Aquaponics has been around for centuries, although no exact date can be put on it's debut.
The ancient Aztecs were probably the first civilization to use the system, though they wouldn't necessarily have called it Aquaponics. Plants were grown in fixed raised, or floating, beds called chinampas in the shallows of lakes. Waste materials from the lake, or canal beds, would have been manually raised and used to irrigate the plant beds. Undoubtedly there were fish in these lakes and canals and bio-organisms etc.
I guess we could also say that the Ancient Egyptians had a similar way of doing things too, along the banks of the Nile.
In Asia, the paddy field system for growing rice has been around for centuries too, and here they introduced fish into the fields for cultivation alongside the rice. Sort of the "appliance of science" without thinking about it too deeply.
It is only since the 1970's that we can say modern aquaponics, as we know it today, really began, when research on using plants as a natural filter began.
Eventually, in the 1980's, large scale aquaponics was introduced in the United States. Which in turn, led to scaled-down versions being created for our own gardens.
The United States wasn't the only country developing the craft of aquaponics. In Australia, ways of being able to reliably grow crops under drought conditions were being researched, and aquaponics, naturally, took off. The Australian aquaponics industry started to boom under the hot, blue, skies.
Now in 2016, aquaponics is widely regarded as a way of enabling people in the poorer, more challenging, areas of the world to grow their own food, and encourage a more viable way of producing food crops.
Not only is aquaponics proving extremely versatile in the developing world, it is also accessible to almost everyone around the world, but it is also moving into urban society, in the form of cooperatives, small businesses, and even simple kitchen windowsill growing.
The Aztecs were certainly onto something weren't they.
