Walmart, How about Aquaponics?  Teach the “Walmartians”

Walmart is the retail leader in the United States and is taking over the world.  They have enacted amazing programs, started and stopped the business of many companies, and set new rules of engagement in mosts every consumer product categories.   Their dominance as the largest grocery retailer means they have great influence on the food supply in the United States.  They have forced companies to work on lower margins and hope for increased sales to provide the lowest possible prices to consumers.  

With great power, success, and money comes great responsibility (an adjustment in the actual quote that sounds very similar).  Also with it comes lots of meetings looking for ways to reduce the demonizing of their company by those less successful.   In the last couple years this has led them to enact new sustainability rhetoric that states simply that it wants three basic things:

“1.  To be supplied 100 percent by renewable energy;

  2. To create zero waste; and

  3. To sell products that sustain people and the environment.”

Okay Walmart, let’s put your money where your mouth is and stop making everyone else conform to what a bunch of people around a table in Bentonville brainstormed as a decision for all of its vendors and do something really special.  Yes, you are doing special things in your communities and around the country, but do something tangible in every store.  

What if Walmart really wanted to lead with an innovative idea that accomplished everything it set forth in its Global Sustainability Meetings and decided that each of their superstores would install a fully functional aquaponics system as an intergral part of their grocery store structure?  Some have just wondered why the Capitalistic Omnivore would write about aquaponics?  Aquaponics blends the successes of Hydroponics and aquaculture to produce vegetable crops from the fully functioning waste steam of fish (like Tilapia, bass, shrimp).  While the fish grow eat and do what fish do, the waste stream of nutrients feeds the vegetables through water flows to the roots of the plants.   

The mechanics of the system could rely on solar and wind energy (renewable), use the waste streams to feed plants and make natural mulch (earthworms would be a nice value add), and sell the products to sustain people and thereby help sustain the environment.  If Cabelas can afford to put in full size aquariums with game fish, your stores could add a potentially profit producing entity behind each garden center.

Could you imagine the teaching opportunity that Walmart could share with their communities.  How a new generation of small “Walmartians” could learn that fish and vegetables could actually be grown and sold fresh at your local Walmart?

Sure, you can buy the grow lights, books, and a variety of parts for installing your own home aquaponics system, but what if Walmart decided it wanted to make a giant leap above live lobster tanks and actually produce romaine lettuce, bok choy, and fresh Tilapia for its customers.  Now that would be truly innovative, green, sustainable and a step toward showing us that they are not just the retailing behemoth they have become but a company truly living by the standards they are trying to get everyone else to live by.  Talk about that around the table in Bentonville.

Want to ready more? www.aquaculturehub.org and www.backyardaquaponics.com are great places to see more information.

I am doing some research on urban farming as well as more on aquaponics.  I really like the story at www.growingpower.org  and how a former pro basketball player, Will Allen, can bring the love of agriculture to his city and help spawn an awakening in urban farming.  Will Allen does aquaponics!  You will see more on urban farming and aquaponics here as time moves forward.