Saving Seafood

Maine farm that uses fish poop to grow crops year-round is expanding

April 27, 2021 — A Lisbon farm plans to add 500,000 square feet of greenhouse operations over the next six years and defy doubters who don’t believe its style of year-round growing, which uses fish waste to fertilize greens, can be scaled into a large commercial operation.

Springworks Farm, the largest aquaponics farm in Maine and one of the largest in the United States, aims to be a local organic alternative to lettuce and other greens trucked from California and Arizona to the East Coast.

It already produces one million heads of lettuce and up to 60,000 pounds of tilapia each year, and plans to have its third greenhouse completed in May. The technique uses less water and can produce up to 20 times more lettuce in an acre as conventional soil gardening, according to Springworks.

Read the full story at the Bangor Daily News

With plants on top and fish underneath, can aquaponics work in N.H.?

October 23, 2018 — Years ago I helped a friend of a friend with a backyard aquaponics system – in which plants are grown in water rather than soil and fish live in the water. I was entranced.

It seemed almost magical, with the poop from the fish feeding the plants to create both vegetables and animal protein in one small space. I figured such systems would soon start replacing gardens among the geekier subsets of the back-to-the-land crowd, becoming a real part of the local food movement.

Nope.

I’m not sure what happened to the system I saw, but I know that aquaponics has never caught on even though the related field of aquaculture, which grows fish or shellfish without the plants, is doing pretty well.

A new project at UNH wants to change that, and maybe turn this fish-and-veggies idea into something that can support a real business in New England.

How? They’re going to science the heck out of it.

“I’m here as a fancy plumber,” said Todd Guerdat, an assistant professor of agricultural engineering, who is leading the project at UNH’s Kingman Research Farm in Madbury. He said seven graduate students are involved in the research at the moment: “They’re the facility managers, they understand the biology, physics, engineering, physiology, and all the other factors that go into it.”

In New Hampshire as in many places, he said, aquaponics systems are built on rules of thumb, at best. If a system fails or if costs go through the roof, it’s not clear why because there’s limited understanding of what’s actually going on with inputs like fish food and outputs like the harvest and the waste.

“The tough part of aquaponics, as opposed to poultry or dairy farming, is that we don’t have nutrient balances established,” Guerdat said. “We don’t have a functional model that says: this is how you can do it … and make money. Send your kids to college.”

Read the full story at the Concord Monitor

A farm deep inside a Brooklyn warehouse may lead the way to large-scale urban agriculture

April 11, 2016 — Here’s one way to grow food in an urban environment: Raise a school of tilapia in a tank. Filter out the nitrogen-rich waste, and let naturally occurring bacteria transform it from ammonia into nitrate. Run that naturally derived fertilizer beneath the roots of greens, herbs and peppers. Let the veggies flourish beneath LED lights. Harvest the vegetables. Later, harvest the fish. Cook and serve.

Known as aquaponics, this complicated but efficient ecosystem is the latest attempt at making agriculture commercially viable in New York City—even though it has a spotty history, a not-quite-proven track record and plenty of skeptics.

“We do aquaponics for the quality of produce it yields,” said Jason Green, CEO and co-founder of Edenworks, an emerging commercial aquaponics company in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn, that recently secured a commitment to supply baby greens and microgreens to Whole Foods Market stores in New York City later this year. “Our innovation is that we can do aquaponics cost-effectively, scalably and repeatedly.”

Though the premise of mimicking a natural system in a closed environment is ancient, Green says that new technologies including proprietary software, a complex plumbing system and cost-efficient LED lighting, plus a soaring demand for local food, will make fish-fed farms viable on a large scale, even in inner cities. A 2010 report from the New York City Council cited $600 million in unmet demand for regionally grown produce.

“Consumers are very interested in knowing the provenance of their food, and companies are responding to that by setting up systems to produce food in cities,” explained Nevin Cohen, an associate professor of urban food policy at the CUNY School of Public Health.

See the full story at Crain’s New York

A Massive Aquaponic Lettuce And Fish Farm Will Grow In A Brooklyn Warehouse

March 31, 2016 — BROOKLYN, N.Y. — “We build industrial-scale ecosystems.” So says Jason Green, CEO and co-founder of Edenworks, a Brooklyn-based urban farming startup. Unlike a typical indoor farm—a sterile environment, sometimes run by people in gloves or even by robots—Edenworks tries to build in as much life as possible.

In their new warehouse, set to open in New York City this summer, fish will grow in tanks, bacteria will turn the fish waste into a rich fertilizer, and plants will use that fertilizer to grow. “That’s the way the Earth works—we’ve just turned it into kind of like a manufacturing process, but it’s all based on ecology,” he says.

In a year, the 6,000-square-foot space will produce around 180,000 pounds of salad greens and tilapia for local grocery stores and restaurants.

The startup is one of a handful that will open large-scale urban farms this year. Nearby, in Newark, New Jersey, Aerofarms is turning a vacant steel factory into a 69,000-square-foot “aeroponic” farm. Gotham Greens just opened the world’s largest rooftop greenhouse in Chicago, an addition to the others it runs in New York. FarmedHere, which also runs a large indoor farm in Chicago, plans to open a nationwide network.

Edenworks claims to have an advantage over most of its competitors: because it uses aquaponics—combining raising fish with plants—it says the salad greens it grows actually taste better. (FarmedHere also uses aquaponics; most others use hydroponics or aeroponics to pump in a mix of nutrients separately, without using fish)

Read the full story at Fast Company