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NARR: Salad greens and fish go very well together,
and they grow very well together, too.
Arugula, watercress and yellow perch are growing together
in greenhouses on a busy street in Milwaukee.
it's a promising experiment at a place called Growing Power.
The community-based urban farm grows food for local groceries and restaurants.
Those markets have been hungry for yellow perch since numbers of the
favorite fish crashed in Lake Michigan in the 1990s.
Will Allen runs Growing Power.
ALLEN: We get two products in a pretty confined system. If you look at that system
you got food growing up there and you got food growing on the next level
and down on the bottom you got 10,000 or probably more like 9,000 now, but about 9,000 perch.
We use the plants to filter out the waste.
NARR: Plants, soil, and pebbles make natural filters.
ALLEN: You got fish on the bottom, you pump water up and let it
matriculate through the plants and back into the systems down below.
NARR: Allen is refining the process with technical help from Fred Binkowski,
an aquaculture specialist at the University of Wisconsin Sea Grant Institute.
BINKOWSKI: You know the greenhouse model is fairly unique for aquaculture,
not many people have been doing this.
NARR: In many recirculating aquaculture systems, the water is cleaned with expensive
mechanical filters and other equipment. At Growing Power, the plants perform the crucial tasks.
BINKOWSKI: Getting rid of the solids, getting rid of the ammonia, getting rid of carbon dioxide.
NARR: Raising fish in cities offers many advantages, according to Binkowski.
BINKOWSKI: You're creating a product that you're really putting at
the center of consumer demand, and as a result of that
you're probably reducing transportation costs significantly.
You're creating jobs, you know,
establishing businesses, creating jobs in the city area.
Abandoned factories, you know with the loss of our manufacturing base here in the northcentral
region and these are opportunities to get these buildings
back up and running again.
NARR: Will Allen sees the benefits of greenhouse aquaculture extending
far beyond his particular Milwaukee neighborhood.
ALLEN: We've taken this project into systems that
can be replicated easily around the world.
Because we have people coming in here from around the world
and they see these systems and they say, "I want this in my community, in my small community."
So when we go into Ghana, we go into South America, into Peru, Columbia, and Argentina, they want this system.
BINKOWSKI: What we can provide through the Sea Grant Outreach Program
is all of the state of the art technology for raising yellow perch.
ALLEN: It really meant a lot to have this partnership.
Like Fred said, it really offered to me an opportunity for the University Institute to go into
the community and do a community project with a community based organization.
I think that is probably the most powerful thing that I've leveraged around the country
when I go around the country and talk about our relationship.