We made it! Back in May, I posted about the aquaponics water usage and how efficient our aquaponics system operates. It’s exciting to prove that food can be grown in places where water and/or arable land is scarce even if we have a fair amount of both here on the ranch. I’ve mentioned before that our well water is extremely high in sodium with the most recent sample at 240ppm. It actually went up from the 200ppm reading a couple of years ago. This makes it hard to grow quality crops making rainwater collection very appealing. The recent drought is another reason why rainwater collection is an important consideration for everyone in our region. So last October, we installed some tanks and they worked beautifully. In fact, so well that we made it through the summer. Thankfully, we got a good 2.5″ rain last weekend that started recharging the tanks for this season. Something very important to point out is that I disconnected the tanks from the rooftops for the first half of the rain to wash off the all the dust that collected on the rooftop. Cleaning out 5000 gallon tanks just doesn’t sound like a lot of fun and from a food safety perspective, this is a good preventative practice.

Per the numbers below, the system used 3,888 gallons of water since the end of April. I can’t recall when our last rain was, but somewhere around that time. This is really interesting because that averages out to about 25 gallons per day for the entire system which is consistent with my reported usage last year! Consistency in science is always reassuring.

Aquaponics Water Usage in gal: