Hello everyone,

I am a complete new fish when it comes to aquaponics. I have been researching for about 2 years (mostly on Youtube), but I wanted to get the other components of my sustainable food supply in place before tackling this challenge.

To date I have 3 chickens (all hens), 6 Californian rabbits (3 does and 2 bucks, and a pet rabbit that someone donated to me not knowing that I was raising rabbits as survival food), and about 30 Texas A&M Quail (providing both eggs daily for food and fertilized ones to incubate for meat).

Besides sustainable protein, I have turned what was a useless (in my opinion) Japanese ornamental garden into a thriving backyard with several avocado trees, plum, peach, loquat, kumquat, blood orange, grape fruit, mexican lime, almond, chinese apple, and more. Not all are producing quite yet, but all are established trees.

All of this is on a 5000 square foot lot in the suburbs of San Diego.

I am now ready to get into aquaponics. The design above is based off of several I have seen with the barrel being based off of a swirl filter, but I have never seen anyone put the pump in the swirl filter. The pump would obviously be separated from the sediment by several layers of filtering material. Would this work?

Again, I am new to this so any advice on pump size and all that would be a bonus.
Thanks,
-Civilian Patriot