Our Story of Land Rehabilitation through Urban Agriculture
Closed Loop Farms is first and foremost an indoor microgreens farm. The bulk of our business takes place in the basement of a century-old meat packing facility. Reinvigorating this once vacant, industrial phantom into a lush indoor farm where we produce our staple crops year round is neat and all, but also lacks certain qualities like fresh air and sunshine. In 2018, we made a deal with the building owners to rehabilitate the gravel parking lot behind The Plant into a functional urban farm. In the years since, our outdoor farm has quadrupled in size and flooded our yard with beautiful flowers that feed the bees and garnish your cocktails.
dozens of shelves on wheels holding microgreen trays under purple grow light
Having indoor operations gives us year-round consistency, which helps us maintain a healthy business in a notoriously unpredictable industry. It can, however, also limit our capacity during the summer, leaving potential revenue on the proverbial table. Utilizing our outdoor space in the summer to supplement our revenue allows us to capitalize on peak season capabilities and diversify the goods we can offer our customers. It also allows us to diversify the jobs and knowledge we can offer our community, a responsibility we take seriously as an employer.
LEFT: Piles of wood chips that would become our outdoor farm
RIGHT: A layer of compost is applied before the 2018 planting
The physical process of transforming asphalt or gravel into functioning urban agriculture is surprisingly simple and incredibly effective. First, we established a base layer of wood chips–recycled from city tree-trimming operations–about 12” thick. Then we covered that with a layer of compost and topsoil, giving us ample growing space atop a flood-proof buffer that enriches the soil as it decays. In addition to growing space, the outdoor farm gives us a place to utilize the leftover soil and plant matter from our microgreens operation. This "waste product" would otherwise have to be hauled away for processing–an expense that leads many other microgreen growers to forgo the soil altogether. Instead, we supplement the soil of our outdoor farm with the composted microgreen trays from the indoor farm, giving us a plentiful source of recycled nutrients, fiscal savings, and lower carbon emissions.
LEFT: farmers empty soil from the harvested trays for composting
RIGHT: farmers plant our first crops in the recycled soil 2018
How Urban Farming Benefits Communities
The overall process has been beneficial not only to our business but to our immediate community, as green spaces like this aren’t just visually appealing – they literally absorb carbon and heat, provide safe habitat for pollinators, and, of course, produce food that doesn’t need to be shipped in from thousands of miles away. Yet another set of beneficiaries are our employees, who gain deeper experience with and understanding of agriculture in general, and urban farming in particular. Having an outdoor program gives us the ability to hire temporary workers (especially students) with a desire to to learn about farming and urban reclamation.
LEFT: POV image planting lettuce with our paper pot transplanter
RIGHT: Flowering viola plants with the Plant in the background
The city of Chicago owns approximately 10,000 empty lots in city limits representing around 8,000 acres of derelict land. This land, heavily concentrated in the de-industrialized, underinvested South and West sides, could be entrusted to the communities that surround them and rehabilitated into operations very similar to ours – and on a scale that could literally lower the average temperature of the city. This isn’t a radical or obscure concept: the Colombian capital of Medellín has already lowered its average temperature by 4°F since 2016 with “green corridors” of shade trees, vertical gardens, and bicycle lanes. Medellín has seen these results by dedicating just 0.2% of its area and 0.01% of its budget to these initiatives. If Chicago invested the same fraction of its budget and land respectively to achieve similar results, it would amount to $160m and 258 acres to lower the average high temperature in July from 82 to 78°F.
Closed Loop Farms is first and foremost an indoor microgreens farm. The bulk of our business takes place in a subterranean lair beneath the not-so-ancient ruins of American manufacturing. We turned a parking lot into a farm because closing a loop starts by working with what we have, and what we have are the scars of urban industrial expansion. The benefits of reversing this damage are tangible fiscally, socially, and ecologically; the proof is in every box we deliver.
