You want me to get that left out of your shot?
Oh no no you're good.
Is it like you want me to be like speaking to you?
Perfect. Sounds good.
So just to give you an idea, we'll probably come back at some point and find a place that's quiet,
and consult an environment to do a longer interview.
For sure.
So this is just more of an informative background to get video views showing off.
The place don't feel like every little detail of the history needs to be there.
It just kind of gives the idea of what we're looking at here.
Sounds good.
Also with that, I'm happy if we meet in a player or something.
We can figure that out.
But awesome.
So this is where everything starts.
This is where our fish are.
Two 1,000 gallon tanks.
And when we first started this, both me and my partner Trent have a background in growing plants.
I was a third generation greenhouse owner.
Trent was a dairy farmer.
And we knew we wanted to start something based off local food production.
And we first were kind of heard about land-based fish farming through places like Superior Fresh.
A couple of bigger salmon farms.
And then we were interested in salmon farming, but found out that to start in salmon farming,
we needed that economy at scale, potentially millions of dollars.
Which in our early 20s, we were in a position to start that.
So then we just looked, okay, what other fish are options?
How do you start it at a scale that works for us?
So aquaponics, we saw some smaller aquaponic facilities that we figured that could work for us.
We didn't really want to use tilapia.
tilapia are really common in aquaponics.
They're, you know, nile tilapia.
So from origins in Africa, which we didn't really feel great about bringing that into a pristine environment in our local Wisconsin waters.
So we wanted a Wisconsin fish.
First fish we had an idea of was that yellow perch at a green bay, because that was the original Wisconsin fish ride.
We started off raising 200 yellow perch and they say, you're not fish farming until you kill some fish.
I said, I'm not going to kill any fish.
Pretty quickly I killed 198 of those perch and had a two really nice perch left, but I figured, you know, maybe we've got to try something else.
The perch, you can raise them in aquaculture, but they don't take to the feet quite as well.
They are, their temperaments a little bit jumpier.
They like to jump out of the tanks or get in a tube, get in a tube with a system if they can.
Whereas a walleye are just a little bit more chill.
They can, they like a little bit of cloudy water occasionally.
They don't like the lights being right on them.
They do great at 70 degrees, which is what you can feel it in our building right now.
It's 40 degrees outside, 70 degrees in here, great for our plants.
And that's where our fish are happiest at as well.
And the whole thing with fish is if you're wondering about how happy, how happy are they, how good are they doing?
It's all face off the feet.
If there's any sort of, if the walleye, if the fish are stressed, they're not going to eat.
So when they're happy, that's when you see a luncheon on the food.
That means they're doing good, they're feeling good.
So how many do you have and you just jump up on here?
Is that how you look at it?
Yeah, so, and it's pretty, it's pretty cloudy right now, so you really can't see too much.
But we have about a thousand fish in here, a couple hundred in here.
These ones are younger cohort, so these are a little bit under a year.
These guys are a little bit under two years old.
So these ones, average fish is about 10 to 12 ounces.
And in here, we have some that are up to two and a half pounds.
So, not quite as big as what we saw at NADF yesterday, not quite as big as what's in the Manavania River,
but really proud of getting them to that size and getting it to market size.
And once we get it there, and if you compare that with how long it takes in the wild, it's about 20%.
So, it's about a little over, it's a year and a half rather than five and a half years to get them to that one pound size.
Once we raise them and throughout their life, they're producing all of our nutrients for our plants.
And once they're ready, once they're that market size, we put them in a purge system over here.
So that is straight up, woke your system of well water.
We'll give the fish a little bit of Epsom salt, and that cleans them out, just like it would be in you.
And then they're left with nothing in their body, they go for three or four days in straight well water.
Perfectly clean fillets, we know what they've eaten their entire life.
It's this, uh,
how did it feed?
So that's 55% protein, so you keep the, uh,
you keep the, uh,
growth rates up, you keep them producing a bunch of nutrients, and they're just very healthy fish because of that.
Canadian fish food, so the economy is pretty interesting right now.
We're working on a couple of little companies to try to get a walleye blend of food that's domestically produced,
because there is a non-proprietary blend that's out there that's been done.
Someone just needs to take it on, so we're kind of working on connecting enough companies where that order is enough scale for those producers to produce it.
But once, so the fish are living in here, and, uh, their water is recirculating, clean water comes from our ASD filter,
and comes back after being filtered, and then you see a small valve over there, we can go around and see that.
But you open that valve, and that's what brings our concentrated nutrients from our fish into our plant loop.
And then we have kind of three more rounds of filtration, so that by the time it gets to our plants, we have no fish food solids in there.
It's all soluble nutrients, so good safety-wise, that's really good, and just, uh, standard operating procedures-wise,
so we don't get all clogged up in our tubes and our towers and everything.
We have the same strains, so these are all from the NADF facility, so a triple strain of walleye.
We have seen, uh, we started operating a green-based strain of walleye, it's going to be really interesting to see.
I'm hoping NADF gets their funding and does this study on comparing the different strains of walleye.
You know, the agricultural industry has been doing this for hundreds of years, picking the right cow, picking the right corn.
Now, we're going to have to pick in the right walleye that really suits, uh, suits, uh, raising like this.
We also hope to eventually get into stocking, so the strains end up being very important that the DNR wants to keep strain-specific walleye in specific bodies of water,
so that if a walleye strain has produced in there, they figure they want to keep that strain, uh, consistent.
New tanks are going to go right over here, so we've got to make some room.
My grandpa made this coat rack, which we'll keep in here and give you two disappointed if not, but, uh, we'll make some room,
and then, uh, that'll get us quite a bit more production capability. That'll screw it up.
Our big fish are our athletes. They're the hardest to that, so when I just blindly scoop in there, I'm probably going to get some smaller ones, but there's a chance I get a big one.
They're going to splash a little bit.
Here's a couple over.
So those are all just under what we would harvest right now.
They're probably just getting, uh, two-a-pound.
I know the spots, they like to hang out. I'll try to get them. Get a big one.
There we go.
Here would be a nice one that we put in the purge system right now. Probably just under two-a-hounds, I would say.
You get that nice color. They're kind of a consistent base-off strain.
That's kind of where you see the strain differences in the color, mostly.
Oh, yeah. Real happy with that.
The size, belly, filet, about half of this fish's weight will be in filet.
And this feed is trickling in 24 hours a day, so while I was in there, they do have their own personality.
So like I said, your bigger ones are more of your athletes.
You're kind of your bully fish a little bit too.
They'll eat first, so the idea is, yeah, food trickling in there all day, all day long, so a bully fish gets pulled,
and then the other fish get a chance to eat. That way you're not dealing with any nippin.
When while they're young, you do have to worry a little bit about cannibalization, so that kind of feed helps.
And when they're really young, you might add a little bit of plate.
Well, water to actually make it a little bit more murky for them to make it harder to find.
I was talking about that $800-$900, so all real similar per square foot to a single family home,
what we produce or what we burn in electric and heat.
And a big reason for that, like you mentioned, the insulation helps out.
Having the lights and having the water in the building is the source of insulation or ambient heat that stays in here.
With the electricity is where we have our lights on, light movers.
So that way it's just kind of trying to mimic the sun, varying degrees of intensity throughout the day,
whereas if you just had one LED light, that plant would want to go straight towards that light, long and leggy,
not much yield, not as healthy of a plant where you get varying degrees of intensity, it grows out every which direction.
Our plants are really largely based off the nutrients that we get from our fish.
We have to add calcium and potassium because the nitrification process of our fish, the pH, is always lowering.
So we need to bring that up and we kind of get two birds sewn at once because we give them those nutrients, potassium and calcium.
That's a good add to aquaponic water anyway, and we're raising the pH.
The one nutrient that kind of has to be added in and of itself, that's not necessarily another benefit, is iron.
Just randomly the fish don't really produce iron, the plants need it.
But you see here, so part of the reason why I say we need to be very serious about our filtration is just how skinny our lines get here.
If we had any sort of solids in there, it would get clogged up really easily.
Each one of these has a bulb valve in it, so there is about 20 gallons of water in here.
One tower will use about one gallon of water per day.
A bulb valve opens up, we trickle water in, and then there's a sump pump in the bottom of there.
As you see going on right here with our baby rosemary, sends water to the top, trickles down, and then it's off for about 40 minutes.
So you get that really nice flood and drain where the plants actually get a little bit thirsty.
That's also kind of representative of where these plants came from.
A lot of the herbs are Mediterranean in origin, so they're used to a sandier soil.
They get heavy rain, get dried out for a while, and so we're kind of replicating that here.
So we're able to grow, you see some rosemary up here on this tower, sage, thyme over here.
So all those stickier, more woody crops were able to grow on the towers.
And then kind of a wide variety beyond that too.
Tomatoes were able to do, and the fish really produced mostly nitrate.
So that's, nitrate is what you need for vegetative crops, so that's your before fruiting or flowering, or, you know, if it's a crop that doesn't fruit or flower.
So all your herbs, all your salad is in that boat.
But our fish water has actually produced enough nutrients where we can produce pretty nice and great tasting tomatoes too.
Just cherry tomatoes because we need to support them on the towers, but yeah, we've been pretty happy with the taste anyway.
And then you see kind of over here on the other side.
That's our deep water culture unit, and that's kind of more common to use for aquaponics, hydroponics, just that trough of water.
It's a little bit simpler of the system and can work for a lot of different crops.
We have our mint in there, it does amazing.
But for us, the tower is allowed for a little bit more food safety, more variety, and just a little bit more control with what we could do.
And it keeps our towers keep the water more separate from the actual plant, because it is fish water at the end of the day.
So keeping it separate, no contact there, just very food safe is the name of the game for us.
We are, you know, just like our fish waters being recirculated, our plant waters being recirculated, our air is moving around, all indoor.
And the reuse of everything, the main lesson we've learned is just keeping everything super clean, disinfected, both fish and plants.
Because you just need biological life to grow, you can't let other bad biology get in the way of that.
Every indoor grower is going to deal with bugs or disease or mildew of some kind, so it's just finding ways to stay ahead of that.
And mostly it's keeping clean, keeping everything super, you know, keeping these fans on us.
It feels good for us, and just like us, when the plants get a little bit, they can breathe a lot better.
So assuming at this point the fish are supporting the plants?
Yep.
It's one day the goal to have the vehicle in terms of income supporting each other?
Yeah, we will, we have high hopes to expand the fish sometime, sometime soon in the next couple of years.
And that probably looks mostly like a focus on expansion in the wall and keeping kind of still reaching the capacity here.
So eventually we will have more nutrients than we are able to use, so it could mean something else, bottling up that nutrients, giving it to a community garden or something like that.
A number of different ways you could handle it, or if there's a corn field right out, right out our door too.
But at some point someone will market fish, fish fertilizer, it's like...
We wouldn't be the first ones to do it, for sure.
I don't know if I told you, in that studying of perch at first, so we talked to a Madison professor named Terry Berry.
Great name.
He was an aquaculture professor, maybe just a biology professor, but he said he had a similar system to ours,
recirculating, but in one tank he had northern pike and another tank he had yellow perch.
He found out that when the northern pike had some sort of predation, the yellow perch responded by doubling their growth rates.
It's just like incredible, you know, in the way of you need this fish to grow as fast as possible to make your margins, whatever.
I said, do all I do that?
Unfortunately they don't.
I can't finish doing that. It's a chemical that's released when one of them's eaten.
That tells the others around it, grow faster, get bigger, I just got eaten.
Some sort of pheromone or something.
Yeah, something that's released into the water.
Yeah.
That's why a lot of fishermen will say, oh, a lake can get stunted, especially the blue gills that never grow faster, certain size.
You've got to introduce a bigger predator to eat him to get him to grow.
The right idea, but the wrong methodology of what actually is happening here,
is to say you need the predation for them to tell each other to grow bigger.
Right.
Without the predator president, they simply reach a side of their comfortable life and then they don't think they can.
They need that pressure.
Yeah.
That drive.
And it's so, yeah, I figured it had to be something like that because he said whether the pike was in the same tank or not.
It wasn't like the perch.
The perch didn't have to see it, you know.
The walleye are enough of an apex predator where they're not necessarily going to do that.
Just cool stuff to learn along the way, especially learning like us.
You end up, you know, YouTube, Google Scholar, talking to these research facilities instead of getting more of a formal education.
You end up with a lot more adjacent things that you learn for better for work.
It's cool to have a mix though.
And you see, you got it here.
We have some power washing going on, assembling towers.
We just got done with the harvest today.
So you see over here, those are a couple of romaine towers that are further ones.
We might be harvesting from, for our little customer's smile.
The other ones are just harvesting from.
We need to unload those.
Soak them, power wash them, reassemble them so they're all perfectly clean.
Very labor intensive, but that's how we grow our good drops.
So, you see here we have some microgreens, broccoli micros, cilantro, romaine basil.
Some day I like to figure out strawberries, but it hasn't happened yet.
We need to clean them up as you go almost after every harvest.
Chives are one thing. Chives are partially both.
You'll see the towers get a little take time, but the plants do really well.
They're able to keep cutting and coming again for whatever reason.
They're really able to reproduce really well and stay really great products for a long time.
Some more basil over here. We have our dill section here.
Another one that you can cut and come again quite a few times.
You guys want to go over and see the germination area?
Yeah, I mean you just want to get some clean.
No, I'm going to edit it for the same activities along the way.
And the motivation and influence on how many engineers and scientists we have
is the new landing. And the same thing like a lot of these people that are interested in science.
But a huge, debatable topic is really interesting to debate.
It's a Tasmanian tiger that they say is really necessary to be back because Tasmanian put his species.
And is it a dire wolf or is it just a wolf with some new trains or whatever?
We'll probably, we've been doing it about every two weeks.
Right out of the circling system and out of the bird system.
Mind you, it's only four people, but no one can tell the difference.
It's kind of interesting that way where salmon, it's quite a big deal to get the purge right
and it could even be three, four weeks sometimes, which they can certainly come down to the nominee on Wednesdays.
No, we don't have a facility.
You know, stainless steel, all that stuff.
But we do have a licensed kitchen towel back here, so we're able to do,
we need the retail from the license just to be able to sell them, so we need that.
But then we're also able to utilize more plant products to put them into charge,
so it has to be raised in the tree.
Billing you in on this yesterday too, then the same way with the plants, we're trying to use them a little bit.
Yep, yeah, we do two fillet packs.
And it is new, you know, you look online, if you, walleye, direct frozen.