You can see a lot of this was built with pvc pipes.  And just a note the term aquaponics specifically means (fishfarming + hydroponics).   And his water pump at about 5:30 in the video, if it overflows and doesn’t drain he’ll get an email alerting him to the problem.  How does he do it?

He has an arduino board  with a temperature probe on it that is hooked up to the internet.  There is also a guy who wrote an api and he’s got flash firmware that you can flash the arduino with and set up the sensors.  There is a data logging card as well logging everything.  Then it feeds to xively which gives him the graphs and variables of the graph so he doesn’t need to run queries or write any programs.

What we’re seeing here is the beginning of the internet of things and farming.  And some crops of course need different amounts of water at different times or even need to be stressed for a while.  For example Asparagus is one of those crops.  So instead of having to remember this can all be set through the arduino system.  Remember the infomercial “just set it and forget it!”.  This gives a whole new meaning to that phrase 🙂