Hello to all. First, I would like to thank you all for having such a knowledgable and active community for me to join and to learn from. I learned more reading Aquaponics 101 than I did reading 6 books from Amazon. I have not yet set up an aquaponics system but will soon and I hope to one day be the one sharing lessons learned.

So how about a quick introduction. My name is James and I am a OH-58D instructor pilot in the US Army. I have a wife and two kids that were fortunate enough to get moved to North Pole, AK with me by the army, there is no sarcasm in that statement they actually tried to send us to Hawai'i. We are a weird, green, hippyish/granola, prepper kind of family. The type that fits in real well in the interior of AK. I am currently finishing up a rotation to S. Korea and if you have never been in a position which keeps you away from your family for a long period of time then you might not know that there is little more to do than get in trouble or self improve. So after coming to the conclusion that I am not equipped to write code to make an arduino powered digital instrument panel for an airplane I started reading about aquaponics. I am now completely hooked on the concept and am overflowing with ideas, concepts, and questions. The only actual experience that I have is tending to my parents salt water tanks as a kid, being a half decent gardener, and talking my wife through setting up a 3 gallon aquaponics aquarium that she got me for Christmas, probably in an attempt to shut me up, over Skype because the boys were to anxious to have fish to bother waiting for dad to come home.

My biggest questions involve information from anyone who has gone down this road in a colder climate. -50f during winter means that the fish must be housed indoors at least most of the year or an outdoor setup started annually. Another place a lot of questions keep popping up is the legality of it in AK. The short story behind that is that AK does not allow farming of finned fish except for a few stocking farms. So verbiage becomes important when you need to start distinguishing between a fish tank and a farm (I want to grow edible fish if possible). So I am here to hopefully jump on the coat tails of people who have already done this and figured out what can vs. can't be done in AK and then what results in healthy fish and plants.

I look forward to a lot of long threads here.

James