The Santa Fe Community College’s Controlled Environment Agriculture (CEA) greenhouse is one of the leading commercial aquaponics education programs in the United States. The 12,000 square foot commercial greenhouse facility houses 5 commercial aquaculture species paired with commercial crop varieties in both turnkey and DIY aquaponic and algal production systems. The school’s location in the high desert of northern New Mexico has brought attention to the water use efficiency potential of CEA crop production. A widely cited claim of 90% water efficiency in crop production when compared with field production lacks a solid body of research and often discounts volumes of water spent on cooling, cleaning, and loss. This lack of research and a need to understand the implications to water supply led to a partnership between SFCC and the City of Santa Fe Water Conservation Office. The Partnership seeks to answer three main questions, how efficient is recirculating greenhouse crop production, how much of total water use does evaporative cooling consume, and what volume of water goes down the drain.
Three PhynÔ smart-water meters were deployed to monitor water use at three strategic locations in the greenhouse water system, 2” main, rainwater harvesting system, and evaporative cooling reservoir. During the first year of the audit the water use totaled 918,492.3L , which is less than 1,233.5 , one acre foot, of water. 843,7664.84L(92.3%) of the water used was supplied by the utility . Cooling consumed 672,371L(73.2%) , while only 74,046.4L(8.06%) was supplied by rainwater collection. Student collected data indicates that the UVI style deep water culture systems are 99.5% recirculating . These results have led to the expansion of the project to correlate water use and total yields .