Suitable Edible Fish for Your Aquaponics Project Revealed!

For a lot of us even casually familiar with hydroponics, the secret of what edible fish to use with hydroponics project is already out. We've already heard it from some innovative small business jumping on the bandwagon and enhancing their organic fruits and veggies with fish waste, or from some hobbyist early adopter who got in on the ground floor and started doing this kind of symbiotic agriculture. But for some beginners, it's a little more obscure -- if you've never done hydroponics before, and never talked to anybody who’s done it, one of the big questions is: what kind of fish can you use?

Here are some types of fish that we've seen work well in aquaponic setups.

Tilapia

Tilapia is arguably the most popular edible fish for hydroponics. It's not only a super-popular and common fish in your supermarket seafood section, but it's also a type of fish that can take the sometimes chaotic environment of a hydroponic reservoir, that's fast-growing, and that basically provides a lot of good nutrients for plants.

Trout

Trout grow fast, and are good in a cooler reservoir environment. They're a commonly farmed type of fish, and are also popular for hydroponic setups.

Carp

Popular in historic Jewish recipes (as gefilte fish) and other cultural cuisines, carp is a bottom feeder, but in an aquaponics environment, growers can better keep an eye on what the carp eat. These are another kind of edible fish that can go well in aquaponics.

Catfish

This is another type of fish that you often see in hydroponic environments. Catfish have their own kinds of textures and culinary uses. They’re a common type of garden or pond fish -- in other words, you might often see them confined to bodies of water, along with other non-edible fish species such as goldfish and koi. Catfish may take more work to prepare, but they are a particularly tasty kind of fish that you can add to an aquaponics environment.

These are a few of the most common types of edible fish varieties that growers use to nourish their crops and provide biological synergy in an aquaponics setup.

For more on aquaponics and everything that goes with it, check out Dealzer’s website as we educate growers on just how to install and support these kinds of more sophisticated grow projects.