Since taking a permaculture design course (PDC) with Bill Mollison in 1992, I’d focused much of my career on water harvesting for the purpose of growing plants in soil. We always had so little water to work with the high desert, so streams and ponds were few and far between. But Mollison’s classic tome, Permaculture: A Designers’ Manual, encourages appropriate technology, contains a chapter called “Aquaculture,” and has the roots of plants dangling in a deep water culture (DWC) on its cover (see below).

Given that controlled environment agriculture (CEA) often looks more like lab research than farming, I went into aquaponics with significant skepticism, so I am fortunate to have been first taught by one of the world’s most renowned aquaponics teachers, R. Charlie Shultz. Shultz, the astute and hirsute guy at right, has been working with the fish-bacteria-plant-human community since the early 1990s. Today, the Santa Fe Community College (SFCC) is lucky to have him teaching and inspiring so many students through SFCC’s CEA department .

The story that is about to unfold here at the all-new Lettuce Digest, I hope, is entertaining, interesting, and informative, but I want to make sure readers know that it would not be happening were it not for work of my good friend and eco-freaky mentor. Shultz had the foresight required to not only create a new and necessary science and agricultural methodology but to build a human community that can spread this ecological technology and its fascinating knowledge far and wide. I’m looking forward to seeing him again in his element—with colleauges he’s known for a long time and the newbs (who have yet to learned what nitrosomonas and nitrobacter do) this weekend at the annual Aquaponics Association conference, held in Oklahoma City this year.

So, welcome to www.lettuceetc.com. Welcome to our “News” page, and please check back again soon! Here’s where we will be posting all the latest about the aquaponics farm we are about to build—and how you can be an important part of the changes we need to make!