Better water, fewer parts.

Our story

We wanted a more reliable siphon. So we fixed it.

We’re a small team that started out wanting to help people grow their own food.

In 2023, the Global Challenges class at Bob Jones University set out to design a backyard aquaponics system for families in parts of the world where getting enough fresh food is a real struggle. The idea is pretty simple. You raise fish, use their water to grow vegetables, and recycle that same water over and over. It uses far less water than a regular garden, and a family can run one in their own backyard.

Building the system was the easy part. Keeping it running was harder, and almost every time the problem was the bell siphon. If you’ve never built one, the siphon is the piece that drains the grow bed so the plant roots get air between floods. When it works, you forget it’s there. When it doesn’t, it won’t start, won’t stop, or clogs with gravel, and you’re back out there cutting PVC and trying again. If it was that tricky for us, we knew a family building their first system would have an even harder time.

So we set out to build a better one. That project became NuVida, which means “new life,” and NuVida eventually grew into Siphona Systems.

Why we do this

Our mission statement says it best:

We exist to glorify God by creating sustainable aquaponic systems that generate fresh produce for developing communities, planting seeds of New Life around the globe.

We believe the skills and passions we have came from God, and we want to be faithful with them. For us, that means making aquaponics easier for anyone who wants to grow food, whether that’s a family in a developing community or someone setting up their first system at home.