Abstract
The global agricultural system has become a major source of stress on the earth’s natural resources. The
current food production and distribution system is not secure and will not sustain future populations as global
food production pressures intensify. It will be important to explore other avenues of food production in order to
build a more sustainable system in the future. Aquaponics eliminates soil from the equation of food production
by combining aquaculture(fish farming) and hydroponics(growing plants in water saturated media). Aquaponics
may provide a source of relief for areas without suitable soil or dense human populations. This experiment
looks to explore system efficiency by altering the design of the grow bed. This was done through a comparative
analysis between two control beds and two augment beds. Each augment bed was fixed with a greenhouse
glazing which encompassed the entire grow bed. We hypothesized that greenhouse glazing can be used in
indoor aquaponic systems to improve efficiency thus productivity. Three sets of data were collected in this
experiment; air temperatures between control bed 3 and augment bed 1, dry weight analysis based on shoot to
root ratio(S:R), and nitrate(NO3) concentrations which was analyzed with an ion chromatography system. The
experimental data suggest that when there is no nitrate deficiency in a system, temperature can have an
increasing effect on S:R. Furthermore we conclude that the greenhouse glazing was effective in capturing heat
which yielded higher S:R in the augment beds. We do recommend more experimentation be done on the
validity of using S:R as a metric for productivity in an aquaponic system.