This week we had the privileged of joining a great team from the Purdue Extension offices around the state to go to Chicago and tour eight different sites. 
The first stop was Growing Home‘s Wood Street Urban Farm. Growing Home focuses on using organic agriculture as the vehicle to reach the community and create job training and employment opportunities. They focus on hiring individuals that have multiple barriers to reenter the job market and help work through them with a 14 week program of hands on work as well as classroom learning and developing interpersonal skills needed to land a job. 
There were quite a few aspects of Growing Home that overlap with our mission of helping people reconnect with their food origins as well as their job training program. We were able to learn many aspects of their program and get contact information so we can have follow up discussions down the road when we are designing our programs.
The next stop was Will Allen’s Chicago site for Growing Power. Most of you are probably already familiar with Will’s work in Milwaukee and around the country. He has really fathered the movement of urban farming with the mission of engaging and empowering local communities to put idle hands to work on making compost, growing food, and community beautification with his Grow, Bloom, Thrive mantra. 
The Chicago site has a lot of interesting things going on in addition to compost and grow beds. They were experimenting with mushrooms as well as growing pea and sunflower shoots for Walmart. They were just getting started with aquaponics at this site but they had their systems up and cycling and growing some test plants. There were even a few goats hanging around. Their Chicago farm has had great luck with employee retention with some being there for over 10 years now. They have also had good luck with placement at other food related businesses in the community making their training program quite a good success.
Up next was The Plant. I had no familiarity with this place before we got there but it quickly turned into one of the shining highlights. The Plant is all about completing the loop in closed systems. Awesome! Take a closer look at their diagram on the left for more details but it is a beautiful thing. They even have an animated version. As a summary, 
they spend time to pair food business together that will help close the waste loop for each other. They have an amazing facility to work from and some great tenets going already. They are also about to bring online their bio gas turbine powered by a shiny new anaerobic digester. Talk about closing the loop. These people are inspiring! They have a full garden outside complete with chickens, a mushroom tenet in the basement, along with a full aquaponics operation of their own as well.
The first evening ended with a stop at Rick Bayless’ Frontera Grill. The locally sourced dishes were amazing and we all shared as many different tastes as possible. It was a good end to a full day of local ag.
The first stop of the following day was to Testa Produce. While Testa certainly had less focus on local, they certainly have a passion for sustainability. They designed their new $22M warehouse to allow for all the niceties we wish every warehouse could have. Wind and solar energy are prevalent along with electric charging stations in the parking lot and bio diesel, hybrid and other energy efficient trucks line their lots. The green roof collects grey water into their 5,000 gallon cistern to be reused throughout the building.
Afterward we stopped at Three Aces for lunch where their chef, Chef Matt, came out to talk to us about how he sources local and prefers to cook with local foods. The atmosphere there was great, the food was great, and the music was great. Highly recommended for your trips to Chicago!
The final stop on the tour was Windy City Harvest which is program within the botanic gardens of Chicago. This program was very well run and the student employees were very well versed on the operations and were very enthusiastic about their farm. They had a very healthy aquaponic operation with several experimental iterations 
going on with system setup as well as plants. The outdoor garden was beautiful with good seedling production processes as well as hoop add ons for the gardens for season extension and over wintering their beds. They also have a very large hoop house on the property they incorporate. It was nice to see them integrate native flowers into their garden as well, no doubt the influence of the botanic garden but still, great to see.
It was an amazing trip and I want to sincerely thank all those at the Purdue Extension office that helped make it possible as well as allowed me to tag along with their team. It was a trip that helped set up many good relationship that can be built on for future program advice.
