Finding Wholesale Buyers

Wholesale buyers will purchase as much as you produce in a certain interval, eliminating concerns over waste when demand slows down from consumers. However, you’ll need to be able to produce large volumes of fish and crops within tight deadlines to meet the needs of the wholesale buyer. Finding buyers in search of new suppliers is a little tricky as well. Don’t just limit your search to the city and state where you’re locating the aquaponics business. Many wholesale buyers are happy to send a truck hundreds of miles to pick up quality produce and fish.

Attending agricultural conventions in your region is a great way to meet wholesalers shopping around. Search for local “terminal markets,” which are centralized hubs for agricultural sales, and attend a few sales there to see who is selling what. You can bring your harvests to one of these sites to shop around for a buyer, but you can also make contacts during the events to arrange for direct pickup from your aquaponics facility.

Direct Sales Opportunities

Direct sales to consumers and restaurants offer higher profit margins, but demand can rise and fall suddenly to make it difficult to earn an even income. There’s also no need to harvest hundreds or thousands of pounds of one crop just to go to market. In addition to directly selling harvests to consumers, you can open up a secondary income stream by offering services to design and install small backyard systems for consumers who’d like to try growing their own food.

Crops and fish sold directly to consumers tend to be distributed in one or more of the following three ways:

• Booths at a farmer’s market or a store located on the farm; which allows for direct contact between the company and the customers.
• Partnerships with local grocery stores and other retail outlets; which expand your reach without requiring as much marketing because you benefit from the outlet’s marketing efforts.
• Consumer Supported Agriculture (CSA) agreements; which are contracts where you are paid at the beginning of a season and offer weekly or monthly boxes of vegetables and fish in exchange for the investment.

Unless there’s extremely high demand through just one of these methods, your aquaponics business will likely earn the best profit from embracing all three. Farmer’s market sales are usually the first to be dropped by a growing business, as there’s much more effort and labor involved in this method. Be wary of setting up a CSA membership club before you’ve produced a few rounds of harvests. Many farms take in thousands of dollars of needed income at the beginning of a season this way but fail to return produce to the customers due to crop losses and other failures. These farms can end up going into debt when refunds must be issued.   

Making Money from Waste Products

Don’t forget about the value of the solid waste you remove from your growing trenches and filtration units. It may look like nothing more than sludge to you, but it’s a rich source of nutrients and makes an ideal fertilizer for many other agricultural uses. Fish emulsion fertilizers are made with the discarded waste of processed fish, including guts and heads, making it another great option for a secondary set of products. Since these fertilizers are easily processed when they’re available and then stored until there’s demand, you can continue making sales during periods in which you’re not harvesting any plants or fish.

Solid wastes are generally spread on screen boxes and dried, then powdered or crumbled and stored in air-tight bags. Drying out the waste stabilizes it so it doesn’t break down further or develop unwanted compounds. If you are located in an agricultural area with many acres of surrounding farmland, you may be able to see the sludge directly after removal to be mixed into a liquid sprayer tank and applied to the ground. This technique is commonly used for evenly spreading poultry manure, but it also works well for fish waste fertilizers.

Fish emulsions are made by grinding fish waste products into a slurry. Letting the slurry stand for a few hours at a refrigerated temperature results in oil rising to the top, which should be skimmed off. The rest of the slurry is mixed with a large volume of water, usually at least ten to twenty parts of water to each part of fish slurry, and then heated to kill off bacteria that could create unpleasant odors. The resulting emulsion still doesn’t smell great, but it’s full of nutrients for field crops and can be applied as both a ground treatment and a foliar spray.