Growing Power is a non-profit Urban Agriculture and Education facility in Milwaukee, WI that claims to grow enough food for 2000 people on 2 acres. Aquaculture is the farming of fish indoors in re-circulating water tanks. The single largest waste from this system is that housing thousands of fish in a closed system fouls the water. Hydroponics is a system of growing plants in a nutrient water medium, which of course begs the question of where the nutrients come from. Aquaculture attempts to solve these problems with an elegant solution by routing the waste water from the aquaculture tanks through a hydroponic system to provide the nutrients for the plants, which help to clean the water and significantly reduces the filtration needed before the water is returned to the fish. Will Allen, founder of Growing Power, puts this system into hyper-drive. First off Will has completely done away with the filtration system. He has also done away with any commercial feed, preferring instead to grow his own.

The underlying foundation of Growing Power is worms. Vermiculture is the practice of raising worms as a means to reduce, even recycle, waste and turn out some (amazingly) good fertilizer. Red composting worms will eat their weight in organic waste (anything from pasta leftovers to cardboard to animal manure) and then poop out “castings” that are quite possibly the best organic fertilizer available. Growing Power does this on an almost industrial scale-using hundreds of bins to process literally tens of thousands of pounds of waste from local restaurants into rich worm castings-saving the restaurants thousands of dollars in garbage removal fees, and providing the raw material to produce tons and tons of food. Brilliant! The other great thing that worms do is double in population every 6 weeks, providing a significant portion of the feed for the thousands of fish in the aquaculture tanks.

Much of Will Allen’s current design work is focused on replicability and cost cutting. Will’s newest aquaculture houses are built in simple plastic hoop houses with the fish tanks buried in the ground to increase insulation and allow the use of inexpensive pond liner vs. stand alone tanks in an attempt to cut costs and reduce energy inputs. The last greenhouse system he took us through was built for $5000 plus labor, and it houses 3000 tilapia and 1500 Lake Perch in addition to 300 sq. ft of water cress and several hundred pots of greens and vegetables that were basking in the warm humid air. For more details on this amazing program and for signing up for classes- http://www.growingpower.org/index.htm

Will Allen also travels to teach other cities how to set up this type of program. Give him a call. http://www.groovygreen.com/groove/?m=200711