continued

The previous post was a long one, and yet, I still have more ideas.

For the hydroponic section, have cameras across all of the racks that take periodic photos of the plants, and using a learning algorithm, get the system to become smart at recognizing growth rate, signs of disease, predicting harvest day and general health of the plants. If there is any alert for disease, the horticulturist would get a notification; the growth rate would simply be data that the horticulturist can take in for analysis while the harvest day would end up being a task given to one or more employees.

In the full scale facility, have roller belts that are mostly gravity and partly motorized so that a bin can be placed at the harvesting site, and then the bin can be put on the roller belt to get to the processing area. A task that could be assigned would be to put empty bins in key locations to be ready for harvest time at those locations. A sensor could monitor that a bin location out in the hydroponic racks is empty and the system could assign a person to bring bins to that specific location.

For the growing medium that is being used in the hydroponic system, I would want the experimental facility to investigate anything that would be possible in terms of taking recycling material, or developing a very sustainable method of coming up with the growing medium.

Periodically, perhaps once a week, an automated system will syphon off 250ml of the water that is cycling through the hydroponic and aquaponic system with the idea of sending it to a laboratory for analysis. We'd check on making sure all of the nutrients needed for the plants and fish are within tolerances, we'd check for micro plastics, metals and anything else that a lab could pick up. This data would come back to the horticulturist for analysis and for possible tweaks to the system. 

For the aquaponics part I had quite a few more ideas. First is to feed them; this could be an automated system with one large hopper that has a 1/8th chute to the fry tank, a 1/4 chute for the small fish tank, a 1/2 chute for the medium fish and a full chute for the last tank fish. So once or twice or three times a day, 10 seconds (or 15 or 20) of food is dropped through these chutes and based on their size, the appropriate amount of food would go into each tank. There would be a sensor in the hopper to show when it is down to 5 or 10 feedings which creates a task for a person to get from the large bags of fish food to empty the bags into the hopper to fill it up.

I am not certain what quality of light fish need. To roughly mimic living out in the open, I'd have multi-colour LED lights strung all around the ceiling of all of the tanks. In the depth of night for two hours they would be off and it would be full dark. For the three hours preceding and the three hours following, it would be dark green and blue colours that very very slowly change from one to the other with the brightness gradually diminishing at night and gradually brightening in the morning. Then at the dawn and dusk points (independent of lat and long; constant year round) there would be a very gradual move from blue/green to yellow/orange/white which also gradually get brighter until a 3 hour gap near or at midday where it is brightest, and then a very gradual lowering of brightness until dusk.

Due to the growth rate of fish, a harvest of them is not something that would get done every day, and perhaps not even every week. Given this, The aquaculturist would be the one to do the harvesting and processing of the fish at the beginning, perhaps with an apprentice. For our customers, some may want the fish whole and as is, other may want it deskinned, others deskinned and deboned, and there may be further ways that a fish can be processed. The aquaculturist would do this all based on whatever orders there are that have come in.

Once there are four or five full scale facilities, the aquaponics would be centrally coordinated so that fish harvesting is not overlapping at any one location with another. At this time the apprentice could be hired and would simply move from location to location at harvest time, and this person would be called the Fish Harvester. Instead of hourly pay, this worker would be on a salary, but at any facility, could ask the system to assign any assistants, should assistance from the general staff be needed.

The Fish Harvester would also be tasked with obtaining the fry for starting the fish at all of the facilities, and ensuring the fish food orders are maintained and that there is some in stock at all of the facilities.

Instead of netting the fish to move them up to the next larger tank, I thought of a more automatic system. Have all of the tanks connected with each other with a screen doorway that separates them that can be motorized to lift out of the way allowing fish to swim through it. Additionally, have a tank sized net of some kind that either lives in the water on the far side of the door, or is automatically lowered into it. Once the largest tank has been emptied of fish at harvest time, initiate the system to begin the fish transfer. First open the screen door between the second largest and the now empty of fish largest, then raise the net and slowly and gently push the fish in second largest tank to swim through the door into the largest tank. Perhaps repeat the process for any stragglers. Sensors in the tank will tell once the second largest tank is empty of fish, at that time, close the screen door between the largest and second largest, and then open the door between the third largest and second largest, and repeat the whole procedure until the smallest is empty.

I would want to avoid plastic packaging at all costs, and so for both the plants and the fish, I would wrap them in paper, or for things like heads of lettuce, put them in paper bags.

Finally, this idea could be good or not, I suppose, depending on how easy or hard it is to find employees. In Canada we have a Temporary Foreign Worker Program and so at a full scale facility I could have built an adjacent living quarters for these foreign workers. There are horror stories about how employers of temp foreign workers treat them abhorrently; I'd want to do the opposite and treat them with dignity and respect at all times and give them living quarters that yes, may be communal, but will be comfortable and not destitute. I would supply transit passes to these employees so that on their days off, they are not restricted to their living quarters or just the nearby vicinity.