Written by Bock Oliver   

As the drought in California deepens, the threat to food production looms ever closer. Already, farmers are laying off workers, letting farmland sit idle and causing a negative ripple effect throughout the economy.
Water is either available or it isn't. Unlike money you can't print more water. Currently, water is applied to the soil in a number of more or less wasteful ways and it all ends up gone. The next watering cycle needs "new" water and the cycle continues. Recently, I discovered a farming technique whose time has come. Aquaponics is a closed loop system as far as water is concerned and uses about 2% of what conventional farming uses. All of the water is recycled with only a small amount getting taken up by the plants and some losses due to evaporation. The system I discovered, Viridis Aquaponics, is designed to be scaled up and produces about 10X the amount of lettuce as conventional farming per square foot. Granted, this system exists inside a greenhouse and has inputs that aren't needed in conventional farming (pumping water and controlling the indoor greenhouse environment) but there are also inputs in conventional farming that aren't needed in Aquaponics. No tractors, no chemical fertilizers or pesticides and a lot less land and water. In Aquaponics, live fish are the providers of the nutrients for the plants and as they grow, they become a protein source for feeding people. Another advantage of this system is that it is labor intensive and not back-breaking. Tractors don't get used in greenhouses and the majority of the planting and harvesting work is done by hand. Since the ponds are above the ground, workers don't have to stoop all the way to the ground to work.
After seeing this system working and after eating the incredibly flavorful products, I am convinced that we humans are about to see a huge shift in the way we produce food. There are many reasons why our current food production system isn't sustainable. In California, the lack of water is finally focusing our attention on the need to create local, sustainable, delicious food in a resource constrained world. Very exciting!!!