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Abstract. Because current approaches to designing wastewater treatment ponds do not provide consistent and predictable performance results, a new approach must be considered. In all the various design methods and equations available for designing ponds, the resulting volume of the final product can vary by over 100 percent. In addition, there is no agreement among pond designers on the depth required nor the shape (length to width ratio and pond orientation from a climatic standpoint) of the pond to obtain consistent performance. The goal of this effort was to identify a pond system that can produce consistent performance to obtain an effluent with sufficient quality to recycle the water to grow typical agricultural crops used for feed. A 2-D simulation of the traditional ponding systems was compared to a pond-in-pond (PIP) system. The PIP is an anaerobic pond built in the bottom of a facultative/aerobic pond to take advantage of the synergistic effects of the various microorganisms processing the organic matter. The anaerobic portion degrades the longer chain compounds to typical volatile fatty acids, which in turn are degraded to final end-products aerobically. The aerobic surface maintains desired odor control. It is shown that the pond-in-pond (PIP) design configuration provides a significant advantage over the traditional pond. Performance data shows that the PIP does provide consistent and predictable effluent quality suitable for reuse.