WEBVTT 00:00.000 --> 00:16.000 You want me to get that left out of your shot? 00:16.000 --> 00:24.000 Oh no no you're good. 00:24.000 --> 00:40.000 Is it like you want me to be like speaking to you? 00:40.000 --> 00:42.000 Perfect. Sounds good. 00:42.000 --> 00:48.000 So just to give you an idea, we'll probably come back at some point and find a place that's quiet, 00:48.000 --> 00:51.000 and consult an environment to do a longer interview. 00:51.000 --> 00:52.000 For sure. 00:52.000 --> 00:56.000 So this is just more of an informative background to get video views showing off. 00:56.000 --> 01:00.000 The place don't feel like every little detail of the history needs to be there. 01:00.000 --> 01:04.000 It just kind of gives the idea of what we're looking at here. 01:04.000 --> 01:05.000 Sounds good. 01:05.000 --> 01:09.000 Also with that, I'm happy if we meet in a player or something. 01:09.000 --> 01:11.000 We can figure that out. 01:11.000 --> 01:12.000 But awesome. 01:12.000 --> 01:16.000 So this is where everything starts. 01:16.000 --> 01:18.000 This is where our fish are. 01:18.000 --> 01:20.000 Two 1,000 gallon tanks. 01:20.000 --> 01:26.000 And when we first started this, both me and my partner Trent have a background in growing plants. 01:26.000 --> 01:29.000 I was a third generation greenhouse owner. 01:29.000 --> 01:31.000 Trent was a dairy farmer. 01:31.000 --> 01:35.000 And we knew we wanted to start something based off local food production. 01:35.000 --> 01:44.000 And we first were kind of heard about land-based fish farming through places like Superior Fresh. 01:45.000 --> 01:48.000 A couple of bigger salmon farms. 01:48.000 --> 01:53.000 And then we were interested in salmon farming, but found out that to start in salmon farming, 01:53.000 --> 01:57.000 we needed that economy at scale, potentially millions of dollars. 01:57.000 --> 02:00.000 Which in our early 20s, we were in a position to start that. 02:00.000 --> 02:03.000 So then we just looked, okay, what other fish are options? 02:03.000 --> 02:07.000 How do you start it at a scale that works for us? 02:07.000 --> 02:13.000 So aquaponics, we saw some smaller aquaponic facilities that we figured that could work for us. 02:13.000 --> 02:15.000 We didn't really want to use tilapia. 02:15.000 --> 02:18.000 tilapia are really common in aquaponics. 02:18.000 --> 02:21.000 They're, you know, nile tilapia. 02:21.000 --> 02:30.000 So from origins in Africa, which we didn't really feel great about bringing that into a pristine environment in our local Wisconsin waters. 02:30.000 --> 02:32.000 So we wanted a Wisconsin fish. 02:32.000 --> 02:39.000 First fish we had an idea of was that yellow perch at a green bay, because that was the original Wisconsin fish ride. 02:39.000 --> 02:46.000 We started off raising 200 yellow perch and they say, you're not fish farming until you kill some fish. 02:46.000 --> 02:48.000 I said, I'm not going to kill any fish. 02:48.000 --> 02:56.000 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. 02:56.000 --> 03:01.000 The perch, you can raise them in aquaculture, but they don't take to the feet quite as well. 03:01.000 --> 03:04.000 They are, their temperaments a little bit jumpier. 03:04.000 --> 03:09.000 They like to jump out of the tanks or get in a tube, get in a tube with a system if they can. 03:09.000 --> 03:12.000 Whereas a walleye are just a little bit more chill. 03:12.000 --> 03:15.000 They can, they like a little bit of cloudy water occasionally. 03:15.000 --> 03:18.000 They don't like the lights being right on them. 03:18.000 --> 03:23.000 They do great at 70 degrees, which is what you can feel it in our building right now. 03:23.000 --> 03:26.000 It's 40 degrees outside, 70 degrees in here, great for our plants. 03:26.000 --> 03:29.000 And that's where our fish are happiest at as well. 03:29.000 --> 03:37.000 And the whole thing with fish is if you're wondering about how happy, how happy are they, how good are they doing? 03:37.000 --> 03:39.000 It's all face off the feet. 03:39.000 --> 03:44.000 If there's any sort of, if the walleye, if the fish are stressed, they're not going to eat. 03:44.000 --> 03:48.000 So when they're happy, that's when you see a luncheon on the food. 03:48.000 --> 03:51.000 That means they're doing good, they're feeling good. 03:51.000 --> 03:54.000 So how many do you have and you just jump up on here? 03:54.000 --> 03:55.000 Is that how you look at it? 03:56.000 --> 04:01.000 Yeah, so, and it's pretty, it's pretty cloudy right now, so you really can't see too much. 04:01.000 --> 04:07.000 But we have about a thousand fish in here, a couple hundred in here. 04:07.000 --> 04:11.000 These ones are younger cohort, so these are a little bit under a year. 04:11.000 --> 04:14.000 These guys are a little bit under two years old. 04:14.000 --> 04:20.000 So these ones, average fish is about 10 to 12 ounces. 04:20.000 --> 04:24.000 And in here, we have some that are up to two and a half pounds. 04:24.000 --> 04:29.000 So, not quite as big as what we saw at NADF yesterday, not quite as big as what's in the Manavania River, 04:29.000 --> 04:35.000 but really proud of getting them to that size and getting it to market size. 04:35.000 --> 04:42.000 And once we get it there, and if you compare that with how long it takes in the wild, it's about 20%. 04:42.000 --> 04:50.000 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. 04:50.000 --> 04:58.000 Once we raise them and throughout their life, they're producing all of our nutrients for our plants. 04:58.000 --> 05:03.000 And once they're ready, once they're that market size, we put them in a purge system over here. 05:03.000 --> 05:06.000 So that is straight up, woke your system of well water. 05:06.000 --> 05:12.000 We'll give the fish a little bit of Epsom salt, and that cleans them out, just like it would be in you. 05:12.000 --> 05:18.000 And then they're left with nothing in their body, they go for three or four days in straight well water. 05:18.000 --> 05:22.000 Perfectly clean fillets, we know what they've eaten their entire life. 05:22.000 --> 05:24.000 It's this, uh, 05:26.000 --> 05:28.000 how did it feed? 05:28.000 --> 05:32.000 So that's 55% protein, so you keep the, uh, 05:32.000 --> 05:34.000 you keep the, uh, 05:34.000 --> 05:40.000 growth rates up, you keep them producing a bunch of nutrients, and they're just very healthy fish because of that. 05:40.000 --> 05:44.000 Canadian fish food, so the economy is pretty interesting right now. 05:44.000 --> 05:51.000 We're working on a couple of little companies to try to get a walleye blend of food that's domestically produced, 05:51.000 --> 05:56.000 because there is a non-proprietary blend that's out there that's been done. 05:56.000 --> 06:07.000 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. 06:07.000 --> 06:21.000 But once, so the fish are living in here, and, uh, their water is recirculating, clean water comes from our ASD filter, 06:21.000 --> 06:30.000 and comes back after being filtered, and then you see a small valve over there, we can go around and see that. 06:30.000 --> 06:36.000 But you open that valve, and that's what brings our concentrated nutrients from our fish into our plant loop. 06:36.000 --> 06:45.000 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. 06:45.000 --> 06:52.000 It's all soluble nutrients, so good safety-wise, that's really good, and just, uh, standard operating procedures-wise, 06:52.000 --> 06:56.000 so we don't get all clogged up in our tubes and our towers and everything. 06:57.000 --> 07:06.000 We have the same strains, so these are all from the NADF facility, so a triple strain of walleye. 07:06.000 --> 07:13.000 We have seen, uh, we started operating a green-based strain of walleye, it's going to be really interesting to see. 07:13.000 --> 07:21.000 I'm hoping NADF gets their funding and does this study on comparing the different strains of walleye. 07:21.000 --> 07:27.000 You know, the agricultural industry has been doing this for hundreds of years, picking the right cow, picking the right corn. 07:27.000 --> 07:35.000 Now, we're going to have to pick in the right walleye that really suits, uh, suits, uh, raising like this. 07:35.000 --> 07:47.000 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, 07:47.000 --> 07:55.000 so that if a walleye strain has produced in there, they figure they want to keep that strain, uh, consistent. 07:57.000 --> 08:02.000 New tanks are going to go right over here, so we've got to make some room. 08:02.000 --> 08:09.000 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, 08:09.000 --> 08:14.000 and then, uh, that'll get us quite a bit more production capability. That'll screw it up. 08:18.000 --> 08:29.000 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. 08:30.000 --> 08:32.000 They're going to splash a little bit. 08:32.000 --> 08:39.000 Here's a couple over. 08:39.000 --> 08:42.000 So those are all just under what we would harvest right now. 08:42.000 --> 08:45.000 They're probably just getting, uh, two-a-pound. 08:52.000 --> 08:56.000 I know the spots, they like to hang out. I'll try to get them. Get a big one. 09:02.000 --> 09:07.000 There we go. 09:22.000 --> 09:29.000 Here would be a nice one that we put in the purge system right now. Probably just under two-a-hounds, I would say. 09:30.000 --> 09:35.000 You get that nice color. They're kind of a consistent base-off strain. 09:35.000 --> 09:39.000 That's kind of where you see the strain differences in the color, mostly. 09:39.000 --> 09:42.000 Oh, yeah. Real happy with that. 09:42.000 --> 09:50.000 The size, belly, filet, about half of this fish's weight will be in filet. 09:51.000 --> 10:00.000 And this feed is trickling in 24 hours a day, so while I was in there, they do have their own personality. 10:00.000 --> 10:03.000 So like I said, your bigger ones are more of your athletes. 10:03.000 --> 10:06.000 You're kind of your bully fish a little bit too. 10:06.000 --> 10:14.000 They'll eat first, so the idea is, yeah, food trickling in there all day, all day long, so a bully fish gets pulled, 10:14.000 --> 10:19.000 and then the other fish get a chance to eat. That way you're not dealing with any nippin. 10:19.000 --> 10:26.000 When while they're young, you do have to worry a little bit about cannibalization, so that kind of feed helps. 10:26.000 --> 10:29.000 And when they're really young, you might add a little bit of plate. 10:29.000 --> 10:34.000 Well, water to actually make it a little bit more murky for them to make it harder to find. 10:34.000 --> 10:48.000 I was talking about that $800-$900, so all real similar per square foot to a single family home, 10:48.000 --> 10:52.000 what we produce or what we burn in electric and heat. 10:52.000 --> 10:56.000 And a big reason for that, like you mentioned, the insulation helps out. 10:56.000 --> 11:03.000 Having the lights and having the water in the building is the source of insulation or ambient heat that stays in here. 11:03.000 --> 11:09.000 With the electricity is where we have our lights on, light movers. 11:09.000 --> 11:17.000 So that way it's just kind of trying to mimic the sun, varying degrees of intensity throughout the day, 11:17.000 --> 11:23.000 whereas if you just had one LED light, that plant would want to go straight towards that light, long and leggy, 11:23.000 --> 11:29.000 not much yield, not as healthy of a plant where you get varying degrees of intensity, it grows out every which direction. 11:30.000 --> 11:36.000 Our plants are really largely based off the nutrients that we get from our fish. 11:36.000 --> 11:45.000 We have to add calcium and potassium because the nitrification process of our fish, the pH, is always lowering. 11:45.000 --> 11:54.000 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. 11:54.000 --> 11:59.000 That's a good add to aquaponic water anyway, and we're raising the pH. 11:59.000 --> 12:06.000 The one nutrient that kind of has to be added in and of itself, that's not necessarily another benefit, is iron. 12:06.000 --> 12:11.000 Just randomly the fish don't really produce iron, the plants need it. 12:11.000 --> 12:21.000 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. 12:21.000 --> 12:26.000 If we had any sort of solids in there, it would get clogged up really easily. 12:26.000 --> 12:32.000 Each one of these has a bulb valve in it, so there is about 20 gallons of water in here. 12:32.000 --> 12:37.000 One tower will use about one gallon of water per day. 12:37.000 --> 12:44.000 A bulb valve opens up, we trickle water in, and then there's a sump pump in the bottom of there. 12:44.000 --> 12:52.000 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. 12:52.000 --> 12:57.000 So you get that really nice flood and drain where the plants actually get a little bit thirsty. 12:57.000 --> 13:02.000 That's also kind of representative of where these plants came from. 13:02.000 --> 13:07.000 A lot of the herbs are Mediterranean in origin, so they're used to a sandier soil. 13:07.000 --> 13:13.000 They get heavy rain, get dried out for a while, and so we're kind of replicating that here. 13:13.000 --> 13:21.000 So we're able to grow, you see some rosemary up here on this tower, sage, thyme over here. 13:21.000 --> 13:28.000 So all those stickier, more woody crops were able to grow on the towers. 13:28.000 --> 13:32.000 And then kind of a wide variety beyond that too. 13:32.000 --> 13:37.000 Tomatoes were able to do, and the fish really produced mostly nitrate. 13:37.000 --> 13:46.000 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. 13:46.000 --> 13:50.000 So all your herbs, all your salad is in that boat. 13:50.000 --> 13:57.000 But our fish water has actually produced enough nutrients where we can produce pretty nice and great tasting tomatoes too. 13:57.000 --> 14:05.000 Just cherry tomatoes because we need to support them on the towers, but yeah, we've been pretty happy with the taste anyway. 14:06.000 --> 14:10.000 And then you see kind of over here on the other side. 14:10.000 --> 14:19.000 That's our deep water culture unit, and that's kind of more common to use for aquaponics, hydroponics, just that trough of water. 14:19.000 --> 14:23.000 It's a little bit simpler of the system and can work for a lot of different crops. 14:23.000 --> 14:25.000 We have our mint in there, it does amazing. 14:25.000 --> 14:38.000 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. 14:38.000 --> 14:47.000 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. 14:47.000 --> 14:53.000 So keeping it separate, no contact there, just very food safe is the name of the game for us. 14:54.000 --> 15:03.000 We are, you know, just like our fish waters being recirculated, our plant waters being recirculated, our air is moving around, all indoor. 15:03.000 --> 15:12.000 And the reuse of everything, the main lesson we've learned is just keeping everything super clean, disinfected, both fish and plants. 15:12.000 --> 15:19.000 Because you just need biological life to grow, you can't let other bad biology get in the way of that. 15:19.000 --> 15:29.000 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. 15:29.000 --> 15:34.000 And mostly it's keeping clean, keeping everything super, you know, keeping these fans on us. 15:34.000 --> 15:41.000 It feels good for us, and just like us, when the plants get a little bit, they can breathe a lot better. 15:50.000 --> 15:56.000 So assuming at this point the fish are supporting the plants? 15:56.000 --> 15:57.000 Yep. 15:57.000 --> 16:03.000 It's one day the goal to have the vehicle in terms of income supporting each other? 16:03.000 --> 16:13.000 Yeah, we will, we have high hopes to expand the fish sometime, sometime soon in the next couple of years. 16:14.000 --> 16:21.000 And that probably looks mostly like a focus on expansion in the wall and keeping kind of still reaching the capacity here. 16:21.000 --> 16:33.000 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. 16:33.000 --> 16:38.000 A number of different ways you could handle it, or if there's a corn field right out, right out our door too. 16:39.000 --> 16:42.000 But at some point someone will market fish, fish fertilizer, it's like... 16:42.000 --> 16:46.000 We wouldn't be the first ones to do it, for sure. 16:46.000 --> 16:58.000 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. 16:58.000 --> 16:59.000 Great name. 16:59.000 --> 17:07.000 He was an aquaculture professor, maybe just a biology professor, but he said he had a similar system to ours, 17:07.000 --> 17:11.000 recirculating, but in one tank he had northern pike and another tank he had yellow perch. 17:11.000 --> 17:18.000 He found out that when the northern pike had some sort of predation, the yellow perch responded by doubling their growth rates. 17:18.000 --> 17:27.000 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. 17:27.000 --> 17:29.000 I said, do all I do that? 17:29.000 --> 17:31.000 Unfortunately they don't. 17:31.000 --> 17:35.000 I can't finish doing that. It's a chemical that's released when one of them's eaten. 17:35.000 --> 17:39.000 That tells the others around it, grow faster, get bigger, I just got eaten. 17:39.000 --> 17:41.000 Some sort of pheromone or something. 17:41.000 --> 17:43.000 Yeah, something that's released into the water. 17:43.000 --> 17:44.000 Yeah. 17:44.000 --> 17:51.000 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. 17:51.000 --> 17:55.000 You've got to introduce a bigger predator to eat him to get him to grow. 17:55.000 --> 18:00.000 The right idea, but the wrong methodology of what actually is happening here, 18:00.000 --> 18:03.000 is to say you need the predation for them to tell each other to grow bigger. 18:03.000 --> 18:04.000 Right. 18:04.000 --> 18:09.000 Without the predator president, they simply reach a side of their comfortable life and then they don't think they can. 18:09.000 --> 18:10.000 They need that pressure. 18:10.000 --> 18:11.000 Yeah. 18:11.000 --> 18:12.000 That drive. 18:12.000 --> 18:19.000 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. 18:19.000 --> 18:20.000 It wasn't like the perch. 18:20.000 --> 18:23.000 The perch didn't have to see it, you know. 18:24.000 --> 18:29.000 The walleye are enough of an apex predator where they're not necessarily going to do that. 18:29.000 --> 18:36.000 Just cool stuff to learn along the way, especially learning like us. 18:36.000 --> 18:46.000 You end up, you know, YouTube, Google Scholar, talking to these research facilities instead of getting more of a formal education. 18:46.000 --> 18:52.000 You end up with a lot more adjacent things that you learn for better for work. 18:52.000 --> 18:57.000 It's cool to have a mix though. 18:57.000 --> 18:59.000 And you see, you got it here. 18:59.000 --> 19:03.000 We have some power washing going on, assembling towers. 19:03.000 --> 19:05.000 We just got done with the harvest today. 19:05.000 --> 19:11.000 So you see over here, those are a couple of romaine towers that are further ones. 19:11.000 --> 19:15.000 We might be harvesting from, for our little customer's smile. 19:15.000 --> 19:17.000 The other ones are just harvesting from. 19:17.000 --> 19:18.000 We need to unload those. 19:18.000 --> 19:24.000 Soak them, power wash them, reassemble them so they're all perfectly clean. 19:24.000 --> 19:28.000 Very labor intensive, but that's how we grow our good drops. 19:28.000 --> 19:44.000 So, you see here we have some microgreens, broccoli micros, cilantro, romaine basil. 19:44.000 --> 19:52.000 Some day I like to figure out strawberries, but it hasn't happened yet. 19:52.000 --> 19:56.000 We need to clean them up as you go almost after every harvest. 19:56.000 --> 19:59.000 Chives are one thing. Chives are partially both. 19:59.000 --> 20:03.000 You'll see the towers get a little take time, but the plants do really well. 20:03.000 --> 20:08.000 They're able to keep cutting and coming again for whatever reason. 20:08.000 --> 20:14.000 They're really able to reproduce really well and stay really great products for a long time. 20:14.000 --> 20:25.000 Some more basil over here. We have our dill section here. 20:25.000 --> 20:33.000 Another one that you can cut and come again quite a few times. 20:33.000 --> 20:38.000 You guys want to go over and see the germination area? 20:38.000 --> 20:42.000 Yeah, I mean you just want to get some clean. 20:42.000 --> 20:51.000 No, I'm going to edit it for the same activities along the way. 20:51.000 --> 21:00.000 And the motivation and influence on how many engineers and scientists we have 21:00.000 --> 21:07.000 is the new landing. And the same thing like a lot of these people that are interested in science. 21:07.000 --> 21:13.000 But a huge, debatable topic is really interesting to debate. 21:13.000 --> 21:21.000 It's a Tasmanian tiger that they say is really necessary to be back because Tasmanian put his species. 21:21.000 --> 21:29.000 And is it a dire wolf or is it just a wolf with some new trains or whatever? 21:29.000 --> 21:38.000 We'll probably, we've been doing it about every two weeks. 21:38.000 --> 21:42.000 Right out of the circling system and out of the bird system. 21:42.000 --> 21:47.000 Mind you, it's only four people, but no one can tell the difference. 21:47.000 --> 21:56.000 It's kind of interesting that way where salmon, it's quite a big deal to get the purge right 21:56.000 --> 22:06.000 and it could even be three, four weeks sometimes, which they can certainly come down to the nominee on Wednesdays. 22:06.000 --> 22:09.000 No, we don't have a facility. 22:09.000 --> 22:13.000 You know, stainless steel, all that stuff. 22:13.000 --> 22:22.000 But we do have a licensed kitchen towel back here, so we're able to do, 22:22.000 --> 22:26.000 we need the retail from the license just to be able to sell them, so we need that. 22:26.000 --> 22:34.000 But then we're also able to utilize more plant products to put them into charge, 22:34.000 --> 22:36.000 so it has to be raised in the tree. 22:36.000 --> 22:44.000 Billing you in on this yesterday too, then the same way with the plants, we're trying to use them a little bit. 22:45.000 --> 22:47.000 Yep, yeah, we do two fillet packs. 22:47.000 --> 22:55.000 And it is new, you know, you look online, if you, walleye, direct frozen.