. They swarm the whole fucking Island. Yeah, they'll hatch it once, or whatever. It's pretty wild. I would imagine you're off in Hawaii. It's probably similar. There they have similar, boom, you know, Bloom,

right now. Steve, it's the, like, I think it's only a couple of weeks out of the air. It's witch moth week. I don't know if you know these witch moths, they're in in, uh, Jamaica. I just learned this on stream. They call them the duppy bat because they're the size of a bat. You mistake them for bats. Oh, okay, but it's the witch moth. And dude, it, you described it properly. It is a swarm. It's a swarm like you're driving. Remember the scene from fear and loathing when they're driving through the it's like the desert, one of the first scenes, I think it's the opening scene, where they're driving through the desert and they're tripping on acid, and then the car gets, like, attacked by a swarm of bats. That's what it's like here when the fucking witch moths are out, man. So you're right about the seasons with the pests, and I'd imagine that the AI bot would do a really good job with things like that, right? Localized two areas. It's going to reflect that data. So that's interesting.

Yeah, that's that's really peculiar about the witch months. Yeah, they're gnarly. Do you know what a Duffy is? A Duffy is, I don't. Adobe is like a ghost in Jamaica. People blame problems on them, or problems in their life on them. But kids will carry an odd number of pebbles, like five or seven or nine pebbles, because the duffies can only count to even numbers. Wow. And if it ends on an odd number, they stop and recount it again. So little kids like, throw the pebbles on the ground behind them. Like, run away, the Duffy will, like, get confused and confused with the beans or whatever, dude, that's amazing. Oh no, it's like a weird Jamaican duffies aren't exclusive to Jamaica. They're across the Caribbean.

That's really cool, man, because the witch moth is supposed to be a sign of a dead ancestor visiting you. So that, like all kind of makes sense. So what else has been on your mind with IPM since you've been digging into this chat, and there's a lot of IPM questions, just any general thoughts or learnings that you've had recently when it comes to pest management?

Lately, I've had a lot of people hit me up about root agents, and a lot of people really struggle. At those they can rip through a huge facility and be like, really hard to get down to zero, if you don't know the right way to do it, but that they can be tricky. The best thing you want to do is knock them down with, like a Bavaria Bassiana, alternating with this area if you miss a race, to knock them back. And then do some some root soaks, and then hit the roots themselves with metaricium ms cephalai, which is really, really awesome for termites and ants, but also, particularly it's good for soil dwelling insects. So it also will hit the root aphids as well.

I have not heard of that last biological Is there a brand name for that one? There

used to be a product called met 52 but that got taken off the market, and there's a new there's two or three new products of the same, biological agents called metarisium. It's not as used as often in the US, but it is a is a good one to have. So if you have a serious transient manure bassana, you know you're going to be able to smash down most insect outbreaks with the rotation of that. Wow. But you're gonna have for root aphids, you gotta do a good root drench and spray the foliar to make sure you get them down all the way. Yeah,

that's what I've realized, too. Is the the root aphids, when they take hold, it's hard to get them down to zero, as you say, especially if people don't want to dispose of their medium and let their garden kind of lay fallow, right? Like if you're in a grow room and you can just shut down your grow for a few weeks, swap out the medium, that's one thing. But if you're, I don't know, in living soil beds that you've been you've had for years and years and years, it's a totally different scenario, man.

The other bit of it is, and this is where I seem to see it the most people will have, like, a greenhouse facility, a grow facility, but air intakes that are like, capable of ingesting insects and passing them through, like they don't have enough screening on it, or whatever, right? And they'll be like, right next to a pond or some other water area. And in North America, they love in the south, they love living in the marshes and anywhere where there's water around ponds and the reeds, there's also a fresh water it's called, like a water lily aphid, or something like that. It looks very similar, and they can live really well in the same kind of environment as rice root aphids. So they're, they're another one to keep an eye out for. But yeah, a lot of times I see them, and it's like, I go outside to their pond, and I can find them right on their reads, and it's like, oh, well, there's where they came from. I've done that five or six times. That's brutal,

man, and you're right. That's the first one of the big takeaways from this episode. If you don't have a filtration on your intake, especially if you're drawing in air from the outside, it's a great way to pull cool air in in certain climates. But don't just leave that ducting open or or Steve, like you said, have like that. I don't know if I would call it chicken wire, but like that exterior kind of filter screen that would still totally suck in a spider mite or rice, Ruby David, or anything like that. Get a get like what? Like a furnace filter and metal tape that bitch on. Get something like that,

your best bet is just to get a build a little wooden frame, like a box frame out of wood, like one by ones and or one by twos, and then put thrift screening on it and make it, you know, much bigger than the intake. This way you have more surface area. So you're not like clogging the crap out of the filter. That's smart. But make like a three by three, or a four by four, you know, square box, and just flip screen over it, and then put that up against the wall, and then I get it rid of most it's like my own stop drips or, you know, if you have airborne mites or something like that, like happens sometimes, and then, you know, you're stuck with that, but otherwise it's gonna stop most other things,

and Just pulling in crap too, you know, debris and bullshit. That is a good point. I see a lot of negligence on the on the intake. I've been guilty of that myself. So, very, very good point. And, yeah, man, it's just a constant battle. It's just, you know, when, if, when they get into your grow and you're set up, it can be a real pain. What does that look like an aquaponic gross. When you get an infestation, you're growing in like a dual root zone system, so there's not a whole lot of media, right?

Well, they'll they'll live down. I got videos of them in the on my YouTube channel. I have a video of a cilantro NFT tray that has more biomass and aphids than it does roots. Well, yeah, so in an aquaponics, the rice root aphids and the water lily aphids really will take off even worse than just soil pots, so we have to really treat them. And again, you know, using the bio controls like metarism and things like that, I don't have to worry about killing my fish or shrimp or anything else in the system. Although Metarhizium sometimes can kill shrimp, like the little, tiny ones, like COVID pods, but it doesn't kill off like your food production shrimp or anything like that.

Oh man, I have questions about shrimp and fish. I'll save it until later in the episode. But, um, yeah, that's interesting. Say, man, and that's why I like talking to you. You're definitely a guy who's up to date on the biological products. That's what everybody wants. Now it's, you know, the days of pylon and avromectin are kind of waning, if not over, and now people want these biological applications. They just do. So, yeah, it's good to see you in the world of IPM. And it's cool that you're kind of getting these unique insights through the AI that you probably wouldn't be able to, you know, quite understand from that perspective without digging through that that data set. Very cool, man. Good luck with your 300 other sessions to paw through, and good luck finding the hacker too. Keep us up to date on the hacker search real quick before we get into what I really want to talk about this episode, which is get back to aquaponics and aquatic microbes and stuff, the real stuff that you're an expert at. Let's talk about this Thai seed drop for a second. You, of course, teamed up with grow cast seed co last year, earlier this year, pretty recently, for a tie seed drop, and they're back. You've got another round of Thai seeds. This time. People got a DM. You directly at potent ponics. Which strains do you have available? And tell me about them. Are they all tie? Are they crosses? Fill me in here.

First we have F twos of the temple ties, basically the the children of the left release more female hunted and and this one's more peachy and more banana. There's more been, much more banana in this, in this drop, than there was on the last round. So that's really cool. In terms of genetics, the differences between this round and the last round with the temple tie, which get, you know, up to 2025 feet tall. The ones that we got the mother stocks, I think the shortest one that we got the mother stock from, was 18 feet tall. The tallest one was like 23 feet and there was ones there that were still growing, that were not down yet, that were taller than any of the ones that we saw. So are they any of the ones that we got seeds from, at least. So they're monsters. So if you're looking for something cool, and they finish in time, we actually grew them in California just last year, and managed to harvest them without any frost damage or anything like that. It wasn't a colder part of California. So yeah, they did just fine. So you should be able to pull them off. And you know, the majority of the US, you know, Michigan, might not pull it off, but anybody in the two thirds of the US, southern two thirds of the US should do just fine. Nice man. We have the sweet temple tie, which is a coffee stream that we found, or has coffee in it sometime, most of the time, but not all the time, on the sweet temple tie, or the sweet tie. And then we cross that with the temple tie. So it's got, you know, some of the lemon, coffee herbs in its terpenes, white. So it'll be interesting to kind of see the breakdown on. And it gets much, you know, a little bit stockier, not quite so tall,

nice. So those would be great if you're looking for something unique outdoor this season. Still, still got time hit them up right now at potent ponics and get those for the outdoor season. And then we got Bucha sugar, which is a sugar cane crust with temple tie. And then the low high, which we released as well in the last release. Nice. Yeah, those low highs the land race on land race ones, very cool man, people like the exotic genetics bringing them in. So this time you hit up at potent ponics, uh, DM him. You know, maybe you got him on Discord or something like that, definitely on Instagram. Give him a follow. If you're just now discovering this show. How's it going? Hit subscribe. And yeah, dude, I'm excited to see what comes out of those. I gotta get back to the mainland so I can get some more plants going. Limited Time. Sale at sustainable village.com, that's right. Code grow, cast gets you 10% off all blue mat watering systems. Now is your last chance. The blue mat code grow cast is going to end here at the end of the month. So go ahead and go to sustainablevillage.com and get the best watering system that you can plug into your beds. You will absolutely love the blue mats. These things do not need a pump to operate. You can have a gravity fed system. They automatically detect the pressure in your soil, and once the pressure or moisture gets low enough, it emits just enough water to get you back in the target range. Never worry about going out of town for a weekend again. Grab the best of the best. Sustainablevillage.com, code, growcast, 10% off. Like I said, this is a limited time code, and they only do it for us maybe a couple times a year. You can't find a sustainable village discount code out there otherwise. So it's a really, really big treat that the folks at sustainable village put on for us. So thank you to Michael box, and if you guys want the best system, whether you're in cocoa living soil, if you're in big beds, if you're in pots, it doesn't matter. Give them a call, shoot them an email. They'll give you a quote, they'll design the system for you for free, and then mention growcast for 10% off your total when it comes to the blue matte products@sustainablevillage.com So one more time. Thank you to sustainable village. Thank you to Michael box code, growcast, 10% off blue matte only for the rest of the month. Only a few days left. Go and grab it. Sustainablevillage.com go. Mode grow cast. Thank you sustainable village.

All right, man, let's talk fish. I realize that we've done a lot of episodes together, and it's been a minute since we've covered aquatic microbes and fish, and now you doing this extensive aquaponics master class. It's like the perfect time to kind of revisit this stuff, follow up on some of this stuff, and dig deeper. One thing that you said that always stuck with me, and I just, I tell this to people all the time, man, when I'm talking to new growers, and maybe I realize that someone's like, a little further along than I expected, and I want to give them a piece of advice that'll help their grow that they haven't heard yet. You talk about aquatic microbes versus terrestrial microbes, and you talk about how a lot of people are missing out on, like, a huge portion of the soil food web, and how naturally these aquatic microbes do find their way onto terrestrial land. So like, you want to include them in your garden, and if you're not including them in your garden, they're not there, you're not getting the benefits of them. You know, I think you mentioned the figures that study showed that something like 80% of living aquatic microbes can survive in living soil as well, like very few are lost in that translation, I would just like you to speak on again, however you see fit now, you know, with your current understandings and learnings, what type of benefits to these aquatic microbes spring. What are these microbes? Specifically, some of your favorite that we're missing from the dirt microbes and and just talk about the benefits that these water organisms can bring to your garden.

Yeah. So the there's quite a few different it's not quite 80% but it's closer to 70% but it's, it's a huge percentage of the microbes that can survive in your in your soil system long enough to do mineralization. So you have quite a bit more diversity. In fact, there was a study done by the alcoholics Association when the soil growers people tried to make us illegal, not illegal, but they wanted to get rid of organic certification, aquaponics, and say, Oh, it's not, it's not soil, so it's not uh organic, which is ridiculous, because when we did a microbe test, we tested with the a bunch of different organic soil farms, soil from their main production space where they're producing crops. And then we tested the same exact thing for many, many different aquaponics facilities. What we found was that the on aquaponics facilities on average at 168% more biodiversity in their aquaponic water than the soil depth, geez, in terms of total species, and that doesn't

even include the dual root zone style, which really incorporates both Exactly. Yeah, that

is really interesting. So that was a really big takeaway, that there was a huge amount of things, and you know, you've, I'm sure you've had many other guests on the show, but you know that activating those immune system genes really is the key to increasing flavor compounds in your cannabis, right? So if you're you're not activating those, then you're not creating those secondary metabolites for the crops, you know, to really take off and do stuff with. So by having the plants have access to that, you know, from even an aquarium water or aquaponics or shed even has taken stuff from your local pond and putting it in there that has that, you know, separate biodiversity is really going to help trigger those immune system response genes on your crops and boost your terpene levels, those 456, percent levels that you see, you know, in some of the more professional growth they're getting, that by hitting those high numbers of micro diversity, you Know, microbial diversity, they're not adding some magic, you know, store bought shit. They're not looking at the moon schedule and, yeah, no, putting crystals in there. And, you know, trying to change the political affiliation of their water with, you know, structured bullshit. Actually, they're, you know, increasing the biodiversity of the microbes. That's why you see natural farming people having really high numbers, and people with really good composted soil having really high numbers for their terpenes and their cannabinoids, is because, well, they have the diversity and the root system in order to actually turn those genes on in the plant that the plant thinks it needs to defend itself against, X, Y or Z, and then, you know, turn Those genes on, and then, you know, that's going to activate the secondary compound production, which we enjoy as terpenes or COVID. Cannabinoids are just a category of terpenes. So,

and that also nods to all the salt growers who go like syngenic, you know, the syngenic style that almost every bottled nutrient grower is employing now, I feel like, every modern grower has a microbe part. Now, it's crazy, man, but I think the aquatic thing specifically, it's like, that's the one change that a lot of people could make in their garden that, like you said, would instantly open up their biodiversity. Is it mostly bacteria that we're missing out on by not applying some source of you? Or is it, or is it just a consortium? Is it about everything, like the algae and other types of microbes in there? What do you think

it's definitely a higher percentage of micro func bacteria, rather. But you also have archaea, and then you have, you know, just all the other microbes that are in there, right? There's definitely fewer, yeah, there's definitely, you know, protists and amoebas and all those other ones that make up the food web. And really what? The reason why it's it's so good is that you're filling in any missing niches that you don't have populated, right? That's why adding IMO, liquid IMO, in particular, to an aquaponic system, increases your mineralization, increases bioavailable nutrients. Isn't because that the microbes are like to have minerals in them. They're just converting the fish waste into more usable platforms, rather than just, right, you know, whatever.

So it works both ways. That's really cool. You're taking limo and putting it in your aquaponic water. That's really cool. It's kind of, you know, makes sense, the land benefiting the Sea and the Sea benefiting the land. Yeah,

we just IMO one week, and then the next week, we just labs and we just alternate those two. You could just do IMO each week, but that really helps radically clean up the aquaponics systems, and helps a lot with food safety as well. So we did a whole, you know, a couple of different experiments where we've treated different aquaponics facilities that had, there's a type of E coli that shows up in aquaponic aquaculture systems is not human it's not human pathogenic, but it causes false positives for the ones that are so you have to send it out for secondary testing. It's kind of like Aspergillus testing in cannabis, where it's easy to get a false positive through both bactolos and vacuoles use or other methods. So if you actually test what's in it versus a total bacteria count or whatever, or bacteria colony forming units, if you test total colony forming units, you might fail. But if you actually just test the species for themselves, right? To realize that there's no there's no problem. So we've treated multiple facilities for for that type of E coli within 30 days without bringing the system offline, which no one else has done ever with lactobacillus. We've also have evidence that it works on Listeria and salmonella as well through some early testing. So in my opinion, you should be dosing labs, you know, in any type of food production facility, if it's liquid, like, if it's hydroponics, you should be dosing labs for food safety, like, just as a food safety standpoint, so that if there is a contamination issue, like a mouse falls in, or something and doesn't contaminate the system.

I think it's a great practice for, like you said, just about any grower, home grower, garden grower, cannabis grower, vegetable grower. Labs are wildly underutilized and overlooked. I am guilty of that as well. So that's another good takeaway here. Get those labs bumping and those super labs, of course, I think we talked about that in the last episode. Go check out that episode about the super labs. But you mentioned something I want to ask you, Steve, you said, you know, add some aquarium water. Even add some water from the pond. You said, What are your thoughts on adding aquarium water? What types can and can't we do? Is it just a free for all? Do you have do's and don'ts for adding this type of thing? Yeah. I

mean, definitely don't add it from, like, your African cichlid tank. The pH is like eight the plants are gonna not be very happy. Um, that would be a big one to avoid. Another one would be, you know, make sure that if you're in flower, oh, no, if I would use fish, aquarium fish water, because it's high in nitrogen, right? So after like, week two or three of flower, I wouldn't be putting that in there anymore. You know, it already has enough nitrogen. You don't need to give it more nitrogen is going to stretch. So keep in mind that there is quite a bit of, you know, the nitrates are much more bioavailable than pneumonias for the plant, as far as instant uptake. And you know, the plant is, yes, it has to convert it, but it's, it loves to uptake the nitrates really, really, really readily. So, you know, be mindful of that when you're when you're watering it in because it'll definitely be a problem if you're just seeing it heavily. So

add it in veg you. I mean, you want to inoculate early anyways, right? So add it when it's young. Is your is your advice?

Absolutely, yep. So that would be the caveats for that, or just dilute it, right? So, like, use it as, like, a quarter of your water, if you're just seeing it in flour, sure. Um, so it can provide some nitrogen, but you're not getting, like, you know, 80 or 100 ppms. Usually, when you do a water change in the aquarium, you're just sucking all that waste out of the bottom. So you're getting, like, a higher level than what the water column is in terms of nitrogen.

Well, what about ponds and creeks and stuff like that? How do we know if it's safe to add that type of thing to our soil? Sure.

So with ponds, obviously you're going to want to have the source renew. They're not spraying any kind of weird, you know, stuff around it. So make sure it's a clean, good source or lake. But you know, again, you're just trying to get, like, the different mineralizing microbes. So make sure that you're getting it from right near where you have a bunch of live plants growing in, you know, aquatic plants. That's really where you want to get it from, because you can even collect the aquatic plants and put them in a blender and pour them on and have all those microbes that are on the surface of it, right? Oh, I like that. And brew them up, yeah, one of the methods we teach for liquid, IMO, collection, we teach a couple different methods, but one of them is just collecting aquatic plants and more or less just blending and brewing them, and it works quite well. That's cool.

I hadn't thought of that year after the bacteria that is forming with the plants kind of at that shoreline. That makes perfect sense. So why not just take the plants themselves, and there is your inoculant right there. They've already done the work for you in gathering it. That's interesting, because I was thinking about, yeah, probably different than, like, scooping a cup from the middle of the middle of the lake would certainly still have stuff. But, yeah, very interesting. Very super, super interesting. Why always tilapia? Then Steve like, Why is every aquaponics set up tilapia? Is there something magic about tilapia, that they fucking poop plant fertilizer?

So tilapia are just used a lot because they if the power goes out, the tilapia can more or less breathe atmospheric air most of the time. For quite a while, they can survive an extremely low oxygen environment. So if you're a newer person or your largest facility and you have problems with electrical for whatever reason, your generator has a problem, you're not going to immediately lose all your fish. Another reason why is, they're easy to breed their mouth brooders, right? So they're going to have their babies hold on to them until they're, you know, big enough to swim in their mouth. And then, once they do that, then they'll release them. And then you get they're easy to just put some floating plastic plants, or, you know, other, you know, a couple of milk crates or something else in there that the babies can kind of get away from the adults and not be adults and not be food. So they're easy to kind of buy one time and raise over and over again. So those are kind of the biggest advantages. In terms of plate price, they're really crappy. They mean they're two to four bucks per fish. So they're not really great for compared to other options. But in terms of, like, just ease of growing something that you can eat, you can also grow them out in about 12 to 14 months, most of the time, you know. So they're fairly quick turnover. In terms of fish species, Paku, are about the only thing that grow quicker than the Paku will get it to plate size in eight months.

Man, that is wild. Well, you just totally answered my question. The low oxygen thing makes perfect sense. That's like, basically insurance for your fish generator for your grow.

You mentioned earlier, though, like

there being a kind of technical definition for an aquaponics grow, that some percentage of the minerals that the plants consume has to come from the fish, because you always got to supplement a little bit, right? Can you talk about that? Sure. So,

yeah. I mean, there, there is no, like, official aquaponics definition, they would try to define when the associations tried to a couple times, but more or less it's, are you getting 75% or more of your nutrients, you know, from your fish waste, or from a fish recirculating fish system. There's lots of stuff that isn't aquaponics. You see the people in sand beds and stuff like that. That's not aquaponics. It's not food safe. It's just a disaster piece to ever do that. It's a just don't ever like, yeah, it's crap. They claim that it makes minerals on its own that aren't in fish food. It just magically creates them from thin air and all kinds of other ridiculous so it really is a, you know, dead end technology, and it gives aquaponics a bad name, but you also people just doing like wicking beds and, you know, sip systems and aquaponics and having really good results. The biggest facility right now is actually just merged, or merged with the Europe German cannabis company, become the first multi country aquaponic cannabis facility that I actually did some work with in the past. Aquila Toss up in Canada, I'm good friends with Danielle matland. She runs a lot of their stuff up there on the fish side. They actually run soil, living soil that's fed up, aquaculture water with a recirculating tray underneath, and you know, any runoff goes back to the fish tank. So, you know, a lot of people are using hybrid systems. And a lot of the bigger commercial, actually, all the bigger commercial facilities at this point are doing some type of hybrid of soil and aquaponics, renewal root zone or raking bed. There's one or two others that aren't but they're having to fino hunt so much that it just, to me, makes no commercial viable sense. Like, yeah, you could fino hunt 1000 strains and find one that's going to produce in DWC only. But why? Though, like, just save yourself the work and just add soil layer and throw any strain of the month that's popular right now and make money. It just makes no sense, from an extent point to, like, put that much work into it to, like, prove a point. I don't know. It just seems stupid, in my opinion. Well,

I mean, I'm a little bit biased. You took me on a trip to go see Vertica farm. Shout out to Vertica farms. Okay, out there in uh, Oklahoma, and I. I'm biased because of how just beautiful that system works. Man, when it's applied to scale, they had their bedroom going. The bedroom looked gorgeous. They had the same canal of, like, fish feed flowing through all these plants in the bedroom. They had autos going, because you have, like, extra space there. So they had a bunch of beautiful autos. They had the flower rooms that looked perfect. Then they had the lettuce production and stuff. It's a very impressive system. Man, we support all growing types here. That's what we've always talked about at growcast, is, you know, there's a million ways to do it. We want to support people no matter what. But if I had to say, like you made the ultimate argument, Steve, which is, you know, yeah, a lot of grow systems can produce all sorts of fire, but this is the only one that produces protein. I just think it's so cool. I think it's so unique, and it's it, there's a really good argument for it being, quote, The best gross style, because it does produce protein, man, it fixes hunger, and it's just really cool to see it in action. So, so thank you for taking me on that tour. And I agree, I think that it is a system that makes way more sense objectively than a lot of systems, although we encourage people to grow how they want. This is a really sensible system.

I love it. Yeah, it's, I don't know. You can do more stuff with aquaponics than you can just about anything else. Like you're using significantly less water use point three to 1% of the system volume per day is what gets consumed by the plants, or evaporation, which ends up being about 17 to 18% of the water you would use for soil, terms of a month to month, or run to run, total water volume. So, you know, a place like Malachi in Hawaii, or wherever else, yeah, it's going to be, you know, a great, great advantage to a place like that. I had a grower in Barbados that was growing in the legal market down there, and he, again, it's another one where they have no groundwater there, right? It's all rain only. So they have so much water, and then the water is out, and then there's no more water. So if you have a place like that, you know, having a system that's recirculating, that's using way less water is really going to be a huge advantage to you, you know, and food production, it was when I was in Africa too. You know, they had very seasonal rains. We can store all the water, you know, when it's there, but in the dry season, you know, if we burn through all that, we're so it's the same kind of deal where we're much, much more able to grow significantly larger volumes of crops off that same volume of water. So that's one page. And then hey, to an apocalypse situation. You know, should it? Fam, drink the water out of the system? Like it's not that talk, like even a little light filtration, or even no filtration, you can still drink the water. Like the facility in California, I used to drink the glass of the waters to prove the students it wasn't toxic. Like, that's cool. Same thing I do when I do the Teach, can't anything. KNF, you know, liquid, IMO, and we have everybody drink it if they want to drink it, you know. So just to show people, like, look, you can make inputs that can kill bugs or make your plants super strong that are drinkable. You don't have to rely on weird chemical shit. That's so cool. Man. Yeah,

that's what it's all about at the end of the day. And like, closing the loop means a lot of different things, but when you take a look at aquaponics, you see a different type of loop. It's just so cool and so self sustaining. I want to ask about something that we teased earlier in the episode, though, you know, you say there's all these different benefits and drawbacks to raising different types of fish to feed your aquaponic garden. And you mentioned the tilapia being, you know, two to four bucks a plate. But can you raise shrimp? Can you raise lobsters to where like, you're selling this meat and making a profit off of the meat and making a profit off of the crops? What about raising our favorite edible fish, or crustaceans for aquaponics? Yeah. So there's

quite a few things in terms of, like, the craziest one I've seen as a group and and I know the guy that that worked on most of it, in terms of putting together. His name is Paul Brown. Really great dude. You see Davis, good friend of mine. He was doing abalone and sea urchins and seaweed. So they grow seaweed to feed the invasive urchins that are like overpopulated. Because we, back in the day, we killed off all the sea otters, right? Because they wanted the fur from them back in the 1800s early 1900s and then they put a moratorium on the sea lion and the sea otter. I think it's a sea otters, I'm sorry, not the sea lion. Sea otters. They would basically be the control agent for the urchins, because they're one of the few things you can eat, the killing all those right? So the urchins are going crazy and wiping out the kelp beds in the west coast. So that's kind of a problem. And then the urchins also are kind of half starving, so they don't have any row so they're not very good for like sushi production or export. So what they do is they go and collect a bunch of the urchins from the ocean, and they collect a bunch of abalone, like the young baby abalone, or breed the abalone, I'm not quite sure. The acquisition of the abalone, raise them up in captivity and grow them out, and then the waste stream from those two feeds the algae and. And then the algae they use to feed the other two. So it's like a loop on that. And then they can basically bulk out the urchins from the ocean and have them get the row in them, so they can sell them for like, food production, you know, sushi and whatever else. So that's

like a sushi roll all in one Do you have the seaweed? You got the fish and you got the sea urchin, yeah,

so that's the craziest one that I've seen in terms of, like, most unique. There's another one that sticks out in my head. There was a group there in Colorado, like south near Pueblo, Colorado, and they have an alligator farm, and they raise alligators, and the alligators poop goes to a giant lettuce facility. The water gets filtered and separated and mineralized from the alligator hoop. Wow, because, you know, it's not, you know, still nitrogen, basically at the end of the day, and then that feeds the lettuce, and the lettuce feeds the chickens, and the chickens feed the Gators. So that's a more interesting food chain in terms of aquaponics systems, but it's, I guess, the highest trophic level

that is talk about closing the loop, the chicken feeds the gator were they harvesting the Gators? Were they eating the gator meat? Yeah,

it's a gator farm. So you get meat leather. Whoa, whoa, whoa, like the farthest northern Gator farm in the States, at least in terms of latitude,

Gator meat, ain't bad. Gator meat, surprisingly, ain't bad. So, I mean, Gator channel is great. Man, yeah, I'll try anything.

Slow cook. It maybe twice.

This was good stuff, man. I mean, we have a few more minutes here. I guess the last thing I'd like to ask you is, if I was looking to get into this, maybe at a home scale. I take the master class. I learned the steps to get started, and I'm going to do this for my first time. What are the top or most common mistakes you see people making that I should avoid when it comes to caring for fish?

One not paying attention to, like, the water temperature and like trying to do some amount of sun shading, same way you would in a greenhouse, right? You're gonna put shade cloth or whatever. Like, you kind of need to do that for any open water areas or the fish tank or, you know, don't have the plumbing directly exposed to the sun, if you're trying to keep it cool, kind of thing. And that's a big problem I see in a lot of the country. Next would be just the assumption that it doesn't make nutrients. It absolutely needs nutrients. Your iron gets oxidized, your manganese is going to get oxidized. Your potassium is going to get stripped out. Molybdenum is going to get stripped out pretty quickly. Remember that aquaponics uses more molybdenum than normal soil does, because that's to convert the nitrates back to ammonia. And to do that, it needs molybdenum to do that chemical process, so it will actually strip it out faster. That's why, like a lot of aquaponics systems, in fact, almost every commercial aquaponics system I've ever tested has been deficient in molybdenum. I can't think of a single one that was actually dosing it appropriately. That's wild. That'll prevent your like purples from turning purple and cannabis, but also prevent like your red sale as lettuce, if you're growing lettuce, from being red or bright red, which can affect the market value. So these are, you know, stuff that I've figured out and tested across many different crops. You know what I mean?

That's really interesting, because molybdenum needed in such low amounts in a soil grow.

Yeah, and it's one of the interesting things. And why I know so much about individual nutrients with crops is that I've grown 200 300 different types of crops with the set nutrient range, and then looked at, okay, here's the exact ppms for every single nutrient in the system, because that's how we test any commercial system that I'm managing. We test either monthly or twice a month. We have a service with true aquaponics, where we actually currently manage about 400,000 gallons of aquaponics facilities across the country on a monthly basis, where they test the water. They send us the results. We send them constant nutrient packets with dates that just rip it open and pour it in and it rebalances the nutrients, you know, in a way that keeps everything balanced and safe on the production line. And we've been doing that since 2018 and had a lot of wow, you know, happy customers with that. So it's definitely, I don't know, give me a lot of insight into why plants do certain things, and then also, like deficiencies, how they affect the crops in different ways, because I've seen them. Okay, this is what happens in cannabis, but here's what happens in squash, and here's what's happened basil, when you don't have enough blood. You know what

I mean? True? It just gives you a deeper understanding that's very true. Dude on

an instrument side is just the you talked about closing loops. You know? It's one of the things that we have with the AI that we're going to be releasing in April or May, trying to have it ready for the pub will probably be I'm going to bait it, display it off, and demo it at the Aqua farm Association virtual conference in April, release it to the public in May, once we've done a little bit more fine tuning on it, but basically, we take all of the awesome natural farming stuff that we showed you in the previous episode when I was on. There, but it's also overlaid with fish toxicity when it parses for the right crops, right? So it will give you nutrient solutions for aquaponics, for increasing calcium or potassium or whatever, using liquid plant input that you make yourself, and account for fish toxicity so that you don't have crops that you know, kill your clients. Now, there might be crops in there that no one's ever tested that will end up killing fish. You know, I can't, if no one's ever tried it, then I can't know, but I think based on genus and chemical makeup, we can do a pretty good job at, you know, getting rid of 99% of the ones that will kill fish. So that's a current project that'll be, you know, demoed in April and shown off in May to the public, and we'll have the first free version out hopefully by the end of the month for the AI, if not, it'll be by 420 that's kind of our last date that we're going to release it, if it's not before then, and lots of cool new features. We're on version three now the AI on the back end public has access to version one and two. If you currently are a paid supporter, if not, like I said, the first free version will be available here shortly. Where do they go? Go to copyleft cultivars on Patreon. If you want to sign up to be code part of that. And if you want to find out more about copyleft cultivars, you can find out about them@copyleftcultivars.com and the master class as well. You can find out at aquaponic masterclass.com no s, aquaponic with a C, not plural. So, yeah, aquaponic masterclass.com to find out more information about the event in Oklahoma. Yeah,

that's right. And then at potent ponics, p o t, e n t, p o n, i, c s, at potent ponics on Instagram is where you can give the man a follow. Steve, we'll let you go. You got a lot on your plate. Man, I always love rapping with you. Really, really, great job. As usual. Go give them a follow. Everybody hit them up for the Thai seed drop. Check out the AI. You know, follow one of the more interesting people in the cannabis space. Thank you, Steve. I appreciate you taking the time today. The time today. Man, yeah. And if

anybody's interested in aquaponics, I got a ton of info over my YouTube channel, uh, potent ponic, same old podcast on it, especially the first 20 episodes. And then there's three aquaponic cannabis conferences that I hosted myself that have 24 or more hours of education in each one for you to learn, if we did like 36 hours in the last one or something, and saying, I forget what it was, but there's quite a few experts on there that are not myself as well, that you can learn about aquaponics. If you're tickled by this conversation, go

check it out. Everybody. Give them a subscribe. YouTube, Instagram. Give them a follow. You know to do that's all for today. This has been growcast. Thank you, dear listener, for tuning in. I appreciate each and every one of you. Growcast podcast.com, for all the things. Get on the green list. That's our free email list. That's where you want to go, that's what you want to do, and we'll see you next time. Everybody. This is Steve potent, ponics and Jordan River. Growcast signing off saying, Be safe out there, everybody, and grow smarter. That's our show, everyone. Thank you so much for tuning in. Go and check out membership. I know you want to grow cast podcast.com/membership will bring you right there. It's the greatest community in cannabis. The show never stops, everybody. We are moving and grooving. 24/7 with bonus content giveaways. I'm in the discord personally. Come and smoke and hang out with me and Wolf Man and Mary Beth. We're all there. We're all waiting for you. The members only discounts will save you your membership fees back and then some. You can find it at growcast podcast.com/membership, I hope to see you there, everybody. Special. Thank you to the members. Got some big stuff planned. It's gonna knock your socks off. I'm gonna do you proud this year, like we always do at Team growcast. So huge shout out to the members, but I appreciate everyone just for tuning in to this podcast, so make sure to check it out. The website is growcast podcast.com there's some good free stuff up there as well. We've got some resources, a couple of articles, and the green list. Every single week I shoot out an awesome article, and it's free, so hop on the green list at growcast podcast.com thank you everybody for lending me your ears. That's all for now. Take care of yourselves out there. Be safe. Love each other. See you later. Everyone. Bye, bye.

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