Food and the City: Urban Agriculture and the New Food Revolution (30 page)

Edel did it all on a shoestring budget, and 95 percent of the existing derelict structure was repurposed. The building is now home to Bubbly Dynamics, though its official name is the Chicago Sustainable Manufacturing Center.
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Bubbly Dynamics now runs at 100 percent occupancy and is a magnet for the niche boutique manufacturing and sustainable technologies entrepreneurs in Chicago. It is home to thirty-five permanent salaried jobs, which include a co-op of five custom-bicycle-frame builders, a fabric-print-screening outfit, and a tutoring program for at-risk children. It's full and extremely efficient, and it turns a profit for Edel, the landlord. It was all the proof he needed to confirm his gut feeling that no building is so derelict that it can't be saved and made profitable.

After the success of Bubbly Dynamics, Edel's next idea was to turn another hopeless case of a building into a zero-waste organic food-producing building in Chicago. He thought he'd found it with the Board of Education building. Edel wanted to create a net-zero building
that combined some select food-manufacturing processes with the growing of food.

“Everybody in city government, except one alderman, was in support of it. Instead, he wanted to tear down the ‘orange-rated’ historical building we were trying to acquire and have a Walmart. That was
his
dream,” Edel recounted.
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(Orange-rated is a Chicago urban-planning term that means that the building was one step below landmark protection status.)

One alderman's Walmart dream was enough to stall the process for two years, but during that time, Edel continued to plan an ambitious new life for the 600,000-square-foot (55,741-square-meter) space, using his team and networks of like-minded, hands-on experts who had gravitated to Edel and Bubbly Dynamics. That's when and how Davis fell into Edel's orbit. Davis was looking for urban-agriculture projects for his students, and Edel's business models included lots of volunteer hours and “open-source expertise.” While Edel worked on acquiring space, Davis and his students began working on a symbiotic aquaponics/hydroponics system integrating fish production with a plant-growing system in the basement of Bubbly Dynamics.

Though the one-dollar price tag of the Board of Education building was attractive, the negotiations with the city were dragging on. Edel decided that ultimately it wasn't worth the wait, given all the existing inventory of available buildings in Chicago. He found a former meat slaughtering, smoking, and processing plant that was in relatively good shape. It had been built in 1925 but over the years had been upgraded and expanded. And it had sat empty for only four years, so there hadn't been time for too much to deteriorate. Most importantly, it was built for food production, which would save Edel an enormous amount of time and money because it was already up to code for many food-related commercial purposes.

Edel closed on the old Peer Foods Building on July 1, 2010, for $5.50 per square foot. What sounds like a real estate bargain, however, amounted to a $525,000 purchase that would test even Edel's resourcefulness. But Edel seems just as capable of attracting paying tenants as he is overqualified volunteers. There's already a list of entrepreneurs who have signed up for space at The Plant, which will move businesses in as its space is completed.

Touring The Plant

I wasn't prepared for how shockingly cold (and dark) it would be inside The Plant on the early January day I had arranged to visit.
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It certainly wasn't the natural-light-flooded ethereal skyscraper that the academic vertical-farming camp was known for; it wasn't even the conventional greenhouse structure one associates with a covered growing space. There were high ceilings, which on that particular day actually seemed to trap the chill, making it a few degrees cooler on the inside than it was outdoors.

I had somewhat naively assumed that Edel would have to “work around” the lack of natural light, that it was a problem to be solved. Instead, Edel explained that the thick brick walls and lack of windows was
a major benefit of The Plant. What currently functioned as windows—antique glass block—would, however, have to be replaced. (“Glass block neither lets light in, nor does it keep heat in or out,” said Edel. As windows, they were useless.) One of the few outside purchases that the building would get was some new windows with high-efficiency glass.

However, high-efficiency glass is very limiting as well, explained Edel, holding up a sample of a high-efficiency window product he had been considering. “See how dark the glass is?” It was a smoky-gray color. High-efficiency glass, by its very nature, blocks those parts of the light spectrum that plants need for growing. And clear glass, which lets more of the light spectrum pass through, allows too much heat transfer. Edel then explained the problem of light units in northern latitudes during the Chicago winter. “In the upper Midwest on a day like today,” he snorted, “you'll get no usable light. In an ideal [summer] day, you might get light penetration of about fifteen feet.

“That means you'll be growing under artificial lights anyway. And the last thing you want is huge amounts of glass for that heat energy to escape through.” Any gains made by electrical savings on using natural light would be negated or completely irrelevant compared to the heating costs escaping out through glass. Besides, a well-insulated brick building such as The Plant will be very effective at trapping heat inside in the winter (the heat from the lights can go a long way toward heating a building if it's well enough insulated, Edel believes) and keeping it cooler in the summer. Heat, as I would learn that day, is as valuable an asset in an ultra-efficient vertical farm in a cold climate as anything else.

But the great advantage, Edel explained, to the cavernous nature of the building is that “you can control the time of day.” This gives Edel the ability to “grow at night” when electricity costs are a fraction of what they are during the day when the demand is high. And plants need a period of darkness just like they need a period of light, so you can create night during the day, when energy costs are high. Edel figures he can cut the energy expenses in half by growing during nonpeak hours.

The other advantage, continued Edel, is that “you can create different time zones in various parts of the indoor system. You can flatten your nominal load so that you don't have demand spikes.” Electrical utility companies like to charge you at the rate when you are at your peak daily energy consumption rate. By “moving the time of day around” between a few growing zones, again, you can achieve a “flatter,” more consistent pattern of consumption and therefore save on utilities. Flattening the demand for electrical consumption will play a huge role in regulating the metabolism of the building as the building starts to produce its own electrical power and heating when the anaerobic digester is built and takes over the energy needs of the tenants and the food-growing spaces.

The one concession Edel has made to a tiny bit of inefficiency will be the “growing lobby.” Large windows along the front of the building will let in lots of natural light. “We'll have things like hops and lavender, and probably the finishing tanks for the tilapia where the water is really clean and the fish look pretty.”

Heat and light were not the only valuable commodities in the building's equation; oxygen and carbon dioxide also needed to be considered. Nathan Wyse, a fresh-faced twenty-something came by The Plant that day to talk to Edel. Wyse was a potential tenant who was looking to take his Thrive label of kombucha—a fermented medicinal tea hitting the lucrative mainstream specialty-beverage market these days—to the next business level.

The yeasts used to ferment the sugars in kombucha require oxygen and produce excess carbon dioxide in the fermentation process. Growing plants, handily, love carbon dioxide. According to Edel, plants “do quite well on six times the normal atmospheric carbon dioxide.” Wyse asked if Edel could think about how these two gases could be exchanged efficiently between the brewing space and the growing spaces at The Plant.
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If they could be exchanged, Wyse's aeration of his batches of kombucha would be greatly enhanced. Edel suggested that
they could likely pipe excess carbon dioxide into growing areas, while drawing oxygen out (one being a heavier gas than the other) to recirculate it between the kombucha fermentation beds and the growing beds.

“So you've already thought about this?” Wyse asked.

“I just did,” said Edel, matter-of-factly.

“OK, well, I'd gladly exchange carbon dioxide for oxygen for better fermentation.”

I felt like I'd stepped into the future, where resources like oxygen and carbon dioxide are valued on an open-market trading system. Clearly, a closed-loop system, such as a vertical farm, as Edel conceived it, was so much more than providing artificial light to a few plants and recycling fish waste as plant fertilizer. It was about striking a delicate balance in the building to create a zero-waste ecosystem where “the only thing that will go out is food.”

As we climbed the stairs to the second floor, the unmistakable greasy aroma of bacon wrapped itself around me. “The smokers were in use twenty-four-seven right up until the day Peer Foods moved out,” confirmed Edel.

Some of the smokers were new: huge stainless steel tanks with what looked like ships’ portholes at about five feet high. The stainless steel was valuable, and Edel and crew had already started to hack it into panels for food-grade countertops and tables. Other panels would become the new bathroom stalls.

There were also older cavernous smokers that smelled like they had been used continuously for a century, which was likely not far off. Smoke stains had left huge black licks up the beautiful 1920s glazed-tile walls. I remarked that it was a shame to think that buildings like this were decaying and being torn down due to a lack of knowledge of how to resuscitate existing construction. And yet, city aldermen had dreams of demolition and replacement with Walmarts.

“Building a new building is a really inefficient thing to do!” Edel fired back. “Plants don't care about columns, or taking a freight elevator
to get out to a market. Really an existing structure is the best possible situation.”
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The stainless steel smoke tanks were in the area designated to be the bakery, one of the food-based business incubator areas. Start-ups will be able to rent the space by the hour and still be in a completely 2,000-square-foot (185-square-meter) food-grade shared commercial kitchen, a major economic hurdle for most people getting into the food-production business, given the overhead on commercial space. Tenants can also rent garden plots on the rooftop garden and source other items, like mushrooms, that will be grown in other parts of the building. “There'll be a wood-fired oven in here,” enthused Edel. The heat from the bakery will be important to heat the other parts of the building. Because of the original function of the building as a food facility, the floors undulate every few feet where floor drains exist. “How expensive would that have been to put in?”

“All of these rooms were great forests of electrical wires, pipes, and everything else. There was meat-cutting equipment everywhere. We are keeping bits of it and reusing almost everything. The oldest wiring is only fifteen years old, fortunately.” There was even a beauty to the age-blackened iron rails formerly used to move the carcasses along from one worker to the next. Edel was planning to keep them suspended from the timber supports as a historical memento of the building's past.

“This is the one mess I'm going to keep because it's so out of control,” he laughed, pointing toward one particularly absurd tangle of meters, pipes, wiring, gauges, and switches. Edel quipped that this is where his art school education will come into play. A floor-to-ceiling glass wall will be installed and dramatic lighting will be focused on the “industrial found art”—a ready-made point of interest that will be a central art piece on the third floor, visible from the conference room and the incubator office space that will be rented out to small businesses that will use The Plant's commercial baking, brewing, and food-preparation facilities.

The New Chicago Brewing Company has signed on to be a major keystone tenant, and there will even be a homebrew co-op that operates out of The Plant. Not only will brewing produce a lot of heat; it will supply vast amounts of spent brewing mash to compost for the gardens and greenhouse or for the biodigester.

We descended into a dark, cavernous basement for the grand finale. We cautiously picked our way around scrap metal, spools of wiring, and over curbs that were scheduled to be sledge-hammered like we were climbing through the innards of a submarine. Edel pointed out rooms that would soon be filled with mushroom beds. He had secured a former military fighter jet engine that would be put into use for electrical generation once the biodigester was built.

Edel yanked on a solid steel door, and we passed from the submarine scenario into a laboratory-white immense room bathed in a fuchsia light on one side, with gurgling vats of tilapia-filled water on the other. The Plant Vertical Farm wasn't just demolition and future scenarios; there was actual food growing in test systems in this basement room.