Inside Urban Green

Aquaponics Now Has an International Organization

Perhaps you have seen articles about aquaponics in the media. Just a little bit of web research shows that aquaponics is definitely a hot topic in urban food communities across the country and around the world. 



Aquaponics (prior posts) is a food growing method that combines aquaculture (the raising of fish) in a symbiotic relationship with hydroponic plant growing. The fish waste provides nutrients to the plants.

The movement is now organized under the banner of the recently formed Aquaponics Association. They have a very active website and an Annual Conference. The second annual conference will be in Denver, Colorado, September 22-23, 2012. Last years conference was held in Orlando, Fl in September. They also conduct workshops and tours throughout the year.

The association already has over 4,000 members (they call themselves "aquapons") and is adding them at the rate of about 15 per day. These are impressive numbers and a testimony to the importance of aquaponics as both a small business and personal food production method.

As you may know, two of the most publicized aquaponics businesses are Growing Power and Sweet Water Organics in Milwaukee. Growing Power also has a facility in Chicago called Iron Street Farm.

Stay tuned. The veggies are growing and the fish are swimming close by.

Meet Martin Schreibman » Dr. of Aquaponics at Brooklyn College

Many people in the NYC horticultural community know Dr. Martin Schreibman and his work but it’s doubtful that many in the population at large know about him and his work at Brooklyn College. Dr. Schreibman wasn't a presenter at the recent TEDxManhattan "Changing the Way We Eat" event but Marianne Cufone was (watch this video). Martin is a board member of the Recirculating Farms Coalition.

Martin is also the founder and Director Emeritus of Brooklyn College’s Aquatic Research and Environmental Assessment Center (AREC). It’s a long name to remember but a key part of AREC is its aquaponics lab (the symbiotic raising of both fish and plants).

There is little doubt that aquaponics is playing a key roll in developing facilities for localized urban food production. It is a modern method and the antithesis of throwing tons of dirt on the roof of an industrial building to create a traditional “farm”. Urban dirt farming may seem like a good idea at this time but there are much better ways to create a profitable urban food production business.

We already have well-known pathfinders in the aquaponics movement in Growing Power and Sweetwater Organics in Milwaukee. There are many others springing up around the country. Two good ways to keep up with the trend is to tune in to activities of the Recirculating Farms Coalition (see prior post) and the burgeoning Aquaponics Association (more about it coming soon).

The recent TEDxManhattan event gave new hope that we can move the current rather recalcitrant urban agriculture movement into the 21st Century. It was great to see progressive people like Marianne Cufone (Recirculating Farms Coalition), Paul Lightfoot (BrightFarms) and Howard Hintertheur (Center for Veterans Issues and one of the creators of Sweetwater Organics) on the TEDxManhattan program.

Diane Hatz the main organizer and host of TEDxManhattan did a superb job of assembling a very interesting menu of speakers. I look forward to seeing videos of all the presentations (coming soon) and participating in the next event.

Marianne Cufone » Recirculating Farms Coalition

Marianne Cufone is Executive Director of the Recirculating Farms Coalition and now lives in New Orleans. She spoke at the recent TEDxManhattan event "Changing the Way We Eat" this past Saturday. I regret not being well enough to attend and meet Marianne and other participants.

The TEDxManhattan video of her presentation will be uploaded in the coming weeks. In the meantime you can learn about the coalition in this video featuring Marianne. It is a look into the future of urban agriculture and more than likely a peek into the future of personal food production.

Few people understand that sub-irrigated planters (SIPs) are actually highly productive and versatile hydroponic micro recirculating farms for personal food production. They save water and can also save the lives of children who might otherwise be exposed to lead poisoning from often-contaminated city soil.

Thanks to the rather dumbed down consumer horticulture education system in the U.S. people (including the USDA Extension Program) call them "self-watering" planters. If there is a horticultural "ignorance barometer" in the U.S., the widespread usage of this term is it.

Fishy Pix From the Past

Speaking of fish, here are some fishy photos from the past. They are from the Shorpy.com vintage photo blog. Photos like these are in my inbox every morning. It's coffee and Shorpy time. This is a link to a Shorpy search on "fish".

The Shorpy photos are particularly interesting in that you can enlarge them to full screen and see some interesting details that are not visible in smaller photos. Read the comments too. They are mostly by guys and some rather sexist more in tune with the older times of the photos. Then again...maybe not so old.

Gloucester, Massachusetts, circa 1905. "Handling a cargo from the fishing banks." 8x10 inch dry plate glass negative, Detroit Publishing Company.
via www.shorpy.com

September 1926. "Thos. R. Shipp Co. -- C.H. Javins stand." The Charles Javins seafood stand in our second look today at Washington's old Center Market. National Photo Company Collection glass negative. February 1913. Bluffton, South Carolina. "Varn & Platt Canning Co. 10-year-old Jimmie. Been shucking 3 years. 6 pots a day, and a 11-year-old boy who shucks 7 pots. Also several members of an interesting family named Sherrica. Seven of them are in this factory. The father, mother, four girls shuck and pack. Older brother steams. 10 year old boy goes to school. Been in the oyster business 5 years. Father worked for 25 years in the Pennsylvania Coal Mine, and the oldest brother there. They said they liked the oysters business better because the family makes more." Photograph and caption by Lewis Wickes Hine.

Kansas City » Meet Jason Fields of The Urban Farming Guys

The name Jason Fields may not be a household name to you today but it may well become one in the not to far distant future.

Jason is one of the Urban Farming Guys (families) in Kansas City. I see him as a present day Bob Vila of the original This Old House on PBS. He is a talent in every good sense of the word.

Like Giacomo Salazonni, he comes across as a counter-culturist with his head screwed on straight. I look forward to meeting him one day. He has the same type of energy and enthusiasm as I have seen from the Buster brothers of Global Buckets renown. America desperately needs thousands more young people like the Urban Farming Guys and Buster brothers. They represent our future.

You can listen to a podcast interview with Jason and watch other Urban Farming Guys (and gals) on YouTube sharing their enthusiasm and experiences with urban renewal and urban farming that I call urban greenscaping. Go guys!

Interview with Jason

via www.thesurvivalpodcast.com

Today Jason Fields joins us from The Urban Farming Guys. Jason is part of a group of about 20 families who have purposefully uprooted from out of their comfortable suburban homes. They then relocated to one of the worst neighborhoods in Kansas City with the goal of transforming it.

Manchester, UK » An Old Building to Become a Vertical Farm

Does this look like a farm? Hardly, but go to England in 2013 for the Manchester International Festival (MIF) and you will see that it morphed into Alpha Farms. If all goes well it will be a prototype for rebirthing old buildings into modern age food factories all over the world.

This decrepit old building will soon house multiple stories of vegetables and fish growing hydroponically and aeroponically.
Watch the video and you will see what it looks like now.

Also, see what John Edel is doing in Chicago. He too is converting an old building into an urban vertical farm he calls The Plant. Will Allen’s Growing Power and Sweet Water Organics are projects of similar nature in Milwaukee.

I wonder when (or if) we will see projects like these in New York City. Currently we are the city of dirt. There is no significant future for often-contaminated dirt in the city.

via www.bbc.co.uk

"Imagine a greenhouse stacked on top of itself, so you have three or four layers of greenhouse - it's a multiple storey greenhouse."

Europe » A Brawny Portable Micro Farm

This is a portable micro farm on an industrial scale. The first floor is a recycled shipping container that houses an aquaculture fish farm. The upper story greenhouse houses the hydroponic vegetable growing that is an integral part of an aquaponics system. A food production unit like this can go anywhere in the city and if necessary move to a new location. It will be interesting to see how this concept evolves. Why aren't we innovating like this here in NYC?

Urban Farming Takes Root in Europe By Julio Godoy* Tomatoes and lettuce growing in the Rostlaube "container farm". Credit:Courtesy of MalzfabrikBERLIN, Jul 21, 2011 (Tierramérica) 

via www.ipsnews.net

BERLIN, Jul 21 (IPS) -  (Excerpt) The Prinzessinnengarten is one of many organic agriculture projects flourishing in numerous cities across Europe. In Berlin itself, another initiative organised by Urban Farmers, a group based in Zurich, Switzerland, uses aquaponics, which combines traditional aquaculture or fish farming with hydroponics, the cultivation of vegetables in water. The result is a sustainable food production system that reduces both water consumption and waste.

The two activities are combined in the Rostlaube or "container farm", in which vegetables are grown in a greenhouse mounted on top of an old industrial container converted into a fish farming tank.

"Our goal is to help people remember that we can produce food using the smallest possible amount of chemical substances, without fertilisers or pesticides or antibiotics," UrbanFarmers director Roman Gaus told Tierramérica.

Chicago » The Plant is Adding Beer to the Menu

photo - Jeffrey Marini

Samuel Evans (seated) and Jesse Edwin Evans are building the brewery of the future.

John Edel's, project of converting an old building into a vertical urban farm called The Plant is moving along. It will soon have a brewery to add beer to the menu of greens, herbs (hydroponics) and fish (aquaponics).

Prior post from the archive

via www.chicagoreader.com

The 15,000 square feet of space the Evanses are turning into a brewery is part of the Plant, a former meatpacking facility in Back of the Yards that industrial designer John Edel is refashioning into a vertical farm. In addition to the brewery, the 93,500-square-foot building houses 312 Aquaponics (which pairs a tilapia farm with hydroponic growing beds for edible plants including greens and herbs), the Living Well Brewery (which makes kombucha tea), and Green Submarine Pickles. Greenhouses, a living wall, and a shared kitchen are in the works.

The idea is to turn the whole compound into a zero-waste facility. The heat for brewing New Chicago's beer will come from an anaerobic digester, which uses bacteria to convert organic waste—produced in the building and by neighboring food businesses—to biogas (and sludge, which becomes fertilizer). The gas is then cleaned, compressed, and run through a high-pressure turbine (repurposed from a military fighter jet engine) to create electricity and 850-degree steam. The brewery, in turn, will produce spent grains—which can be used to feed the tilapia, grow mushrooms, and feed the digester—and carbon dioxide—which will be piped to the plants in the building to make them grow faster.

Discover Magazine Discovers a 21st Century Urban "Farm" in a Chicago Building

Lettuce grown outdoors at The Plant will be sold locally this fall. Courtesy Rachel Swenie

John Edel and his aquaponics (fish and vegetables) and hydroponics urban food production project The Plant in Chicago received some more richly deserved publicity, this time from Discover Magazine.

If you are not familiar with LED horticultural lighting and the magenta color, the lights are customized to beam red and blue light that optimizes plant growth. These lights are not meant to please the human eye. The plants are the kings and queens of this show.

via discovermagazine.com

In Chicago’s meatpacking district, developer John Edel hopes to reinvent the urban food supply with a $4 million, four-story indoor produce and fish farm called The Plant. Edel and his colleagues have already planted 3,000 square feet of hydroponically grown lettuce and other greens and installed 1,400 tilapia in tanks.

The fish farm and gardens are connected by a 9,000-gallon water circulation system: Wastewater from the tilapia tanks, rich in nitrogen-based nutrients, flows into the hydroponic beds, where it irrigates and fertilizes the lettuce. The crop roots then filter that water before it returns to the fish. Edel and student collaborators at the Illinois Institute of Technology are also building a custom-designed digester that will turn the project’s leftover vegetable and fish waste into fertilizer and biogas to power a heating, cooling, and 280-kilowatt electrical system. The Plant will offer its first bounty for sale this fall, supplying greens, mushrooms, and tilapia to farmers’ markets and local restaurants.

London » A Tour of Three Urban Agriculture Projects Including the FARM:shop

Visit three London urban agrculture projects. The first is a traditional in-ground allotment garden (community garden), the second uses recycled construction skips (dumpsters) and is portable (though not sub-irrigated) and the third is the FARM:shop that includes aquaponics, hydroponics and chickens. This is the type of urban agriculture diversity that we need in NYC but do not have at the present time. It's all about dirt here.

via www.youtube.com

I went along to the Open Garden Squares Weekend in London to find out how people are using vacant urban space and land to grow fruit and vegetables in the Capital. I visited the new Regent's Park allotment garden and spoke to Capital Growth about their recent successes in developing new community food growing spaces in London. I also visited the King's Cross Central Skip Garden, created by sustainability education charity Global Generation, and FARM:shop in Dalston, East London - a derelict inner city terrace which has been transformed into a mini hydroponic and aquaponic farm.