[URBAN NOTE] "Aquaponics: urban growers gaining ground"

[rfmcdonald]

Spacing Toronto's John Sherman reports on a Mississauga-based startup hoping to make aquaculture mainstream against the Greater Toronto Area. (Zoning is an issue in Toronto proper.)

A generator resting on wood planks sits shut off in a corner and large metal racks line otherwise bare walls at Aqua Greens’ warehouse during a recent visit. Yet in just a couple months’ time, co-owners Pablo Alvarez and Craig Petten hope the place will be green with fresh heads of bib lettuce, arugula, basil, and chives.

Nestled within a business park in Mississauga, the 3,400-square-foot light-industrial site they signed a lease for in early September and are now renovating is a big step toward their goal: bringing sustainable, locally grown produce to Toronto retailers’ shelves and restaurants’ menus – even in the dead of winter.

To do this, the two are taking advantage of an innovative farming technique with ancient roots called aquaponics. It’s a system in which plants are grown in water instead of soil, get nutrients from fish poop, not manure, and in Aqua Greens’ case, mature under artificial lighting rather than the sun’s rays.

Four currently empty 1,550-gallon fish tanks in Aqua Greens’ warehouse will soon play an important part in this process. Poop from fish raised within them will be filtered out, but nutrients from the waste will linger in the water that’ll then be pumped up to plants on rafts. Once there, gravity will force the water back down, and the cycle will begin again.

Proponents say plants grow faster in the controlled aquaponic environment and even stay fresher longer after reaching consumers. But when it came to establishing an aquaponic business to serve up leafy greens and herbs to the city, there was a caveat; as Spacing reported in June, Toronto’s post-amalgamation zoning bylaw doesn’t let land be used for agricultural purposes. Chicken coop or aquaponic farm, the rule applies all the same. “It was challenging and at the same time it was frustrating dealing with the zoning issues in Toronto,” Alvarez reflects.

Since that time, the two entrepreneurs were invited to speak to Toronto city council twice. Petten says “a lot of the councillors had favourable things to say,” but that he and Alvarez “were told that because it was an election year nothing was going to happen until after the election.”