Week 10 Fish Farming

So the end of another week and things are staying pretty constant. Fishing this past weekend I ended up with about 9 lbs of white perch. Other than that I did manage to finish getting some growing projects completed. Namely some of the hydroponic systems are now ready for use when the weather finally decides to stay summer like. I also have started work on a fish farm system. I'll include pictures soon on this but basically its a wooden box lined with plastic to hold water. Above the tank is a bed of water crest and pea gravel. The water is moved from the tank to the bed above via a pump and the water after trickling down the bed is dumped back into the tank. The bed filters the water of most of the fish waste and by dropping into the tank from above it aerates it as well. This system is used to great success by a place in Milwaukee called growing power. You can check out their website here; www.growingpower.org .
This week I also spoke with the state aquaculture biologist about the permitting process needed for raising fish for sale and stocking. I was surprised to learn that the process is actually quite simple and affordable. A 50 dollar fee and a 10 dollar renewal fee is all the money it costs. Along with a yearly inspection of the fish for disease which is currently free. So this will be something that I will be doing more of after my wife and I have bought our own home. A large scale operation would just be unreasonable while we remained in a rental.
Thermoelectric modules are something of a new discovery for me and I plan to start building a panel soon based on this technology. In essence these are used by some locations as a way to utilize waste heat generated from another source. My plan is to see how much and how large a system would need to be to generate the same amount of electricity from the sun as a traditional solar panel would. The most interesting thing is some of these modules can produce electricity on the reverse side from cold. This could potentially make them a great source of power during the long Vermont winters. Watch for me to post more on this separately from this weekly update in the future once my modules have arrived.
Weekly grocery shopping came in at 56 dollars this week, still keeping me well below my average pre experiment. The dry months in terms of hunting are coming and as far as fishing it will become more challenging as the fish move to deeper waters later in the summer. Wish me luck.