It was love at first sight for a small businessman-slash-engineer-slash-serial tinkerer.

“I love this aquaponics thing,” he said. “And I think it’s going to do a lot for this country.”

Aquaponics is the marriage of aquaculture, fish farming, and hydroponics, vegetable farming, without soil. In the United States, you can buy an aquaponic system from any number of commercial suppliers. Here in Uganda, setting one up is an exercise in improvisation.

Mulamata has converted the narrow courtyard between his house and his office in Kampala into a makeshift aquaponics laboratory — a thicket of blue plastic pipes and black plastic tanks and wooden troughs filled with gravel.