At the same time, I stumbled upon an impressive documentary on the subject of fish farming and plant breeding in urban areas. An American biology professor is breeding food fish and growing vegetables and herbs in a high-rise building with the aid of an aquaponic system. These are cooked in the adjacent restaurant and served fresh to the guests.

An ingeniously simple approach

to producing food directly on site instead of transporting it all over the world. This has considerable potential to reduce the emissions of the climate killer CO2. The climate issue also includes a wide range of other interwoven major challenges of our time. The idea of producing food locally could provide an approach to finding solutions for some of these major issues. I was fascinated by this possibility of cultivating vegetables in a largely self-sufficient, resource-conserving way without the use of chemicals, combined with one’s own fish farming. The flexibility and at the same time technical simplicity of the aquaponic system increased my enthusiasm the more I learned about it. It was time to apply the basic knowledge I had gathered.

Getting down to work

My first project was a detached garage, which was promptly converted into a greenhouse with an aquaponic system. This is the “playground”, where I have been producing food fish and vegetables and gaining practical knowledge and inspiration for the past few years. As two sides of the same coin, the drawbacks and successes I have had both constitute a valuable source of knowledge about the aquaponic system.

Vitalion has grown out of this source of inspiration, and the next stage is already taking shape: a largely self-sufficient system with the declared aim of giving a small community the opportunity to farm fish and grow vegetables and herbs even under adverse conditions, to consume the produce themselves or to trade it, as independently of the climate as possible.