On Milwaukee’s north side, a small but highly productive indoor farm is taking root. The so-called Hundred Acre farm is on a parcel of what was a major industrial hub for decades. Some people believe the farm could become an element of a resilient localized food system.
Its founder and CEO, Chris Corkery, arrived in Milwaukee five years ago. He says he was — and remains — on a mission to reinvent the food system through urban production and indoor production.
Corkery understands people might have been skeptical.
“Some random guy from New York that moved here that has an idea. Noone’s getting on that ship,” he says.
But Corkery did his homework. He kept talking with people and he started building out a 5,000 square foot space in Milwaukee’s 30th Street Corridor.
“We’re looking into our vegetation room,” Corkery says. Today, four full-time “farmers” raise and harvest Italian large-leaf basil. Their other crop is a salad blend.“So, we’re stacked five high, five horizontal levels of growing, going up, I believe, 10 feet,” Corkery says.
The plants get their start going in the nursery, from seed to germination, before moving into this environment of perfectly balanced light, air and water.
“It’s a laboratory-like conditions that recreate optimal growing needs, really recreating the perfect summer day 365 days a year,” Corkery says.
There’s no soil involved. “Our plants are suspended in a medium with nutrient-rich water. That nutrient-rich solution is really our secret sauce,” Corkery says. “And what’s up with the product? It’s all natural — no herbicides, no pesticides. It’s not being treated with anything.”
And the water recirculates through the system.
The first harvest was in January 2022. Corkery’s first customer was Feeding America Eastern Wisconsin.
“They were like, 'We’ll take what you can give us and we’ll pay you.’ So think how that felt,” Corkery says.
More customers have followed, including chefs, restaurant groups and grocery stores. Chef Austin Vetter discovered Hundred Acre on Instagram. He owns a fresh meal prep and home delivery business.
“I just kind of fell in love with the process, fell in love with his mission. Yeah, every week we have his hydroponics spring mix in our salads,” Vetter says.
Early this year, Vetter teamed up with Chris Corkery. They concocted an artisanal sauce — pesto.
“Every three weeks, he harvests about 40 to 60 pounds of basil, and then it gets into our kitchen within a day. And then we pick the basil off the stems and then we go right into pesto production within 48 hours it’s been harvested,” Vetter says. “And then he tells me what he needs exactly, and then we just send that off to him to distribute to the grocery stores.
Vetter says now they’re playing with a vinaigrette recipe.
Milwaukee School of Engineering professor Michael Carriere’s been watching Hundred Acre’s evolution.
In fact, some of his honor students have been lending a hand there, including helping develop 3D components to troubleshoot if Corkery’s system runs into a problem.
“Inevitably, there’s a leak, and so rather than having to recalibrate or recreate the entire system, can you recreate or 3-D print a certain piece of that in order to keep the system running, keep leakage to a minimum,” Carriere says, “And I also have a group of students starting to work on water testing with Chris … making sure that the water going through this recirculating hydroponics system is what it needs to be.”
Carriere has studied and written extensively about Milwaukee’s urban agriculture history. He considers Hundred Acre to be part of the infancy of hydroponic farming – part of an incremental process.
Carriere believes the approach has a future.
“In a lot of ways, it has to have a future. If the climate crisis continues to impact things like food production, you can remove some of those variables. You don’t have to use a ton of pesticides and other sort of harmful things that can impact the climate crisis. So, I don’t think there may even be a choice,” he says.
Carriere hopes urban farming becomes a regional story.
“There are farms in Kenosha, Wisconsin; in Cleveland, Ohio; in Minneapolis, and so what I hope comes out of this current moment is these folks start to talk to one another or there’s an effort to kind of grow this network,” Carriere says.
Chris Corkery agrees that people in the industry aren’t quick to share.
But for now, he’s consumed in building off Hundred Acre’s momentum. A year from now, he hopes to launch a second indoor farm in Milwaukee’s Riverwest neighborhood.
