❓ Frequently Asked Questions

Aquaponics combines aquaculture (raising fish) with hydroponics (growing plants without soil) in a symbiotic loop. Fish produce waste, bacteria convert it to nutrients, plants absorb the nutrients and clean the water, clean water goes back to the fish. It's been around for thousands of years — the Aztecs did it. We just added WiFi sensors.

Tilapia. They're hardy, fast-growing, tolerant of varying water conditions, and taste great. They also have surprising behavioral patterns that we track with our sensor network. Each tank holds about 47 fish in 200 gallons. Yes, we track individual fish behavior. No, we haven't named all of them. Most of them.

Primarily leafy greens: butter lettuce, Tuscan kale, Swiss chard, and various herbs (basil, cilantro, mint, dill). We also grow cherry tomatoes, peppers, and cucumbers in the greenhouse beds. The vertical racks are dedicated to fast-turnover crops — lettuce goes from seed to harvest in about 28 days.

We use zero pesticides, zero herbicides, and zero synthetic fertilizers. The fish provide all the nutrients. However, aquaponic produce can't technically be USDA Certified Organic because it doesn't grow in soil (the certification requires soil-based growing). We think the results speak for themselves. Our sensor data can tell you exactly what was in the water when your lettuce was growing. That's more transparent than any certification.

Community Supported Agriculture means you subscribe to a weekly produce box. Three tiers: The Seedling ($25/week, individual), The Harvest ($45/week, family of 4), and The Bounty ($75/week, premium with fresh tilapia). Pick up at the farm stand on Saturday mornings, or we can arrange delivery within 15 miles.

Spring CSA begins in March. The aquaponic systems run year-round (the greenhouse is heated), so we have produce even in winter, but spring is when the outdoor beds come alive and variety increases dramatically. Sign up early — slots are limited by what the system can sustainably produce.

Every bag of produce gets a QR code that links to the actual sensor data from when your food was growing. Water temperature, pH, nutrient levels, growth rate — all tracked and timestamped. You can see exactly what conditions produced your lettuce. It's farm-to-table transparency powered by the same IoT stack that monitors server rooms.

24 ESP32-based nodes running UPIP IoT firmware. They measure pH, water temperature, dissolved oxygen, EC/TDS (nutrient concentration), ammonia, nitrate, soil moisture, and flow rate. Plus a weather station for air temperature, humidity, wind, rain, UV, and barometric pressure. Total: 96 sensors generating 1,200+ data points per minute.

UPIP Device OS is a custom operating system built on Alpine Linux with 5 variants. The IoT variant is designed for edge sensors with minimal resources (256MB RAM, 1GB storage). It handles I2C, SPI, GPIO, 1-Wire, and MQTT out of the box. The same ecosystem that powers our fish tanks also runs server racks and point-of-sale systems. Same code, different organisms.

All data is stored on-premise on our own servers. No cloud services, no third-party analytics, no data brokers. The public sensor dashboard shows aggregate data. Individual customer provenance data is shared only via the QR codes on their specific produce. We believe in radical transparency about your food, not about your identity.

An extractor is any company that wraps basic physics in expensive complexity, brands it "green" or "innovative," and creates a dependency cycle. They solve a real problem, then engineer maximum complexity around the solution so you need their service contracts, their proprietary consumables, and their subscription platforms. The goal is extraction of money, not solving the problem. See our full Extractor Watch page for specific examples.

A counter-system strips an extractor product down to its physics and rebuilds the solution from affordable, repairable, non-proprietary parts. Example: a $500,000 weed laser applies heat to weed roots. A spark plug does the same thing. So our counter-system is a spark plug, a motorcycle battery, a truck rotor for thermal mass, and a BIG RED BUTTON. $75 total. Same physics. No service contract.

The PIP Study Group reads about extractor systems — their technology, their business models, their patents — and then discusses how to build open counter-systems. It is part of the UPIP Academy education platform. Anyone can join. The goal is not just to build alternatives but to understand why the extractors build what they build and how to make their approach obsolete.

That is the entire point. Every counter-build is documented with parts lists, costs, physics explanations, and build instructions. We want a thousand people building spark-plug weed killers and gravity-fed grow horses. The extractors win when they are the only option. They lose when everyone knows the physics.

Yes! The farm stand is open every Saturday from 8 AM to 1 PM. For full tours of the aquaponic systems, sensor network, and infrastructure, contact us to schedule an appointment. Tours are free and take about 45 minutes. The fish are surprisingly social — they tend to cluster near visitors.

Yes. We run programs for school groups (K-12), university agricultural science departments, and maker/IoT communities. Students get to plant something, scan sensor data, and learn about the intersection of agriculture and technology. We also partner with UPIP Academy for online agricultural education content.

Always. Harvest days, planting days, and sensor maintenance days are great times to get involved. No experience needed — we'll teach you. In exchange, volunteers take home produce. Fair warning: you will develop opinions about pH levels.