I am, sort of, doing an apprenticeship right now. We are building an indoor aquaponics pilot (290 m2/3100 sqft facility). Aquaponics is growing fish, bacteria and vegetables in a recirculating water based system.

We are doing this “from scratch” (obviously buying pumps, sensors, tanks etc of the shelf). At the same time I am learning aquaculture (growing fish) in a formal two semester course, as well as reading a bunch of books on the subject. We are also planning an insect larvae farm, to use food waste as feed, to partially feed the fish.

It turns out there is a massive amount of things to learn. I am lucky my colleagues are full of different expertise than what I have. The know how to grow plants, build buildings, mechanical engineering, electronics, software, sales, the list goes on. It is somewhat scary how complex everything is, but it is amazing to build the thing with your own hands and see it gradually come to fruition. I am learning so many thins that I can’t learn from a book.

We are building this ourselves to learn by doing, as we don’t want to scale up without significant hands on experience.