Raising fish, plants in old stockyards
The Back of the Yards neighborhood, with 47th street running through its center, was once filled with acres and acres of stockyards.
In their heyday, those stockyards gave Chicago a reputation as the world’s meat-packing capital — but also as an environmental and health horror brought to life in the stark images of Upton Sinclair’s novel
A few remnants of that industry remain today in this South Side neighborhood between Western and the Dan Ryan. But the stockyards are long gone, replaced by an industrial park and a mindset that, from now on, Chicago will try to move past those images.
Now, you will find a jungle of a very different kind here.
It’s on the third floor of an old meat-packing plant, a humid hothouse, of sorts, filled with rows of greens and sprouts, even exotic white strawberries. Nearby, in large blue barrels, lurk tilapia, fish native to tropical regions.
It’s all part of the fledgling world of urban “aquaponics,” vertical farms set up in old warehouses, where plants and fish are raised symbiotically. The idea is that water containing fish excrement is used to feed and fertilize the plants, which then filter that water before it goes, through a series of pipes, back to the fish.
“I never really saw myself going into farming — but this was an opportunity to try something different,” says Mario Spatafora, a 24-yearold, spectacle-wearing accountant by training who is vice president of finances at this new Back of the Yards company, known as 312 Aquaponics. The company hopes it will soon be selling fish and vegetable greens to restaurants and at farmer’s markets in the Chicago area.
It started when one of Spatafora’s childhood friends, now one of four young partners in the business, set up a successful aquaponics system in his apartment when they were in college — and a business idea sprouted.
Those in the field say interest in aquaponics has been growing in the last three years — though mostly on a smaller scale with people who have backyard greenhouses or who live in warmer climates such as Hawaii.
So far, though, only a few are attempting indoor aquaponics on a commercial scale. Besides the Chicago site, there’s one aquapon- ics business in an old crane factory in Milwaukee, for instance, and another in a warehouse in Racine, Wis.
“These guys are really on the cutting edge,” says Sylvia Bernstein, vice chairman of the newly formed Aquaponics Association.
312 Aquaponics shares its old meat-packing plant building with such tenants as the Living Well Brewery, where fermented tea called kombucha is made, and the New Chicago Beer Co., a microbrewery that will open later this year.
The sunny space that 312 Aquaponics occupies has high ceilings and brick floors and warm, moist air. In it, visitors find rows of flats under grow lights. Many of those flats are filled with lettuce and “microgreens,” tiny plants, such as basil or beets, that are grown closely together in hydroponic containers and used much like sprouts in salads and sandwiches.
Once the plants are ready for market, the flats will be covered and distributed to restaurants live so they stay as fresh as possible, says 23-year-old Andrew Fernitz, a biology major in college who is another of the 312 partners.
Fernitz dunks a net into one of the barrels, pulling out two skittish tilapia. “They are a hearty fish,” he says, chosen, in part, because they can better withstand fluctuations in water temperature.
There are, of course, challenges to getting an old building like this up to code. There are cracks in the floor or ceiling that are being repaired and occasional drips in the pipes that supply water to the system. The entire process has to be licensed by the city health inspectors and other departments.
“Technically, we’re a farm,” Spatafora says. “But nothing in the Chicago business code regulates farming. The closest thing they’ve got is a restaurant, and clearly, we’re not a restaurant.”
At 312 Aquaponics, the firm’s young owners have had to find part-time jobs, while they wait to complete the licensing process.
Even young pioneers have to pay the rent.