 When a biblical theme park turns out to be running one of the most sophisticated horticultural operations in Kentucky, you pay attention. I've spent decades with my hands in soil — or, as it turns out, not in soil — and I can tell you that the moment you walk into a working aquaponics greenhouse, something shifts in your brain. The gardener in you starts doing math involuntarily. Square footage times yield per tube divided by days to harvest equals... wait, that's how much lettuce per day? From fish tanks? CLICK HERE TO WATCH THE VIDEO THAT SUPPORTS THIS BLOG That's exactly what happened during a recent behind-the-scenes visit to the Ark Encounter in Williamstown, Kentucky, the life-sized Noah's Ark attraction that most people associate with biblical history and enormous wooden beams. What they don't know — what almost nobody knows — is that tucked behind the spectacle is a horticultural operation that would make a university extension agent weep with professional admiration.
Let's walk through what's actually happening back there, because it's considerably more interesting than anything you'd read on a brochure. Aquaponics: The Beautiful Symbiosis You Should Already Know About If you've been gardening for more than ten minutes and haven't explored aquaponics, consider this your formal introduction. The concept is elegant in that infuriating way that makes you think, why didn't I think of that? Fish live in tanks. Fish do what fish do — they eat, they metabolize, they produce waste. That waste introduces ammonia into the water, which beneficial bacteria convert into nitrites and then into nitrates. Nitrates, as any gardener worth their trowel knows, are nitrogen compounds — the very foundation of plant nutrition. Instead of letting that nutrient-rich water become a water quality problem, you pump it through growing channels where plants absorb those nutrients directly through their roots. Clean water returns to the fish. Plants grow without a gram of synthetic fertilizer. Everybody wins. The Ark Encounter's operation has gone through a few iterations to get it right — bass and native fish went dormant in Kentucky winters, tilapia proved to be, let's say, enthusiastically productive in ways that overwhelmed the system and apparently had a destructive streak to boot. Koi turned out to be the Goldilocks solution: steady waste producers, manageable temperaments, and as a bonus, the mature ones get a scenic transfer to the Creation Museum's koi pond. Not a bad retirement package for a fish. The partnership with Kentucky State University — which happens to house one of the nation's leading aquaponics research programs — is smart institutional thinking. You bring in academic rigor, your team learns best practices, and university students get hands-on field experience. Everyone leaves smarter. This is how public-facing institutions should operate. The Geometry of a Hundred Heads of Lettuce a Day Here's where the agronomist in me wants to sit down with a calculator and a strong cup of coffee. The growing channels — long horizontal tubes arranged in rows, roughly 40 feet per tube, ten tubes per row, four rows — operate on a 40 to 50-day production cycle. Seeds start in small net cups nestled in styrofoam floats, roots dangling freely into moving, nutrient-charged water. No growing medium. No soil. Just roots doing exactly what roots evolved to do: seek water and dissolved nutrients. The plants move through stages — germination tray to floating nursery to production channel — in a choreography that ensures continuous harvest. When workers pull a mature head of romaine from the top of the channel, they're simultaneously replanting the next generation at the bottom. It's assembly-line thinking applied to plant biology, and it produces approximately 100 heads of lettuce daily. Before you get too excited about fresh salad, I should mention: this isn't for the restaurant. Every leaf of it goes to feed the zoo animals. The hoofstock, the exotics, the kangaroos — yes, there are kangaroos — all benefit from this daily green harvest. When your animal nutrition program is running a sophisticated aquaponics operation to supplement diets rather than buying bagged feed supplements, you're doing something right. Hydroponics and Fodder: The Barley That Will Genuinely Surprise You Adjacent to the aquaponics channels sits the fodder operation, and if the lettuce math impressed you, brace yourself. Six pounds of barley seed. Seven to nine days. Sixty pounds of living, green, nutritionally dense fodder. Read that again. A single tray of barley seed — just moistened, just encouraged by moving water and ambient light — multiplies its weight tenfold in less than ten days. The operation runs seven trays in rotation, one harvested daily, cycling through germination to full mat in a week. The finished product is a thick, root-bound carpet of young barley grass that larger animals consume as a dietary supplement. It costs almost nothing in inputs and delivers fresh forage 365 days a year, regardless of what Kentucky weather is doing outside. This is strictly hydroponics — plain water, no fish contribution — because many animals are sensitive enough that even naturally-derived nitrogen compounds could cause dietary complications. The distinction matters when you're feeding diverse exotic species. For anyone raising backyard livestock, maintaining a small fodder system should be on your list. The math is simply too compelling to ignore. The Geothermal Piece Nobody Talks About Every conversation about controlled-environment agriculture eventually arrives at the same uncomfortable topic: cooling costs in summer. Heating is straightforward — gas, electric resistance, biomass, take your pick. Cooling a greenhouse in a Kentucky summer without running commercial air conditioning is a different problem entirely. The solution here is geothermal air exchange, and it's one of the most elegantly low-tech approaches you'll find in a modern growing facility. Buried tubes extend underground to a manifold that runs across the breadth of the structure. At sufficient depth — in this region, roughly 52 degrees Fahrenheit year-round — the earth maintains a temperature that makes it a natural heat sink in summer and a relative warmth source in winter. A fan draws air down into the underground tubes on one side of the building; that air travels through the earth-cooled manifold and returns through tubes on the opposite side, entering the greenhouse noticeably cooler than it left. No refrigerant. No compressor. No dramatic energy bill. Just physics being physics, and someone smart enough to put pipes in the ground. Combined with circulation fans that keep air moving continuously — critical for gas exchange, transpiration, and humidity management in any enclosed growing space — the system maintains temperatures hovering around 68 to 70 degrees Fahrenheit even when summer outside is considerably less hospitable to leafy greens. The Harder Lessons: Pest Management Without a Chemical Safety Net Let me tell you what keeps integrated growers up at night: insects. When your entire growing system feeds directly to animals, your pest management options collapse dramatically. You cannot reach for conventional pesticides. You cannot make exceptions. Aphid pressure on lettuce that's destined for a giraffe's afternoon snack is not a problem you solve with a spray bottle of something from the garden center shelf. Biological controls — beneficial insects, predatory mites, strategic environmental management — are the only viable toolkit, and anyone who has tried to establish and maintain a biocontrol program inside a closed greenhouse environment knows it is genuinely difficult work. The conditions that favor your crop also favor your pest. The same warmth and humidity that pushes lettuce to harvest accelerates an aphid colony with equal enthusiasm. There are no perfect answers here, only ongoing management, vigilance, and a grower — in this case, a dedicated specialist named Jerry — who understands the system intimately enough to catch problems before they cascade. Good growing is mostly good observation. What This Place Actually Teaches Us Beyond the theology and the tourism, what's operating behind the scenes at the Ark Encounter is a working demonstration that sophisticated food and forage production doesn't require vast acreage, chemical inputs, or conventional soil. It requires systems thinking, biological understanding, patience with iteration — they went through three fish species before landing on koi — and the institutional willingness to invest in expertise. The collaboration model alone is worth stealing: partner with universities, welcome students, build relationships with researchers, and treat your growing operation as a learning environment rather than just a production facility. Cincinnati State and Kentucky State both have fingerprints on this project, and the operation is better for it. For home gardeners and small-scale producers, the takeaway is practical: aquaponics and hydroponics are not futuristic novelties. They are mature, proven systems that can produce meaningful yields in surprisingly small spaces, year-round, without soil. The fish do the fertilizing. The geometry does the rest. And if someone tells you koi are just glorified goldfish — they're not entirely wrong. But those glorified goldfish are feeding a zoo full of exotic animals every single day. That's not nothing. CLICK HERE TO WATCH THE VIDEO THAT SUPPORTS THIS BLOG The Ark Encounter is located in Williamstown, Kentucky. The horticultural facilities are not part of the standard guest experience, but the zoo and gardens are open to visitors. Nick Federoff helps business' and busy homeowners grow a great-looking properties using low-maintenance, climate-specific gardening systems. When you call 1-800-405-NICK, you’re not buying anything. Subscribe…it's FREE https://www.youtube.com/@NickFederoff Click this link to find about the channel - https://youtu.be/VeqtgEftJdo?si=bXO5ZJ5QbYol0ef5
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