vertical farming and industrial reuse
Matt Baker just published a couple of great articles in Index Publishing’s online magazine. Check them out at Sustainable-Chicago.com or go straight to the articles Seeds of Change: Vertical Farming Comes to the South Side and Innovation Incubation: A Look Inside the Chicago Sustainable Manufacturing Center
For a little while there it looked like the building acquisition was falling apart. We were getting mixed signals from the attorney and broker, that was stressful. The new closing date is penciled in as July 1st.
Mike, Frank and Zack from IIT have the new experimental aquaponics system at Bubbly up and running just in time for a visit from a pile of city officials. The new system is modeled after Myles Harston’s systems at Aquaranch, with a few twists. At the Peer building, we’ll build growing beds from the many 12′ by 4′ FRP insulated sandwich panels which currently partition the work coolers. Those panels are 4″ thick with plastic faces and will make nice water-tight beds. With a 2″ piece of foam on top to hold the plants (through holes in the foam and growing media) we won’t lose much temperature or water vapor. That insulation will mean less energy is needed to heat fish tanks and less cooling and dehumidification will be needed in the growing rooms.
The raised-bed garden at Bubbly is looking great this year, lots of new crops. Up on the roof, Mike Welch and I planted Hyacinth Beans, Morning Glories and Purple Runner Beans which have started to grow out over the parapet and onto the stainless cables which make up our “green cornice”.
Tags: aquaponics
Financing is in place, the lawyers are wrangling, everything seems to be temporarily under control.
May 12th, the Mayor introduced an ordinance specifically allowing anaerobic digestion and composting of food scraps, animal waste, yard waste and other, less well defined organic materials. This is very good because we would like to digest all of our agricultural waste, fish waste solids (the ammonia is converted by bacteria to nitrites for the plants) and distillers grains from the beer brewing process, to make high quality fertilizer and bio-gas, which would, in turn, be converted to electricity and heat in a turbine.
Here’s a rendering prepared by IIT grad Adrien Binet of the south facade, I’ve added living walls to spice it up a bit. And yes, the lettuce flag has been ordered.
Ben Kolak has been documenting all the Plant-related activity lately and turning it into video segments. He has two videos up on vimeo so far. The first one below follows the progress of the IIT students involved in developing the aquaponics farm for the Plant; the second video is about how John’s first building, Bubbly Dynamics, went from neglected industrial building to Sustainable Manufacturing Center.
In search of the future of Urban Agriculture from The Plant Chicago on Vimeo.
Bubbly Dynamics: How to turn your local motorcycle junkyard into a Sustainable Manufacturing Center from The Plant Chicago on Vimeo.
Tags: video
We Have a Contract!
After much hand wringing, we’ve decided to move on to Plan B. The Board of Ed building on Pershing is out of the picture, for now. Plan B is a 95,000 sq ft former meatpacking plant at the southwest edge of the Stockyards. Built by Buehler Brothers in the 1920s to process and smoke ham and bacon, the meatpacking division of the company was renamed Peer Foods in 1944 to distinguish it from markets also owned by the Buehler family. Peer has since moved on to a larger more modern facility, putting this plant on the market.
This facility is perfectly suited for conversion to a vertical farm. It has high ceilings, 6 truck docks, refrigeration and red brick floors with drains everywhere which will make growing easy. We’ll reopen bricked up windows, add greenhouses on the roof and build out spaces for sustainable businesses to help pay the mortgage. Since the plant was USDA certified, it will be considerably easier to obtain licenses and pass food safety inspections than if we had to add those features to a non-food building. There are vapor-tight light fixtures, aseptic wall coverings and stainless steel doors, frames and electrical panels.
The past two years of work on our plans for the Pershing Road site have not been wasted. Most of what we planned to do there will work even better in the Peer Foods plant. The relationships built and knowledge gathered are invaluable. Kristin Ostberg has put together a solid business plan to carry us through the next ten years, and with rents from partner organizations in the building, there should be enough capital to keep expanding the farm and researching new methodologies.
We’ll announce an open-house once we close on the property, hopefully late June.
They’re very small right now, but they look happy. 100 Tilapia fingerlings each about an inch and a half long are darting about producing waste which is being converted to nitrites by friendly bacteria and fed to our various greens. In addition to the fish, we now have an aeroponic system joining our hydroponic and soil based growing beds. 18 tiny sprinklers are spritzing the roots of arugula, chives, lettuce and chard. Excess water falls back into the 275 gallon fish tank below, being oxygenated in the process.
Tags: aquaponics, fish
Check out the new photos on our flickr page! Add us as a contact on flickr and track our progress visually.
While we’re waiting for the official go ahead from the City, there are plenty of details to obsess over. Lately we’ve been revisiting where the main entrance should be and how folks will get to the public portions of the building. The current main entrance is right up against Pershing Road with no room for a ramp or a proper front porch. Anyone parking their car in the lot behind the building would need to walk about 600 feet to get to the door, so it makes sense to put the entrance on the east facade, close to what will be the main passenger elevators to the public areas. Two of the 11 freight elevator shafts will be converted to passenger use, while a few others will make fine convection ducts to move excess heat around.
On the financial end, by borrowing a larger pile of money up front, we can immediately insulate the walls and roof, and rebuild the windows with low-e double pane glass. The energy savings from those tasks boggles the mind. We’d go from a projected annual heating bill of $145,000 down to about $30,000. Once we start to recycle waste heat from the farm, we won’t be paying anything at all for gas.
Here are a few views of what the lobby might look like. Note the living wall at the back.
Big presentations today for the IIT team. IPRO (Inter-Professional Research Opportunity) day is when about forty groups at the Illinois Institute of Technology show off the labors of their semester. I think the students did a great job, and so did the judges, and I can’t wait to jump back in this January with a (somewhat) new group.
Down in the basement at Bubbly, water is burbling through growing beds, plants are reaching toward the lights and the system only leaks a little bit! After one month of bacteria growth and water quality monitoring, the first batch of tilapia will be introduced. Zack, from IIT, has found a breeder whose has developed “super males” which, when paired with certain females, only produce male offspring. It’s important not to mix genders to avoid overpopulating your system. After around eight months those fingerlings will reach maturity, but I plan to start eating them much sooner.
