SS Connection

Aquaponics was a term that was coined in the 1970's,although there is some debate on it's occurrence. The earliest example of one branch may be the lowland Maya, followed by the Aztecs,who raised plants on rafts on the surface of a lake in approximately 1,000 AD.The Aztecs cultivated a system of agricultural islands known as chinampas in a system considered by some to be the first form of aquaponics for agricultural use. Chinampas are networks of canals and stationary artificial islands inn which they cultivated crops on the islands using nutrient-rich mud and water from the canals.In the early chinampas systems, plants were brought up on stationary (and sometimes movable) islands in lake shallows.Nutrient-rich waste materials sunk from the chinampa canals and surrounding citirliestes was then used to manually irrigate the plants above.The earioliest explanation of another part of the history can be cited in South China, Thailand, and Indonesia, where the cultivation and farming rice in paddy fields in combination with fish are found as explanations of early aquaponics system.