Transcripts

Virginia Man Creates Elaborate System To Reduce Food Waste

MS. REBECCA SHEIR

00:00:03
For this next story, we're going to get out of the cold actually and head to a warm and humid spot in Arlington, Va. It's the headquarters of another caterer, a guy by the name of Joel Thevoz. His facility includes a fish farm and a hydroponic or soil free garden. And the thing about the farm and garden is they're connected to each other in a pretty unusual way. Sabri Ben-Achour has more.

MR. SABRI BEN-ACHOUR

00:00:25
Walk into Joel Thevoz's Main Event Catering operation in Arlington and you'll see a sleek test kitchen with brushed steel stoves, a wine tasting area, and then in the back...

MR. JOEL THEVOZ

00:00:34
It's a garden inside our warehouse. I mean, we're an old industrial section of town and we happen to have a garden with fish.

BEN-ACHOUR

00:00:44
It's actually much more than a garden. It's a greenhouse fish-farm combo. It looks like a massive two-story bunk bed with at least four levels. On the upper levels, broad-leafed squash vines spill out the side and around the metal posts holding the thing up. On the bottom bunk are chest high tubs full of auburn colored water.

THEVOZ

00:01:03
As you can see here, what we have is a series of fish tanks in which we house tilapia. We have at least 500 full-size fish in the range of 2 to 3 pounds.

BEN-ACHOUR

00:01:16
Thevoz throws in a few handfuls of little pellets, the fish gobble them up in seconds. This is Thevoz's attempt at a closed loop aquaponics system. What that means is the fish waste feeds the plants, the plants help filter the water for the fish. It's almost self-contained, almost like a little ecosystem.

THEVOZ

00:01:34
What happens is the fish excrete their waste and it's an ammonia rich waste. In aquaponics what we do is that we introduce these naturally occurring bacterias which are called nitrobacters to process, to convert, the ammonia into a nitrate and that is the base element of a fertilizer. The plants absolutely, it's like crack for plants and they absolutely love it and this is how you're able to get these beautiful greens with absolutely no soil.

BEN-ACHOUR

00:02:07
Thevoz climbs 12 feet up a ladder and points to the second level, where a green carpet of seedlings is lit by LED lights.

THEVOZ

00:02:13
In here we have arugula, we have chia seeds, we have amaranth, we have lettuces. We probably have 15 different varieties of plants. One of the beautiful things about systems like this, is in a recirculating system there's almost no waste.

BEN-ACHOUR

00:02:36
Thevoz's goal is to scale this up and one day have aquaponic greenhouses on the roof. He wants to replace the fish pellets with larvae from his compost bins, if he can get approval from the local health department. And he wants this system to provide fish and more vegetables to his catering business. So far he hasn't harvested any fish yet.

THEVOZ

00:02:52
I got to tell you that first when I was putting this together, people thought I was nuts. My employees, my spouse, my friends thought I was completely out of my gourd. But I got to say I proved them wrong, I mean, the system is fully functional, it works.

BEN-ACHOUR

00:03:09
It works, but it isn't economical for Thevoz right now. It'd be cheaper to just buy tilapia and he's getting mostly micro-greens as opposed to vegetables.

MR. STEVEN NEWMAN

00:03:17
If you're trying to market to the person that's going to go to the large grocery store, you're not going to meet that market demand.

BEN-ACHOUR

00:03:24
Steven Newman is a Greenhouse Crops Extension Specialist at Colorado State University.

NEWMAN

00:03:28
You need to focus on a higher end market that's looking for, that's willing to pay the price for locally produced food and these sorts of things.

BEN-ACHOUR

00:03:36
But there are other ways this could become doable besides simply focusing on shi shi niche high-end markets. Don Bailey is a research specialist at the University of the Virgin Islands Agricultural Experiment Station.

MR. DON BAILEY

00:03:46
It can be economical, it is quite doable.

BEN-ACHOUR

00:03:49
One of the big reasons why urban agriculture is a difficult proposition is that land and water in the city are expensive compared to their cost in, say, rural Mississippi, where catfish are farmed by the acre. But that's exactly why Bailey thinks aquaponics is a good idea.

BAILEY

00:04:03
The reason we've started studying it in the Virgin Islands is because our land is very expensive. So farmers need to be able to intensify their productive into small parcels of land.

BEN-ACHOUR

00:04:13
So if you can farm intensively, you can get enough bang for your buck to the system work. For now though, Thevoz says he isn't really worried about the money making angle. It's really more of an experiment.

THEVOZ

00:04:24
One of our goals is how to have an efficient vertical farm. So right now it's just trying to mitigate our waste.

BEN-ACHOUR

00:04:32
And that goal, at least, he's succeeding. I'm Sabri Ben-Achour.

SHEIR

00:04:37
Ever wonder what a tilapia micro-greens closed-loop system looks like? Well, consider it your lucky day, we have photos on our website, metroconnection.org.
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