Trading the Pool for an Organic Greenhouse

During a severe drought in the 1970s, many homeowners were forced to drain their swimming pools, creating a venue for the Z-Boys, a group of underground skateboarders, to invent aerial skateboarding. This summer, a family in Mesa, AZ drained their swimming pool and is looking to start a similar groundswell in the realm of organic food production.

The Garden Pool family (who aren't identified on the website), bought their home in October 2009 with hopes of producing their own food. "We had planned to be food self-sufficient by 2012 but we made it by mid-2010," they write in the YouTube video description. 

The swimming pool area is used for aquaponics tilapia production, and the family grows a wide variety of fruits and vegetables in rain gutters and five-gallon buckets. They also keep laying hens, catfish, and they even have dwarf lemons and mandarin orange trees.

For more on Garden Pool, check out their website.

A Chicago Aquaponics Update

Photo by: Dave 48Earlier this winter I wrote a story for the Chicago magazine Mindful Metropolis about the possibility of urban farmers to start farming with aquaponics in Chicago (read the full article here). One of the people I interviewed for the story is John Edel, an entrepreneur who hopes to convert a large, unused building into a vertical farm with aquaponics grow beds.

When I met Edel in November, he took me to another building he had rehabbed in Chicago's Bridgeport neighborhood. Edel showed the basement where he hoped to start experimenting with some small-scale aquaponics with the help of some Illinois Institute of Technology students, but none of the systems had been finished when I visited.

Recently, I got an update from Edel, along with these neat wide-angle photos of the kits he's working on. "The system keeps improving, we have 100 tilapia fingerlings in the tank now and aeroponics above," Edel says. There's no word yet on whether Edel will be able to obtain the property he's been eying, or how soon he'd be able to get his vertical farming operation off the ground, but he's hopeful that it will happen sometime this year.

You can keep up with Edel's project by following his blog, The Plant Chicago.

-Mark

Photo: Dave 48

Fish Food: Chicago's Appetite for Aquaponics

The February issue of Mindful Metropolis, a Chicago magazine about green living, is on newsstands, and it features an article I wrote about several organic aquaponics farms that are planned for the city.

Here's a excerpt:

In aquaponics, the plants are fertilized with nutrients and bacteria from fish water, and the plant roots filter the water so that it can be circulated back into the fish tanks, creating a symbiotic loop between fish and plants. Growing Power actually has several urban farms in Chicago that are managed by Allen’s daughter Erika, but none of them incorporate aquaponics technology. In fact, no commercial aquaponics operations exist in Chicago, because Chicago law doesn’t currently allow it, but several key players would like to see that change. 

“There’s nothing on the books in terms of the zoning as far as fish are concerned, but because they’re living beings they’re considered livestock,” says 46th Ward Alderman Helen Shiller. “Well, obviously we have to separate that.” 

Shiller hopes to convert the former Salvation Army building at the corner of Broadway and Sunnyside Avenue in Uptown into a multi-use building that would house aquaponics fish tanks and grow beds, an educational center, a community kitchen, and an on-site market. But she needs to address zoning issues in order for that to become a reality. 

Allen caught a break with the Growing Power property, because it was already zoned for agricultural use when he bought it. “He’s the last farmer in Milwaukee,” Shiller says. “You could probably not do what he’s doing anywhere else in a city without having the same problems that we’re having.” Shiller recently raised the aquaponics issue with the Chicago Departments of Zoning and Community Development, and she hopes to see the livestock designation change within the next year. “More and more of our colleagues are saying, ‘We really want to do that, so as soon as you figure it out we’re going to do it,’” she says.

Read the whole story at Mindful Metropolis, where you can read a digital version of the entire magazine.

-Mark

Farming With Fish at Growing Power

On Tuesday I wrote about the composting operation at Growing Power; today I'd like to focus on the aquaponics technology - the combination of aquaculture and hydroponics - used at the farm. We've covered aquaponics on this site before, when Dorothee and I went down to Flanagan, IL and made a video about an aquaponic farm called AquaRanch. At Growing Power they do some things similarly to what we saw at AquaRanch, but most of they're setup is very different.

At AquaRanch, Myles Harston keeps the fish in large, circular tanks that are located in a separate room from the vegetable grow beds, and he runs the waste water from the fish tanks to the grow beds. At Growing Power, space is utilized more efficiently. The fish at Growing Power are kept in long, 4-foot deep rectangular tanks that have been dug into the ground. One benefit of this design is that the ground helps to insulate the fish tanks, and it leaves more vertical space to build grow beds (and the Growing Power folks use every square inch of that extra space).

When I visited, we actually saw some workers building a new aquaponics bed (above, at left). My tour guide told us that the materials needed to construct one of the beds only costs about $4,000, with the fish tank liner accounting for most of the cost.

Above the fish tanks, the Growing Power folks have rigged a two-tiered shelf system that serves as grow beds. The water from the fish tanks, which is loaded with fish waste that's rich in nutrients and microbes, is pumped up to the elevated grow beds. The grow beds are set at a slight angle, so the water flows slowly from one end to the other. One of the most common plants grown in these type of bed is watercress (pictured at top), because it likes a lot of water and it does a good job of filtering and cleaning the fish water.

At Growing Power they use both tilapia and yellow perch in the aquaponics systems. Yellow perch are native to the Great Lakes, so they can handle cold water, but tilapia are tropical fish, so their tanks must be heated. Unlike AquaRanch, where the fish are harvested and filleted on-site, Growing Power only sells whole fish at present, but at $6 per pound it's a bargain compared to AquaRanch's $15 per pound tilapia fillets.

-Mark

Taking a Tour of Growing Power in Milwaukee

Over the years, we've read and heard a lot about Growing Power, a large urban farm on the northwest side of Milwaukee, but until this weekend I had never been there. So on a trip to Milwaukee, I set aside a couple of hours and took a tour of the farm (tours are given every day, and they cost $10). Growing Power was started by Will Allen, a former pro basketball player who grew up on a farm. Allen bought the property in the early 1990s, and it has since grown into a Milwaukee institution that attracts hoards of visitors and volunteers and produces loads of organic vegetables.

The thing that struck me most about Growing Power is the sheer amount of food production that takes place on the less than three-acre plot. Aquaponic grow beds that are rigged up with two-by-fours are layered, with the top beds capturing the UV rays from the sun and grow lights hanging over the lower levels. Beneath them, fish are grown and harvested, and hanging baskets hang from the sides, growing more vegetables. No space is wasted, inside the greenhouses or out.

Will Allen didn't guide the tour, but he had a brief cameo, swooping in to spread a few handfuls of worms in one of the big compost bins in the middle of the greenhouse.

The rub on Growing Power is that it isn't a business model that could easily be replicated elsewhere, because they depend heavily on various grants (Allen recently was awarded a MacArthur "genius" grant) and volunteers. Additionally, Milwaukee allows Growing Power to keep fish and livestock on-site, because agricultural zoning was grandfathered in when Allen acquired the site.

That all may be true, but Allen and Growing Power still set a good example of the potential that unused urban spaces hold, and Growing Power is currently doing outreach, helping people in other cities, like Buffalo, Louisville, and Detroit, to set up similar urban farms. In fact, my tour group included a few guys from Reno to study some of the techniques used at Growing Power in hopes of replicating it back home.

In the course of the week, I'll post some more photos and take a closer look at some of the techniques used at Growing Power. For more about Growing Power, check out this recent New York Times Magazine article about Will Allen.

-Mark