West Side program has self-contained fish farm
Urban project plans creative way to wean itself off grants, gifts
You can't spend much time loafing when you've got 2,000 fish to take care of.
Jesse Meeder's project at the Massachusetts Avenue Project's urban youth farm promises to supply a neighborhood that now has little access to fresh food with locally raised tilapia — a warm-water fish that has long been a staple of the Middle Eastern diet — as it brings the community agriculture organization some income that can make it more self-sufficient.
Housed in the garden's adobe and straw bale greenhouse on Buffalo's West Side, the small fish farm is designed to work in a way that requires little expense or outside input and produces no waste.
In fact, calling it a "fish farm" misses the point, which is to create a miniature ecosystem where the fish, plants such as basil, parsley and watercress, and compost energized by 5,000 red worms feed one another in a manner similar to the way nature operates. The technical term is "aquaponics."
"The system is perfectly balanced," Meeder said. "We're trying to replicate the natural environment. That's what farmers should be doing."
Meeder, MAP's farm education coordinator, said he had been researching the aquaponics plan for about two years, reading and tinkering with tubs, tubes and pumps before launching the pilot program in July.
The pond in the middle of the greenhouse contains about a gallon of water for each fish — standard ratio for raising the breed, Meeder said — with a series of pipes that move the water through the pond, through a pump and into a collection of old bathtubs and sinks that have been repurposed into a self-contained multi-crop farm.
"The system I built crazy cheap," Meeder said.
With the major expense being the water pump and heater, the whole project came in at no more than $500 for materials. Once the initial population of organically raised tilapia was ordered from the fisheries operation at the State University of New York at Cobleskill, about the only other input is for the electricity to power the water pump/heater. And, Meeder said, he has hopes of replacing that with solar power.
The water literally falls from the sky, caught in the MAP's 1,000-gallon rain barrel. Heating that water to 80 degrees — necessary for the equatorial fish to grow and multiply — keeps the rest of the greenhouse warm enough for the watercress, basil, beans, tomatoes and other vegetables that are grown in deep gravel beds.
The plant beds filter the water before it is returned to the fish pond. Not that the water has to be all that clear.
"Tilapia like murky water," Meeder said.
They also grow quickly, don't eat one another, and are happy to eat vegetable leavings as well as the duckweed (40 percent protein) and algae that Meeder grows specifically as fish food. That avoids the need to buy commercial feed, which both reduces the cost of the operation and ensures that the fish and plants won't somehow be contaminated.
"We're never going to have any disease in here at all," Meeder said.
The first crop of tilapia should be large enough to sell in the spring, he said. They'll be eight to 10 inches long, weigh a pound to a pound and a half, and sell for $5 or $6 each.
They'll be sold live — processing would involve a lot more expense, plus licensing and inspections — to individuals and restaurants. Anyone who has ever cleaned a fish caught in a river or lake can do the same with MAP's tilapia.
The hope, Meeder said, is to create a larger fish operation, with 10 times as many tilapia and maybe some 200 catfish — in a separate tank — so that the aquaponics project will generate enough profit that MAP can ween itself from the grants and gifts that help keep it going.
Diane Picard is executive director of MAP. She said the aquaponics project, modeled after one developed by the Growing Power organization in Milwaukee, supports her organization's major goals.
It provides fresh food for a population that often has trouble finding it, not only by selling it but by demonstrating how individuals can do similar things in their own homes. "It can be done in a 50-gallon barrel in your basement," Picard said.
Brent Lehman manages the fish hatchery at SUNY Cobleskill. He sells about 5,000 tilapia fingerlings a year to customers around the northeastern United States. He said most of his customers are high schools that buy 1,000 or so for student projects, while some individuals buy 50 or so for their own ponds. The one- to two-inch fingerlings sell for as little as 6 cents an inch, while those closer to full-grown go for $2.50 a fish.
Picard said the project also provides work training experience for the local youth and will help make MAP self-supporting.
Meeder said that while his project needs to get larger to become a viable commercial enterprise, individuals could create their own smaller versions to raise some of their own food. If more people did that, he said, they would have more nutritious food, save money and put more of the city's area to productive use.
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