Jon Bales has worn lots of hats in his life, from Navy flight instructor to coffee plantation owner, but now Bales’ thoughts are pretty much caught up in fish.
“What we’d like to do is to make Milwaukee become a national leader in growing fish by creating a large-scale production facility to grow 100 tons of yellow perch, which is a species which has kind of been in decline in the Great Lakes. We’d like to bring it back and satisfy the market for it and at the same time have an educational component so we can show the rest of the country on how they too can grow fish in the city,” Bales says.
Right now we visiting Growing Power, a Milwaukee nonprofit that develops community gardens. The group also builds systems of tubs and trenches, circulating water that feeds fast-growing fish.
Leon Todd is Bale’s business partner. He says they’re project will incorporate the same ideas Growing Power developed.
“We would put them in raceways and treat the nitrates or the waste products from the fish naturally,” Todd says.
But Bales is quick to say, they won’t be producing “farm-raised” fish.
“We’re mimicking nature indoors. We’re not going to be polluting our natural waterways with mites or parasites that are from caged fish. These are going to be happy fish. They’re going to grow many times faster indoors instead of outdoors because we don’t have the cold winter when they stop growing. We’re confident that we can grow them from fingerling to plate-size fish in a year’s time,” Bales says.
Bales used to own a fish farm in Costa Rica.
“Coming back to Milwaukee I realized that there’s no reason we shouldn’t be growing fish here in the city. We have the water, we have the labor pool. We have a lot of empty buildings that could be used to put fish tanks in to grow fish,” Bales says.
Bales and Todd have already scoped out their location.
“We’re looking for a five acre site in the Menomonee Valley, because that’s going to the center of activity, the showplace in Milwaukee. Lots of things are happening in the valley, it’s being remediated,” Bales says.
Todd says the building would be converted to become a vertical farm using several floors to create the aquaculture system.
“If we’re going to take a leadership role in this green environment, green production, green living, why not have it a showplace facility so that other cities can come and learn how to do it,” Todd adds.
But wait, there’s more.
“We intend to have our own restaurant as part of the aquaculture center where people can come and spend some time seeing how this is done and then tasting the product. So that even chefs can learn how to prepare the fish in a variety of ways,” Bales says.
Todd says initially they weren’t sure how many jobs they could create, because they wanted the operation to be completely automated.
"But then one of our friends came up with the idea, well, the jobs are in the butchering of the fish. That these are livable wage, sustainable jobs, butcher union pay and the restaurant facility and people are learning at the same time that they are going through their union certification right with us,” Todd says.
Todd and Bales are collaborating closely with the Great Lakes Water Institute located in Milwaukee.
“The Great Lakes Water Institute gave us 800 adult perch over 90 days to see if it would work. They’re now going to give us several thousand to raise from fingerling as a second stage in our test environment,” Todd says.
The Water Institute plans to transfer those baby perch within the next month.
Bales and Todd ooze not only excitement, but confidence. They say they’re riding the wave of the future.
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