Development of Potential Indicators of Aquaponics Industry

Aquaponics is a sustainable method of farming fish and vegetables, so it is highly valued by individuals, entrepreneurs, educators, and governments. It is a special aquacultural method that creates economic and ecological benefits. Considering that the development of the aquaponics industry is leading the ecological fishery industry in the future, a set of indicators to evaluate the potential of the aquaponics industry is necessary to be developed. Therefore, a literature review and the Delphi method were used to establish a set of indicators for the investigation of the development of the aquaponics industry. As a result, the key implementation strategies were proposed from five aspects: environmental conditions, resource conditions, industrial conditions, technical conditions, and policy conditions of aquaponics. In the central trend analysis, 48 potential indicators of the aquaponics industry were defined. Important indicators were found in the environmental and resource conditions, followed by industrial and technological conditions, and policy conditions in the order of the number of indicators. The most important indicators were “water quality control: complete technical knowledge of water temperature control or operation of dissolved oxygen nutrients” and “water pollution control: have generated water pollution control or operation technical knowledge”. For future strategies, we suggested the following implementation strategies: (1) taking the aquaponics industry as the important object of rural revitalization policies, (2) taking various indicators as the basis of policy implementation, and (3) establishing the promotion group of aquaponics.