JUN 21, 2019

JON CHAVEZ

jchavez@theblade.com

Hidden from prying eyes and tucked beneath a four-story steel and concrete parking garage in the heart of downtown Toledo sits the most unlikely of things — a farm.

But this one has no tractors, silos, or scarecrows.

Go inside Balance Farms, an 8,168-square foot high-tech “aquaponics” operation located on the first floor of the Tower on the Maumee’s parking garage on Summit Street, and you will find multiple rows of tall racks filled with herbs and leafy greens that are growing robustly in black plastic trays.

Each tray is bathed by ultraviolet light and filled by a three-layer sandwich of nutrient-laden water, shredded coconut husk, and a styrofoam sheet with rows of neatly-spaced holes to hold the hydroponically-grown crops.

“There’s never a rainy day, there’s never a cloudy day in here. We have a controlled light spectrum that gives each plant exactly what they need, and we go from seed to harvest in about four weeks. Every week we’re harvesting about 500 heads of lettuce,” said Prakash “P.K.” Karamchandani, of Balance Pan-Asian Grille, which is the prime beneficiary of Balance Farms’ bountiful and organic harvests.

Mr. Karamchandani and his business partner, HoChan Jang, co-own the Balance restaurant chain, which they founded in 2010 on a premise of tangy and exotic flavors using the freshest ingredients possible.

But Mr. Jang, the chain’s executive chef, menu planner, and in-house foodie, grew increasingly frustrated that his meal planning and menu experimentation was limited by his produce suppliers.

Some items they could not procure, while others could not be obtained regularly or in consistent quantity.

“I’ve experimented with a lot of different peppers. But for some dishes, they’re just not going to have the genuine flavors because I can’t always get what I need,” Mr. Jang said.

So in mid-2016 the two began investigating a way to get the freshest ingredients, in large quantities, and at the exact time when those ingredients would be needed.

Their $715,000 solution was an aquaponics farm adjacent to their downtown Toledo restaurant.

Aquaponics is a self-contained symbiotic system that recirculates waste water from a fish tank through a vegetable bed. The nutrient-rich wastewater feeds the plants, and the plants filter the water to keep the fish healthy.

Neither of the two owners knew much about aquaponics, so they purchased an existing small aquaponics firm in Toledo, Great Greens, which ran an aquaponics farm in the Uptown neighborhood near downtown Toledo and was supplying greens to a small list of area upscale restaurants.

Balance Farms, which is 15 times larger than the operation Great Greens had, went operational in mid-May and already is supplying lettuce and herbs (mostly basil) to Balance Grille’s four Toledo area stores plus a new store in Cleveland. The basil crop has been large enough to sell leftovers at Walt Churchill’s Markets locally and Plum Markets in Ann Arbor.

About 80 percent of the farm will be functioning by July and Mr. Karamchandani expects production levels to hit 100 percent by 2021. A system that will house fruiting plants like tomatoes and peppers hasn’t been set up yet but should be operating by this summer.

Modern aquaponics has been around only since about 1979 and it didn’t really take off until the 1990s.

“We’re now past it being a fad stage and people want it to work long-term. People are committed to it and it has taken hold,” said Allen Pattillo, an aquaculture researcher and a specialist in aquaponics at Auburn University in Alabama.

However, aquaponics still faces some real hurdles, he added. For one thing, it’s expensive on a per-cost basis.

“It’s hard to make money in agriculture just in general terms. The margins are thin,” Mr. Pattillo said.

With aquaponics, “The profitability, that’s the tough part,” he said.

In regular agriculture, the distribution markets available to produce growers have long since been established. But that isn’t the case for produce grown using aquaponics.

“The biggest problem that most (aquaponics) people have is they have a hard time selling the stuff they grow. It’s a big problem finding markets for it,” Mr. Pattillo said. “If (Mr. Karamchandani and Mr. Jang) can take theirs onto the retail side already in their restaurants and sell the rest to whomever, that’s a great start.”

Currently, Mr. Pattillo said he is unaware of any restaurant chains that are using aquaponics to vertically integrate their supply chain into their overall business.

“There’s a fellow with a place close to Minneapolis. He’s got a garden center and an organic farm and a restaurant. It’s not all on site, but he’s kind of vertically integrating,” Mr. Pattillo said.

A company in Wisconsin, Superior Fresh, is using aquaponics to grow produce on an industrial scale, but it functions as a produce supplier with its crop going to restaurants and retailers.

The jury is still out, Mr. Pattillo said, as to whether the public really cares enough to pay a little more to buy produce grown with aquaponics.

“We all say we would like to buy some of that nicer stuff, but when it comes right down to it, we might not,” he said. “But people are more likely to try those new fancy things in a restaurant than in the store,” he added.

The Balance owners might have saved money by using a hydroponic system instead of aquaponics.

In hydroponics, plants are grown in water-fed trays, but unlike aquaponics the water isn’t recovered and fed back into the system and the grower must continually buy nutrients, seeds, and other items.

Mr. Karamchandani said he and Mr. Jang made the decision to spend more for a system that was organic but that also was largely self-sustaining. Once Balance Farms is fully functional, the only large expense will be seeds, and even that expense might be offset by sales of excess produce, mature fish, and other by-products.

“We’ve tried to monetize every aspect of this project,” Mr. Karamchandani said.

For example, a small part of their crop is a fish food called duckweed. And when the waste conversion tanks become too filled, some liquid can be drained off, bottled, and sold as liquid plant food.

So far, the urban farm project has about 600 fish, mostly tilapia and koi, swimming in 650 gallon tanks. But there is room for 1,200 fish. The fish tanks and additional tanks that mix wastewater and bacteria to create nitrates that plants can absorb are located in a separate room from the plants.

Both plant water and fish water eventually meet in a computer-controlled mixing system that pumps water to one system or another to keep it all balanced. Overall, the fish tanks and water system to feed the plants contain about 26,000 gallons of water.

Inside the plant room, a climate-controlled system using triple filters regulates the air quality and humidity.

Even tiny flies that hover around the plants are there for a specific purpose: they eat mold that can damage plants. And the fly population is strictly controlled — all are females.

If building an aquaponics farm seems like an extreme step to have a “farm-to-table” experience at a fast casual restaurant, Balance Grille’s owners say it’s worth it.

On the food side, Mr. Jang said, Balance can claim without exaggeration fresher and better tasting greens.

“The flavors are much bolder but the textures are so much more delicate,” Mr. Jang said. “The lettuce is sweeter and it has a better texture.”

If menu items call for exotic greens or peppers, Mr. Jang said he now can grow as much as needed. “And it’s not just a certain item. I can grow hybrids. Really, this is a way we can put our own mark on everything we sell,” he said.

On the business side, Mr. Karamchandani said the aquaponics farm enhances Balance’s corporate brand and pledge of freshness. It also will eventually cut costs and provide new revenue streams.

More importantly, it gives the owners a greater measure of control they have long desired.

On its website, Balance promises “fresh meals, where every ingredient is prepared from whole form, right here in the restaurant.” But up until last month, that promise was more a goal than reality.

“Restaurants by and large revolve around delivery of their product by a supplier. But say you’re expecting a shipment of greens,” Mr. Karamchandani said. “Those greens could have been prepped on a Monday and been sitting in a (refrigeration truck) waiting for shipment on a Wednesday.

“All that work for a product that sat on a truck for a day,” he said.

At Balance Farms, produce is harvested at 6 a.m., distributed locally and in use by 11 a.m. at the restaurants, Mr. Karamchandani said.

“This was so worth it for us,” he said. “Food is such a commodity and not needing to give up control on how we get our supply was important.

“Look outside the restaurant industry and there’s vertical integration everywhere. Look at ProMedica and their recent acquisition. That was all about being vertical,” he said.

It takes about six to eight weeks in dirt to grow lettuce conventionally. “We need just four weeks to bring it to harvest and we can rotate crops so that we’re harvesting fresh greens every week,” Mr. Karamdanchani said.

Eventually, 70 percent of everything grown in their mysterious space with covered windows will supply Balance restaurants. The remaining 30 percent will be sold at local grocery stores.

And while Balance Farms is low-key for now, it will not stay in the shadows long.

The two owners plan to show off their investment in an innovative way.

They have an arrangement with Imagination Station to eventually turn their urban farm into a kind of exhibit demonstrating how a sustainable aquaponics farm operates.

Mr. Karamchandani said a live exhibit is a natural fit for Balance’s philosophy.

“People want transparency. They want freshness but they want to be assured how that freshness occurred,” he said. “When this is ready you will see every part, see the entire process of how we grow everything that we put on the table.”