Morrisville, NY -- Students at Morrisville State College may soon be eating local lettuce grown with fish poop during the dead of winter.
College researchers have teamed up with Syracuse-based engineering firm O’Brien & Gere to build an experimental greenhouse on campus, where they hope to produce salad greens and fresh fish all year long without spending a fortune on heat, lights and other costs.
Their research project, supported by $1.1 million in state and federal grants, is intended to lay the groundwork for a commercial venture to build similar high-tech “farming” operations on a much larger scale.
Terry Brown, CEO of O’Brien & Gere, said burgeoning interest in safe, locally produced food creates an opening for “controlled environment” growing operations in or near urban areas. “I am extremely confident that this concept will be profitable,” he said.
Fish farming and soil-less agriculture, or hydroponics, are not new. But both face considerable challenges in Upstate New York and other cold-weather regions, where heating and lighting costs can obliterate potential profits, said Ray Cross, president of Morrisville.
The goal of the Morrisville project is to integrate fish farming and lettuce production with an innovative energy system, and to cut costs by using waste from one process to fuel the next.
Heat given off by an electric generator next to the greenhouse will keep the fish and lettuce warm during winter. Carbon dioxide exhausted by the generator will help grow algae to feed the fish. And, yes, fish waste will be used to fertilize the lettuce, after being sterilized with ultraviolet rays.
Many elements of the project have been tried before, but the Morrisville researchers hope to put them together in a new, more profitable, way. “We’re looking for nickels,” Cross said.
The greenhouse is already producing lettuce. The fish, the algae and the power system will be added in the coming months.
O’Brien & Gere has teamed up with a state college before to form a commercial venture. In 2002, the company formed Source Sentinel LLC, a water pollution-monitoring company, in partnership with the State University College of Environmental Science and Forestry.
Source Sentinel’s sensor technology has been adapted for use at the Morrisville greenhouse to monitor nutrient levels and to keep the water used to grow lettuce free from harmful concentrations of bacteria. If the greenhouse operation spawns a new business, it would be a partnership between ESF, Morrisville and O’Brien & Gere, Brown said.
But success is far from guaranteed. Louis Albright, a Cornell University professor of biological and environmental engineering who specializes in controlled environment agriculture, said there is “no obvious benefit” from combining fish farming with hydroponics.
The nutrients in fish waste are not well-balanced for use on lettuce and will require manipulation to turn into fertilizer, said Albright, who is familiar with the Morrisville project. The cost of adjusting the nutrients will probably overwhelm any savings, he said. “It’s not clear that it will lead to something commercial,” Albright said.
Albright agreed that if researchers can continue to cut the costs of operation, controlled environment agriculture, or CEA, could take off in this region because of the growing demand for safe, local food.
Right now, there are probably no more than two dozen CEA greenhouses in the state, Albright said, including Finger Lakes Fresh, a hydroponics greenhouse in Ithaca that sells $600,000 a year worth of lettuce and other greens. Finger Lakes Fresh was started by Cornell but is now operated by Challenge Industries, a vocational services organization for people with disabilities.
The local CEA industry is hobbled by long winters and high utility costs. But a rise in oil prices could help change the outlook, because fossil fuels play a critical role in the production and transportation costs of conventional farming.
That’s why the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority has supported CEA research for more than two decades, said William Reinhardt, senior project manager in NYSERDA’s industrial research and development unit.
As the world’s oil reserves are depleted and fuel prices rise, food production in the Northeast will change dramatically, Reinhardt said. Ten years from now, CEA operations will likely dot New York state and generate $400 million to $600 million in annual sales, he predicted.
NYSERDA provided a $400,000 grant for the Morrisville project in hopes of learning more about the potential benefits of integrating hydroponics with fish farming, Reinhardt said.
The U.S. Department of Energy awarded a $700,000 grant to enable the project to add a wood-powered gasification system to provide power and heat to the greenhouse. In addition to helping assess the efficiency of the gasifier, the researchers will provide the energy department with information about using carbon dioxide to grow algae, said O’Brien & Gere engineer Chris Campbell, program manager.
The 30-by-60-foot greenhouse at Morrisville was constructed last spring. With help from Morrisville students, researchers recently began harvesting about 300 heads of premium Bibb lettuce each week for use in college dining halls and a campus-run restaurant. They hope to ramp up production to 1,000 heads a week.
The lettuce is grown in nutrient-rich water under lights that boost growth after the sun goes down or when clouds cut down the natural light. The researchers are testing LED lights against traditional high-pressure sodium lights to see if they can get the same production for less energy.
In a corner of the greenhouse stand two 650-gallon tanks and one 1,100-gallon tank, in which the group plans to raise about 1,500 tilapia fish each year. When the fish-farming operation is under way, fish poop will be collected, treated and substituted for commercial fertilizer in the water for the lettuce.
By next spring, the greenhouse should have its own power and heating system. Using the DOE grant, the team will install a gasification system that will consume about one ton of wood chips per day and generate 50 kilowatts of electricity.
A gasifier heats solid fuel to produce a gas, which can be burned to turn a generator. The unit will reduce the greenhouse’s electricity costs, and the heat it gives off will provide much of the energy needed to warm the growing area during winter, Campbell said.
Once the gasifier is in place, the team will install a 160-gallon tank to grow algae inside the greenhouse. Carbon dioxide exhaust from the generator will be piped into the enclosed tank to help the algae grow.
If researchers can get the tilapia to subsist on a diet of algae rather than purchased fish food, they will save a lot, Cross said. Fish food accounts for 40 percent of the cost of raising fish, he said.
The research team will gather data for at least one full year — through next fall — to learn how the greenhouse performs in all the seasons.
But Brown, of O’Brien & Gere, said he won’t wait that long to start lining up investors for a commercial-sized operation. Brown said he hopes to have sites lined up and investors ready to go by the time the research results are in. “I really see this as a considerable business opportunity,” he said.
Contact Tim Knauss at email@example.com or 470-3023.