>> Welcome to Metro Farms. We are located in Chicago, Illinois. Here on the west side of
Chicago, we're in a food desert area and that means some nutrition foods are really hard to
come by because grocery stores are so far away. In the inner city of Chicago, you have a lot of
African-Americans that have like diabetes or health issues. So the Urban Transformation
Network saw that need and wanted to help. >> The idea came from agriculture, farming,
planting in the community, seeing some of the interest in gardening and farming but an
easy method, a different method, a method when you talk about sales, it's not just seasonal,
and we looked at a lot of different operations. We looked at locations,
and Metro Farms just happened to sneak up on us. We didn't choose aquaponics. It kind of
tapped on ourselves. The program for Metro Farms and Urban Transformation
Network is an agricultural youth project for the local communities, so this will help
benefit the community, eating fresh food, getting live fish that's grown locally and also
understanding the agricultural aspect of it, the educational background of how we became
where farming, agriculture is now. The farming now has upgraded to aquaponics and hydroponics meaning
that it grows indoors. Fish that normally is in the lake or river now is in tubs and containers
that's grown indoors which provides proteins and nutrients for live vegetables. That's how
you come here today. So the partnership with the university, partnership with the high school,
it benefits educational but it also provides stipend that you can provide interns for so
it can subsidize grants where people actually work and then they sell their harvest
and then we actually benefit from it. >> I love to see the improvement that
it does and the affiliation that it has with teaching and telling people about eating healthy.
Just seeing kids amazement from seeing the fish and wondering like wow how does fertilizer from a
fish go through water systems create fresh produce and then for something to be eaten by you know the
community, different residents of the area just knowing that they're eating something healthy,
something that's nutrition that what we need to be eating every day.
It just amazes me just to see that and knowing that I am helping
with those things. Here at Metro Farms, we believe in empowering people, transforming lives,
and so that's our main goal. >> It's a tool to open up doors. It's a key to
get people in. They don't know what it's about. They don't know what it is, but they have an
idea that it's hard for me and then the interests get in, the science part get in,
the healthy eating get in. So we're going after education and healthy eating, behavior changes.
>> So we hope for the future to keep that going on constant:
touching lives, changing lives, changing eating habits. You can live a long healthy life.