Will Allen didn’t invent aquaponics (he can thank the Aztecs and Egyptians for that), but as far as we’re concerned he might as well have. Allen’s Growing Power in Milwaukee is the country’s most celebrated aquaponic farm, a method that combines fish and vegetable production, and it has become a laboratory for growing a lot of food in a small space.
By now, Growing Power’s story should sound familiar. After playing hoops in Belgium in the 1970s, the brawny six-foot-seven Allen retired from basketball and moved to Milwaukee. In 1993, he purchased an old nursery on the city’s northwest side and started farming in greenhouses using aquaponics. Growing Power now employs dozens and feeds thousands, and Allen has a MacArthur “Genius Grant” under his belt. Allen’s success has caught the attention of urban farmers and green entrepreneurs in Chicago, prompting them to ask, “Why can’t we do that?”
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 are 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.
Among the people standing on the sidelines and waiting for Shiller and others to change the zoning code is Myles Harston, an aquaponics specialist who Shiller has invited to run the farming operations at her proposed Uptown project. Harston, a former horse whisperer from the Rockies who speaks with a slight Colorado twang, founded AquaRanch about five years ago in Flanagan, Ill. His greenhouses form an island in a sea of corn and soy fields about 100 miles south of Chicago. Prior to opening AquaRanch, Harston had been working with both fish and plastics since the mid-1980s, both of which provided useful knowledge for building aquaponic grow beds. In 2004, Harston bought the aquaculture division of Ringer Foods, his former employer, and constructed a large greenhouse in which to grow the vegetables.
“It’s taken us a while to get into the marketplace, a little longer than we thought, partly because it was such new technology,” Harston says. AquaRanch sells fish locally, and he sells organic vegetables and fish through Green Grocer Chicago and Irv & Shelly’s Fresh Picks delivery service.
Aquaponics isn’t going to replace soil-based farming any time soon, Harston says, but it can be a good complement to it, especially in cities where land is scarce. “This can really be the base for urban agriculture,” he says.
Harston has a great deal of pride in his tilapia—a “high-quality protein,” as he calls it—which he harvests and fillets in a small room located at the back of his AquaRanch facility. Conventionally raised tilapia are fed a mixture of fish meal, corn and indigestible matter that, when excreted, creates a great deal of water pollution. At AquaRanch, not only is the waste water filtered by the vegetables, but water is used more efficiently than any other form of organic farming.
“While we have a lot of water, the only water we really lose is through some cleaning and evaporation; we don’t lose it through the soil,” Harston explains. “It’s probably somewhere around 2 percent of the water that would traditionally be used outdoors.”
Shiller and Harston aren’t the only ones who see visions of kale and tilapia when they look at shuttered Chicago buildings. Developer John Edel has similar designs for a large city-owned building in the 1800 block of West Pershing Road. Edel doesn’t have much experience working with aquaponics, so he’s enlisting the help of a class of Illinois Institute of Technology students to help with the project. He does have a proven track record of rehabbing derelict old buildings, as he demonstrated when he converted a 24,000 square-foot warehouse in Bridgeport into the Chicago Sustainable Manufacturing Center.
From the roof of that building, Edel, a thin man who sports a red beard and a cardigan sweater, stands and points to a row of large brick buildings on Pershing Road. Edel hasn’t acquired the property yet, but he already has architect renderings of the vertical farm and an elaborate rooftop greenhouse. The 600,000 square-foot building he has his sights on is roughly 25 times the size of his previous development, but Edel is undaunted.
The building has good bones, he says. “These former Board of Education buildings were actually built for the army during World War I,” says Edel somewhat hopefully, suggesting that it might already be strong enough to support the weight of water used in an aquaponics system.
The zoning code must be resolved in order to start any farming operation that involves fish in Chicago, but energy costs will determine the long-term viability of aquaponics in the city. Neither Shiller’s Salvation Army building nor Edel’s Board of Education building will benefit from the passive solar heat and UV rays that greenhouses enjoy. They’re brick-and-mortar buildings that will need to be heated and lit in order to keep fish and plants alive. Both have expressed interest in using LED lights because they use less energy than traditional grow lights, but LED lights still need to be powered for nine months of the year.
“My goal is that whatever we do there, all of it needs to be driven by green technologies and energy savings,” Shiller says of the Salvation Army building in Uptown, but everyone has a different idea of what that means.
Harston wants to experiment with ethanol that’s made from unconventional sources, like cattails, sugar beets and food waste. Edel prefers wind energy, and he points to Testa Produce, a nearby produce distributor in Back of the Yards which is building a large wind turbine for its new facilities, as a model that he might try to replicate. For her part, Shiller isn’t ready to commit to one particular alternative energy source. “We’d like it to be a demonstration place for different wind technologies and for solar technologies,” she says. “I think everyone just wants to see what is out there and try it all.”
In October, Edel made a pilgrimage to Milwaukee to study the techniques used at Growing Power, and he liked what he saw. Growing Power is located in what’s known as an “urban food desert,” a portion of the inner city that lacks healthy food options, and Allen sells fresh vegetables at an on-site retail store. Edel would like to open a similar store at the Pershing Road property, which he says would bring much-needed local food and jobs to the community. In Uptown, Shiller laments that the community can’t even attract enough farmers for a farmers market, so she hopes to fill that void.
If his and Shiller’s plans succeed, Chicagoans will have a year-round supply of sustainably raised fish and organic vegetables, grown right in their backyard.