The Plant Chicago

Our design teams are making great progress on several fronts.  If you’ve added your name to our volunteer list, be patient, there are now over 100 people who’ve offered to help.  We’ll start rotating people in as farm construction begins in the next few weeks.

Mandy Poole has jumped right into engineering an anaerobic digester which will produce the biogas needed to feed our combined heat and power system.  We’re going to build four concrete tanks set into the ground out in the yard with an equalizer tank to pre-mix the ingredients.  A belt press will de-water the resulting sludge which is valuable fertilizer.  The removed liquid is compost tea which can be used directly on soils.  The whole system will be contained, so there will be no odor (hi neighbors).

The farm design team has settled on a location and layout for the first three growing beds.  They’ll be 24′ by 12′ and located in the East basement.  Each bed will be identical, allowing for controlled experiments before we build the next set of beds.  The space is ready to go with plenty of power, water, floor drains and thermal mass to carry it through the winter.

The first few volunteers are working on reopening windows which have been covered for many years, moving and sorting detritus and sealing the many smokehouse vents and exhaust fans before winter sets in.

Michael Welch and Kate Flannery are beating the bushes for available grants.  All of this fun is expensive!

Big thanks to Keith Chalmers from NewStar Networks for installing a mesh network and WiFi and to Schulze & Burch Biscuit Company for donating twenty 275 gallon food-grade HDPE totes, which we’ll use as fish tanks and storage bins.

Google Maps has finally updated!  If you look at the roof of 1048 W 37th St. 60609, you’ll see what I mean.  How many other factories have a 5,200 sq ft baby picture on them?

Big thanks to the folks at Katten Muchin Rosenman LLP for their pro bono assistance as we work toward 501(c)(3) status for the farm.

I’d also like to thank the City of Chicago-Departments of Environment, Community Development and Zoning and Land Use Planning for their ongoing support and willingness to work with us on our crazy ideas.  There is a fair amount of hand-holding necessary to walk this project through the regulatory issues relating to aquaponics, anaerobic digestion, waste hauling (to feed the digester) and combined heat and power.  As we break new ground by combining these systems in a farming/manufacturing environment, the City is busy writing new codes and ordinances to make a growing wave of urban-ag projects possible.

If you’d like to be put on our volunteer list, and didn’t already sign up, send an email to info@plantchicago.com with info about what tasks you’re interested in working on.  Some possible areas are: grunt labor, agriculture/aquaculture systems, engineering or construction.  There will be many opportunities to learn about these subjects as we go.

Around 200 people stopped in to see The Plant in its pre-transformed state.  Thanks to everyone who helped prepare, cook and clean up, especially Ted Lemen and Phillip Acklin who played the piano and drums for the duration.  We’ve collected many email addresses from folks who want to help and we’ll send something out to you guys shortly.

Check out a few shots of the open house on our flickr page

Ben’s posted another video on the vimeo page! This one includes a sneak peek inside the new building.

The Plant Takes Root in the Stockyards from The Plant Chicago on Vimeo.

Saturday, July 31st from Noon to 5:00.  We’ll have some food and drinks, but feel free to bring a dish or something to throw on the barbeque.  This will be a good opportunity for anyone interested in getting involved to meet the design team and see the space.  1400 W 46th St.

The closing went fairly well today, a few missing details, but not bad for a big industrial deal.  After working to put this concept together for several years, I’m really excited to get started on the physical plant.  Where to start?  How about the giant, exploded main water shutoff in the basement?  Or opening up those bricked-in windows?

Thanks to everyone who has helped, in whatever little or big way.  There have been many folks involved in getting us to this point.  Now the fun part begins!  Watch the blog for an open house announcement, as soon as my head stops spinning and I figure out when it will be.

The closing is scheduled for July 1st, so various details are flying by.  In the title insurance policy, we find a restriction from 1936: “No intoxicating liquor of any kind shall ever be manufactured or sold thereon”  Oh No! how do we build a brewery then?  Will the grandson of the fellow who placed that restriction come looking for me?  A good friend in county government was able to get to the bottom of the matter, in the basement of the County building.  The restriction only applies to the two northern most PINs out of 27 parcels making up the property, luckily at 45th and Loomis, not under the building.  Most likely, there was a tavern at that corner, as it was across the street from the gates to Packingtown.  Workers would come out for lunch, buy a beer and get a “free” sandwich.  If you’ve ever read The Jungle, this corner is where much of the action took place.

Joe Millham is madly crunching heat loss, consumption, digestion, illumination and air quality numbers.  We hope to have a solid plan in place in the next two weeks which takes advantage of equipment in and on the building.

Dolan Geiman took this fabulous photo from the roof of Bubbly yesterday.  You can see the new bean planters for the green cornice.  Those planters were vinegar barrels a while back and were donated by Illinois Container, our neighbor to the East.  While the rainbow doesn’t quite point to the Peer Foods building, it does end somewhere in the stockyards.