Main Street Farms:

some material here was also taken from an article on Main Street Farms by the Groundswell Center for Local Food & Farming

When I was looking for a certified organic hydroponic farm to feature in this issue, I put out the word to NOFA members. Several suggested that I pick Main Street Farms, an operation in central New York that has an aquaponic and hydroponic component, the hydroponic part of which is certified by Baystate Organic (also featured in this issue).

Although Main Street is not typical for organic hydroponic farms in that a large portion of their business is derived not from hydroponics but from growing in soil, I felt it would be a good choice to interview. In part this was because I figured growing in both media would give them the ability to compare and contrast those two approaches. In part it was because the owner I spoke with, Allan Gandelman, was willing to be entirely forthcoming about their methods and I wasn’t sure I would get such transparency from other hydroponic growers.

The towns of Homer and Cortland, where the Main Street Farms operate, are deep in New York state farm country — 25 miles east of Ithaca, 30 miles south of Syracuse, and 40 miles north of Binghamton. Compared to the rest of the Northeast, New York has a wealth of open farmland, sizeable population centers, and a farming infrastructure – tractor dealerships, slaughter houses, feed stores, food processors – that can support new farm ventures. Add to that reasonable land prices, and what better place for wannabe farmers to try their wings?

Which is exactly what Allan Gandelman and Bob Cat did when starting Main Street Farms.

“I started the farm about six years ago,” recalls Allan. “Before that I was a high school social studies teacher locally. I was teaching and I was disillusioned with the food system and I wanted to figure out:
one, how to get local produce into the food system because kids weren’t learning and school lunches were so bad that the kids often ate just a bag of chips and a bottle of soda, and
two, how to educate children and consumers in general about eating healthy and the importance of buying local.”

Allan took a year-long Sustainable Farming Training Certificate course and a Farm Business Planning Course from the nearby Groundswell Center for Local Food & Farming during the Center’s first year of operation. He liked what he learned. He also had been researching hydroponic and aquaponic systems and thought they might be a good way to achieve his goals for a localized growing platform.

“I read about aquaponics,” Gandelman says, “and thought it was cool. I went to visit Growing Power in Milwaukee and thought it was awesome. His sys-tem is designed more for employing neighborhood people and not making money, though.

“I bought an old flower nursery in Homer,” he continues, “and I started out building an aquaponics system there in a greenhouse. I just went online to learn how to do it. Mostly YouTube! I visited a lot of aquaponic farms all over the country to see what they were doing, and built a small scale system as a proof of concept. It worked.”

At that point Allan asked Bob to join him. Bob was working as an outdoor environmental educator at the time, also with kids. The food the kids were being fed was also not very good, which led Bob to think about eating better food. He took the Sustainable Farming Certificate Course the next year and went into a partnership with Allan.

They started doing soil-based plant sales and a market garden in the nursery’s greenhouses while Allan built the aquaponics production facility. It took him about a year to build. He doesn’t really have a technical background, just an undergraduate degree in Anthropology and Geography, and a Masters in Education. But summers he did a lot of carpentry, construction work, plumbing, and used to buy and fix up houses.

“Foreclosures mostly,” he says, “and fixed them up myself. I think I bought my first house when I was 21. Now I’m 35. I’d need a summer project when I was in school so I’d buy a house and fix it up. For me this was no big deal – plumbing, electric, all of it. I’ve managed a lot of projects as a result. It translates well to farming.

Allan is from New Jersey and New York City, but went to school in the Hudson Valley and New Paltz, and lived there for about 10 years. He dreamed about starting a farm there, but the land was too expensive. He found it much easier in Homer, with wide open markets because of Syracuse, Ithaca, and Binghamton being so nearby.

The farms currently produce about 30 acres of vegetables on three sites, including in about 25,000 square feet of plastic covered space. They have upwards of 200 tillable acres available to them and every year are taking on more and more. Counting both owners it employs about ten people, year-round. The aquaponic/hydroponic facility is the only one they heat in the winter. All the other covered spaces are high tunnels where they grow in the winter with no heat.

“The farm is called Main Street Farms,” explains Allan, “because you can really have an aquaponic/hydroponic farm like this on every main street. This model has achieved some of my original goals, but over the years we have expanded significantly mostly through field production in soil rather than our aquaponic system. We are really involved in the local community and that has helped a tremendous amount. We have three locations and people drive by our greenhouses all the time. So we have become part of the landscape.

“We sell to the school system now, too,” he continues. “which was one of our goals. The irony is that they don’t buy the stuff that is grown in the aquaponic system because it is too based on specialty crops and too expensive. What they are buying is field crops like lettuce, winter and summer squash. We can’t beat the grocery store prices on those, but the school districts around here have a USDA grant where they can pay a little more for local produce. It is a miniscule part of our gross sales, but it gets them higher quality food and works for that goal.”

Allan also has a lot of connections to the Universities. He has done a bunch of research projects with the people at Cornell in the ag school and is in a good location for that kind of collaboration.

The farm sells a big volume of greens in September and October to SUNY Cortland. The students want it, and the college itself has a sustainability plan so they need to buy local and sustainably grown food.

The central part of New York is jam packed with CSAs and local food options. Syracuse University and Cornell have food clubs, food field trips, and buy-local groups, and there is plenty of interest in local food. Allan’s girl friend is beginning a Masters degree in Food Studies at Syracuse.

One of the farm’s major markets is an innovative 250-share CSA that goes year round. Every year they build more high tunnels for winter growing. This year they introduced an innovative way to pay for shares.

“Our CSA is now on a weekly payment system,” Allan explains. “If someone wants to skip a week they can. They just log in to their online account. They can go back on whenever they are ready. We live in an area that isn’t affluent and for people to spend $500 or $600 for a season of produce is a lot of money. So by doing a weekly thing if they go on vacation and don’t have to pay for their share, they’re happy. They don’t feel like they have wasted money. For us, we are getting those people to eat better and they are part of the farm.

“We still have 30 to 40% of our members,” he continues, “who just mail us a check for the whole thing. Some pay for the season and miss half the pickups. They don’t care. But we had other people in the past who would freak out about missing one week and paying for it. Also, we have two sizes of shares, but any

CSA share is a lot of vegetables and if people don’t eat all of them in one week they can finish them off the next week and skip the new ones for a week. It prevents the problem with backlogs of vegetables in refrigerators!

“This is the first year,” he concludes. “that we are doing that pay-as-you-go system, and people are loving it. On July fourth a lot of people put their accounts on hold to go on vacation. So that was several thousand dollars on hold, but we have other markets and it meant people were taking advantage of the system. They are part of the farm and they are not wasting their $25. But before the hold system we would harvest the vegetables, set them somewhere, and then compost them. That was no good! And this way we have labor savings. But if we had done this 5 years ago as a brand new farm we couldn’t afford to do it this way. Too risky!”

The rapid growth of the farm is in part due to an aggressive strategy of investment and hiring. For one thing, they keep upgrading their facilities by building high tunnels. This year, in addition, they have secured an old warehouse in Cortland and are setting up a new packing and washing facility there. It will be heated and insulated and built on a concrete slab so they can use a forklift to move stuff around!

Allan is putting in a commercial kitchen there and they will move everything directly from the field down there for washing and packing. It is only a mile from the production areas and the efficiency of labor will be much better.

“Right now our facility is too small to run pallets through,” points out Gandelman, “and so right now we are moving things many times more than we need to. The labor savings alone will pay the rent for us – not to mention people’s comfort level in the winter! Half of what we do is in storage vegetables so we are washing and packing every week of the year. When you are doing that in a retrofitted barn and the water is freezing, people are miserable!”

Allan also feels their growth is based on his willingness to reach out for staff instead of doing everything himself.

“I have hired people to do some of the stuff that I used to do in marketing,” he explains, “and that has freed me up to create better systems, hire the right people, stuff like that. When I was doing it all with my business partner Bob, we didn’t have time to expand!”

Of course the down side of this approach is that you don’t always find the right person. Right now Allan has no full time greenhouse manager – just one employee coming in for a few hours – so he has to fill in and it is hard to do all he should. He is just too busy to keep up with it all.

“We had a great woman manage it all but she moved to Colorado,” he laughs. “We have lost two workers to Colorado now. Greener pastures! We can’t pay what they pay!”

For the first time, Allan this year reached out for workers under the H2A program. They now employ 2 Jamaicans, and he is pretty happy with their work.

“They work,” he says. “They know what they are doing. These guys have farms in Jamaica in the winter and have been coming to New York and working in apple farms for 20 years. They are older guys and I found housing for them. They aren’t here to mess around. They don’t take days off. They want to work as much as possible every day. They know plants.

“We’re not used,” he continues, “to having our harvest crew know anything! We were hiring college kids and local people. We would tell them to go make a bunch of chard and they do it and you look at it and you say: ‘You put four leaves in here that are diseased or have pest damage.’ The guys from Jamaica know how to make a nice looking bunch! It is just different.”

The farm’s minimum wage is $12.38 an hour and the pay is above the living wage for Cortland County. The farm hires someone to cook lunch for the employees every day. Farm work at Main Street Farms is not enough to make a middle class job, Allan understands. But one of his goals is that farmers should be getting the same pay as teachers.

“We should be at that level,” he feels. “Until we get there I won’t be satisfied. Otherwise the food system is unstable.”

The greenhouse Allan uses for his aquaponic and hydroponic operation is slightly longer than usual, about 112 feet, by 30 feet wide. It is double skinned to preserve heat, which is one of the primary expenses of the system. They have a natural gas furnace for hot air, and were using it to heat the circulating water the fish live in. Allan got a grant, however, from NYSERTA, the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority to install solar thermal panels to heat that water. They look like solar electric panels but are for heating water. There are definitely savings when using solar versus propane, but in the winter there is only so much heat available from the sun before they have to use the gas again.

“Here you can monitor that whole system,” Gandelman says, standing at a control panel at one end of the greenhouse. “We have a hot water holding tank outside which is at 147 degrees on a cloudy day. The collectors are at 93, the heat exchanger is at 84, and the fish tanks are at 75. When the system needs heat it runs glycol through the heat exchanger to the holding tank and pulls the BTUs out of the holding tank and sends them to the fish tanks. Once the holding tank goes below 150 the solar panels start pumping hot glycol back into the holding tank.”

The actual aquaponic/hydroponic system Allan has designed is not too far distant from what Will Allen uses in Milwaukee and John Todd and others designed at the New Alchemy Institute on Cape Cod in the seventies. Back then they had tilapia in tanks and grew in solar greenhouses. There is not a lot of research published about their work, but they had separate water filtration systems to keep the circulating water healthy for the fish and not let the fish wastes overpower the plants. They got into biological filtration systems, repeating much of what nature does, and that moved into work in waste water treatment. It is much easier to raise money on the municipal scale to treat waste water than to raise food. So a lot of the New Alchemy work has gone in that direction since the Institute shut down.

Allan’s system has rows of tanks running down the length of the greenhouse. Each row has 3 levels of tanks. The bottom tank has the fish and the two top ones have microgreens floating on racks in the filtered water pumped up from the fish tanks.

Right now Main Street uses tilapia, a common name for any of hundreds of species of cichlid fish from the lilapline cichlid tribe of mainly freshwater fish inhabiting shallow streams, ponds, rivers and lakes and less commonly found living in brackish water. They tastes like catfish or other mildly flavored white meat fish and take a year to grow. Tilapia have increased in popularity as a food fish since they grow well in farmed fish environments.

The fish are fed pelletized meal made from ground up fish, which is commercially available. Main Street sells the fish gutted and scaled, either fresh or frozen. Allan and the farm staff clean and process the fish themselves in a commercial kitchen, which is a lot of work, he says. They hope to diversify into yellow perch and maybe largemouth bass this winter, fish that also grow well in this environment.

A pump takes the water from the fish in the bottom tank up to the top and then gravity feeds it all the way back down, feeding the greens in the top and middle levels, until it gets back to the fish in the bottom tank. A biofiltration system is under these beds. It collects the solids, they break down, and red wiggler composting worms that live in there in the water eat the solids. The biofilter is colonized by different bacteria. There is one that eats ammonia. It shows up right away. If you had a fish tank at your house you would have the same bacteria show up. They are converting the ammonia to nitrites. Then another bacteria converts nitrites to nitrates. The nitrates are what the plants take up.

Tubes carry air into the tanks to oxygenate them, but they are turned off for the summer. Right now the backflow of the water is enough to oxygenate it. But the basic system as Allan designed it has held up well for 5 years.

“You can grow any leafy green in this water, “ says Gandelman. “We were doing a lot of lettuce for a while. These are microgreens here now — they are the most profitable. They won’t be harvested for another week. They go to restaurants and stores, mostly. We have mizuna, arugula, mustard greens, kale, cabbage, peashoots. They are sold in little clamshell containers and are put on meals as a garnish or used in salads. They are tasty and mildly spicy. We grow them on these burlap racks, just floating in the tanks. They mostly need nitrogen to grow, which they get from the fish waste. They also need iron, which we add as a trace mineral every month. There is plenty of phosphorus in the fish waste. These greens grow in 14 to 21 days, and don’t need much else. You can add micronutrients if you want, but the fish waste has most of them already because we feed them a balanced feed. In this system the fish are putting in amino acids and things that are good for the plants.”

The greens could all grow in soil – the farm used to grow them in soil in trays on tables. It would be a lot of work bending over to grow them in the ground, but you can grow them in media on tables in a hoophouse.

“The microgreens all have their preferences,” says Allan. “This is mizuna and it is yellowing a little. It doesn’t do great in the heat, but it does well in the winter. This cabbage is doing awesome. These are peashoots just ready to harvest. We vary our mix depending on the season and what does best.”

A year-round growing environment like this, with high nitrogen nutrient water, poses a lot of pest issues, especially on salad greens and leafy greens. Mostly it is insects, says Gandelman, primarily aphids.

The greens are certified organic, so the farm is not spraying, but it is still growing year-round and doesn’t shut down so that makes it a little bit tricky with the greens that grow here. There is not a time when the pests are frozen out or can’t find crops to feed on.

Costs are also a problem. The mission was to get food in to the schools and feed people, so it has to be affordable, whether it is certified organic or not.

“The economics don’t work great,” admits Allan. “They’re okay. But for this to really work we would have to build a four or five acre greenhouse. You need to get economies of scale, and that is really the scale to make this work profitably as a stand alone system.

“Everything in here is expensive,” he continues. “And growing high calorie food out in the field, like potatoes or carrots or beets, is way more cost effective for us and much more cost effective for the end consumer. You can get a much higher volume of food for the same money as you can with leafy greens. You know? Leafy greens just don’t have a lot of calories.

“We sell them retail for $32 a pound,” he adds. “Wholesale that is $24 a pound, to restaurants, mostly. Each one of these racks might yield a half pound. It’s not a ton of money but it is enough to keep the place going. Growing them this way is lower in labor costs because you are constantly watering them in soil and this takes care of that. On tables the soil dries out so fast you are always watering. Here you don’t have to pay attention to that. But here you have to pay the electric, the heat… “

Main Street isn’t really big enough to go through a food distributor, so they do all their own distribution – restaurants, grocery stores, farmers markets.

Allan says if he had to do it over again he would probably just build more high tunnels. The price of land is not that high and they don’t utilize the aquaponics operation as much as they could, especially in the summer, so it is not as profitable as it could be. Finding the right person to work there is part of the problem. If they could do that, he thinks it would be more profitable.

“I’ve done a lot of workshops on aquaponics,” Gandelman reflects. “People want to get into it as a retirement plan. But it is a little risky for that. The startup overhead is really high. I tell them they are better off building a high tunnel for $5000 or $7000 and growing in the soil. Then go to the farmers market and see how you feel about it. Then, after a year or two, you can put an aquaponic system in that high tunnel if you still think that is what you want to do.”

Asked how he would redesign an aquaponics system now, after working with this one for five years, Allan says he wouldn’t use a vertical stack system like this, but put the fish in tanks in a garage and pump the water into a greenhouse with one level of floating racks. Such a design would call for more upfront costs, but in the long term he thinks it would be better to separate the fish and the plants more. He still likes the idea of doing aquaponics because it is different and he likes being a diversified farmer.

“I could grow 200 acres of cabbage in soil and sell it all,” he sighs, “but that sounds boring. The aquaponics thing is just another piece of our diversified operation. That is why it works. If it was just aquaponics, on that scale, it would be too difficult and not that interesting to me.“

Gandelman pays attention to the national discussions about organics and hydroponics, but it doesn’t really affect Main Street Farms that much. They are certified organic because they can be, but it’s not that important to their marketing.

The tilapia are not certified for one simple reason: there is no such thing as organic fish food. The farm buys the best fish food they can find. But the USDA can’t certify sea food and the fish food is made up mostly of other fish. So the tilapia can’t be certified until someone makes a plant-based fish food that can be certified first.

The greens can be certified because the manure from the fish is being broken down in a biofiltration system and never really touching the plants. The worms eat the manure, the solid fish wastes, and their castings then break down in water to provide the micro and macro nutrients. The worms just reproduce and keep going. The same rules apply as in the soil where you apply manure and then it is broken down by bacteria. Allan has to follow the same NOP rules about not applying manure that is not broken down to plants until after 120 days. That is really a big reason they have not expanded the aquaponics part of the operation — because of those limits on nutrient use for the plants.

“I don’t think that hydroponics by itself should be allowed as organic,” Allan states. “There are no bacteria or organisms in the system. But this is a living ecosystem. It’s not working with synthetics, it is working through organisms, bacteria, fish, worms. It is very similar to a soil system.

“If you go down to Florida,” he continues, “you can see where they grow organic tomatoes in sand and fertigate them with minerals. They use things like bat guano and say that is okay, but that is the same as hydroponics – supplying nutrients through irrigation.

“People say they want the crops grown in soil, “he concludes. “But if the reason they want that is because of the living organisms in soil, this system has that. The whole thing is based on worms, manure, and bacteria. But in a straight hydroponic system, even if you create an organic nutrient, there is no living bacteria that really power it.”

One of the reasons Gandelman is not more supportive of hydroponic growing is that he has seen it taken to extremes.

“A friend of mine now has the biggest indoor vertical farm in the world,” he reveals. “He started here at Cornell and he was growing baby arugula in the late nineties. No one wanted that. It was like: ‘What the heck is baby arugula? It’s spicy and bitter. We don’t want to buy this crap!’ But fast forward to 15 years later and everyone wants baby arugula!

“So now everyone wants those baby greens,” he continues, “arugula, baby spinach, baby kale, now it is a thing. And a vertical system is perfect to grow those short, fast turnaround things. To make money you have to be harvesting constantly. You don’t want to be waiting like we do for storage cabbage – it takes a whole year for one crop. With a vertical system they are harvesting 52 times a year. At those economies of scale it is profitable, but at mine, not so.

“A vertical farm is where you grow everything indoors in a stacked system,” he concludes. “What we have is two levels here. What they have is 10 or 15 levels of racking, and every rack is a different bed. It goes 15, 20, even 30 feet high. They use the same physical footprint, but times 15. They are in New Jersey, in Newark, in an old steel mill. They are growing what in the field could be 100 acres of arugula. And they are right next to their New York City market, so they have lowered some of their transportation and freshness costs. Plus that whole industry of hydroponics and vertical farming is moving to robotics. Soon they won’t have much of a labor bill. Also, if you are an indoor farm in New Jersey, your competition is outdoor farms in California. If California has a drought, labor problem, pest outbreak, you’re totally immune from those problems.”

Allan feels that food costs in the US country are too low. He goes to the Syracuse farmers market, which is monstrous. They have 400 vendors and get 20,000 buyers a day. A lot of the growers, however, are the old conventional vegetable growers who want to beat everyone on price. That doesn’t make sense to Allan. He thinks we need all levels of production in our food system, and the prices have to support that.

“Because this work is important on different levels,” he insists. “The most basic level is from an environmental quality perspective. We’re an organic farm so we take care of the soil and the environment much better than bigger conventional farms. The next level is that we’re growing food for our local community so we’re helping people to eat better, eat healthier, eat what’s in season, and not go to the grocery store so much. And then on a whole different level, we have a decent sized farm business and a bunch of employees which makes us feel really good that we can provide jobs and employ people, and take part in our community that way.

“Sure, there is a potential to make money too,” he adds. “But like in any farming venture, aquaponics or field production, all the stars have to line up perfectly for you to do that. If you get the right people, the right markets, the right product, the right system, the right scale, just at the right time – then you have a chance! If any one of those variables is not lining up, though, it won’t make money.”