WorldWide Aquaculture, LLC, (WWA) in partnership with the Institute of Ecolonomics (IOE) is offering courses on community scale sustainable aquaculture and aquaponics, in Northern Colorado.  These courses will range from single day introductions to one week or longer workshops. 

All of the courses will include fun, challenging and educational hands-on activities.  These  are not boring, butt warming lecture classes.  You will be actively involved in building sustainable culture systems that will be used for either research or commercial production after construction is complete.  After attending our week and longer workshops you will have enough knowledge to confidently manage the construction and/or operation of community scale culture systems. 

What are sustainable community scale aquaculture systems?  They are NOT home sized systems, or regional scale (~200,000 square feet or larger) systems that serve major metropolitan areas and require many employees to construct and operate.  Instead they are systems that could be built in almost every community in the United States in already vacant buildings, they will provide food for ~30 to hundreds of people, and can be comfortably constructed and operated by even a single person or small numbers of people part-time. 

Community systems can be simple or they can be complex.  They can be “high tech” or they can be “low-tech”, but they are all very impactful.  We try not to have biases regarding specific system technologies, but rather we want to teach about all the possible alternatives. We feel this objectivity is important in this relatively infant set of technologies (<45 years), where it is easy to believe that “your” technology is the best even though there may be limited results to support that assertion. 

Why should you pay your good money to attend one of our courses?  That is a really good question.  So let’s see if we can answer it: 

• Most importantly our course designers and instructors are accomplished teachers generally and recognized industry experts involving sustainable aquaculture and aquaponics, specifically.  Dr. Wayne Dorband leads the instruction team.  Dr. Dorband has over 35 years of sustainable aquaculture experience, has been a college professor, and has founded and directed many environmentally related businesses.  Co-instructors include other key members of the WorldWide Aquaculture team and partners including Travis Hughey (aquaponics icon), Bevan Suits (The Aquaponics Guidebook), Dustin Dorband (Construction Director, Oceans Bounty Seafarms), and a number of others, including international guest instructors.
• Our unbelievable venue and location.  Courses are taught at the institute of Ecolonomics 55,000 square foot greenhouse complex, the WWA indoor sustainability laboratory, and our 160 acre Mountain Sky Ranch Sustainability campus.  We have over twenty experimental aquaculture systems  in operation at all times and several commercial community scale systems.  We do not know of any other venue with this diversity of systems for you to be able to see and even operate. 
• Our staff have successfully founded and operated aquaculture and many other types of businesses for many years.  We will not just be teaching you the biology here.  We will be teaching how to profitably run a community scale business.
• We will not teach what we have not done.  We are operating or have operated every type of system we will teach you about.  We “walk the walk, not just talk the talk”.
• All of these venues are within 15 min. of each other, and are in the beautiful setting of the Colorado Rocky Mountains.  We are less than an hour’s  drive from Denver International Airport or downtown Denver.  Our teaching facilities are both indoors and outdoors allowing for year around course scheduling.
• I bet you would enjoy having some fun when you are here outside of the specific learning setting (We think you will have a great time when you are in class also). Well how about fishing, hiking, biking, climbing, pasture golfing, shooting, and other creative outdoor activities right on our Mountain Sky Ranch site.  Also, within two hours are all the major Colorado ski areas (Vail, Winter Park, Keystone, Copper Mountain, etc.), Rocky Mountain National Park, Denver, Colorado Springs and Pikes Peak, Wyoming, and many more attractions.  Within a few miles of our site is world class golfing, blue ribbon fly fishing, hunting, six major universities, and much more.
• We have a wide variety of lodging alternatives for you.  From camping on site or at a very close county park, to four star luxury lodging at the new Embassy Suites Hotel and Conference Center, and many options in between.  In the future, we will also have limited on site lodging at our Lodge and Event Center, and our Valley Cabin. We will help you arrange exactly what you are looking for.
• The opportunity to possibly enter into a bigger and longer term relationship with us as you decide about how to pursue your Community based sustainable aquaculture interests.  We have licensing, consulting and other partnering relationships that we could discuss with you.
• Finally, we commit that we will provide you the best of our abilities for your entire time with us. 

We will be offering workshops for those with minimal technical knowledge and for those with considerable knowledge. If you think that community aquaculture and aquaponics is something you would like to explore, we know our courses will meet your needs.  Here is our current schedule of courses: (Schedule being composed – come back soon)

If you do see a date that works for you we can also set up a private course for you.  We limit our workshops to less than 20 students so you will get very personalized attention.  Our courses fill up quickly so we recommend that you sign up now using out secure reservation and payment system.  

If you are still looking for more information before you make your decision, you can contact us at 303-495-3705 or wayne@Ecolonomics.org.  This could be a life changing experience for you.  Get in touch with us now.