Aquaculture is the cultivation and rearing of aquatic plants and animals in a fully or semi-controlled environment.  Aquaponics combines aquaculture and hydroponics to yield a method of food growing that greatly reduces the use of water resources, demands no soil, and produces crops in the form of vegetables, fruits, herbs and fish.

Aquaponics provides a solution to the main issues that both aquaculture and hydroponics systems face: the need for sustainable ways of filtering or disposing of nutrient-rich fish waste in aquaculture, and the need for nutrient-rich water to act as a fertilizers in hydroponics.

Aquaponics is a resource-efficient and sustainable way of producing crops on any scale, and imitates the plant-fish interactions found in natural aquatic habitats. The small-scale, backyard aquaponic food production system is the subject of this report.