Nica Impact featured on i 61 newsletter

Heres a link to i-61s newsletter featuring Nica Impact.

http://i-61.org/building-bridges/

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The Plant

The Plant

The other day I visited The Plant in Chicago. It was great to see! There was tons of innovative ideas and a very cool guided tour. The reason I went was to see the aquaponics but it turned out to be much more than that. The Plant serves as a small business incubator. I was knew to the term, but it allows new business to come in with lower start up costs. Each business is a cog in The Plants giant wheel. Everything going on in The Plant works in conjunction with each other. Spent brewers grain gets used for mushroom substrate, CO2 from the Kombucha Tea process gets pumped into the aquaponic rooms to enrich the plants air. These are just two of the many symbiotic relationships the different business have with each other.

The Plant has plans to install an anaerobic digester. This technology will provide the building with Bio Gas. The Bio Gas will provide The Plant with all its electricity and be able to sell some back to the power company at night! It works like a mechanical stomach. The right blend of fatty, oily matter and solid, starchy matter (which The Plant is paid to remove) is combined, and constant slow rotation starts a fermentation process that creates Bio Gas. When the "stomachs" contents are done digesting there are two by-products. The liquid byproduct is sold to farmers as an organic nitrogen fertilizer. The solid byproduct is used as a compost. The property is just over two acres so most of the compost will also be sold.  

Although there is still a little ways to go with construction around the HUGE building, the aquaponics system in the basement is flourishing! The main food production bed and fish tanks can produce a 1/4 ton of veggies and 100 lbs of fish a month!

The main grow bed that produces a 1/4 ton of mixed
greens. Seed to harvest in 30-45ish days.

This is their LED grow bed. They are growing Curly Kale.
Only purple / blue LEDs are used to not waste valuable electricity
on light spectrums the plants do not use. Curly Kale is the
most nutrient leafy greens. Very efficient power to nutrition ratio.  

Producing 100 lbs of fish each month cannot be easy, but this system makes it look like people have been doing it for decades. They have the fish in raised IBC containers so the gravity pumps the water into the grow beds. 

One of many IBC containers used by The Plant. These are
easy to recycle for aquaponic needs. 

Settling tank and minimal mechanical filtration.
Behind, you can see the main grow bed. 

Aquaponic plumbing

                 

Myself, Felix Vogele, at The Plant

I was very impressed with The Plants aquaponics systems. The whole process is about putting as little in as possible and getting as much as possible out. If all goes to plan, I can foresee many replica "plants" in the future.

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New Fish!!!

I got some new fish last night! I am very happy with them. One of my fish contacts had to get rid of some of fish to make room for new ones. I was happy to come by and see if there was any that caught my eye. I ended up coming home with five little guys. Im very excited about them.

Blue Dolphin mug shot. When they are older,
they will grow a big hump on their forehead.
This hump is to attract mates and is composed of fatty tissue. 

The first pair is Blue Dolphins (Cyrtocara moorii). I have been interested in them since I began keeping cichlids back in 2004. They are very peaceful fish that grow to big sizes, very cool. One of the distinguishing features of an adult Blue Dolphin is a large hump that grows on its head. The larger the hump, the older the fish. While it is mostly males with large humps, females can have them too.

The next pair and single, Im not sure exactly what type they are yet but I think the single one is a female "Rusty Cichlid" but is def a type mbuna. This family of fish is pretty easy to identify. They look very similar.

Rusty Cichlid

Here are some more pics I took of all my fish

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