Johanna (Jo) Hearron-Heineman checks the water lines on hydroponic butter lettuce, grown in a Racine industrial building on the fourth floor. The water for the lettuce comes from the tilapia also raised on site. Hearron-Heineman operates the business with her husband Joe Heineman, doing business as Natural Green Farms.
Having a love for old buildings, it's really cool to see them find a new lease on life as urban farms. From what I've read about these types of projects it's doubtful that they're making money yet but it's great to witness creative entrepreneurship at work. We need much more of it in the field of urban food production. There's much more to growing food in the city than digging dirt.
via www.jsonline.com
Old factory now home to tilapia, lettuce
Racine - Imagine raising vegetables in an abandoned, four-story manufacturing building. And doing it without soil.
An old JI Case building once used to manufacture plows for farm fields is being transformed into a dirtless vertical farm where fish and lettuce are grown in a symbiotic system.
The farm, in a part of the city that once was an industrial hub, potentially could produce the same amount of food as 40 acres of land without the use of pesticides or fertilizer, according to the entrepreneurs behind Natural Green Farms at 615 Marquette St.
This particular method of growing food, using treated fish wastewater to grow lettuce, is nothing new. But it could be a cutting-edge venture if it turns an obsolete industrial building into a local model for a new industry that creates jobs and produces fresh food close to the people who would eat it.
In Japan, obsolete auto manufacturing buildings have been converted into food-growing factories, said Joe Heineman, who owns Natural Green Farms with his wife, Johanna Hearron-Heineman.
The Heinemans say they could produce 4 million heads of lettuce and 1 million pounds of fish a year if they expanded their model to fill all four floors of the building. So far, they're using portions of two floors - about 10,000 square feet of the 200,000-square-foot building - to grow 7,000 heads of lettuce a month, plus about 24,000 fish at different stages of maturity. They've been in the building, experimenting, for three years.
