CHAMPAIGN — Unveiled Thursday at Holy Cross School: a Ferris-wheel-like contraption containing a variety of produce, from radishes to butter crunch lettuce.
In a third-floor room that used to be a school computer lab now stands an Aquaponics Lab, featuring a vertical growing tower made out of PVC pipe that connects plants grown in water to a tank of tilapia.
The tower is meant to serve as instructional fodder for teachers and students at the Champaign Catholic school. If all goes as planned, students will donate the produce and fish grown from the structure to the church’s on-site food pantry and soup kitchen.
The tower was donated from Sky-High Aquaponics, a company founded by Richard Tryon, retired president of Colwell Systems and namesake with wife Ann of Krannert Center’s Tryon Festival Theatre.
Thursday morning’s festivities drew a crowd of local stars, including several Champaign Rotarians, like former University of Illinois President Bob Easter, current Parkland College President Tom Ramage, Pia’s owner Eric Meyer and club President Shandra Summerville, who all came to check out the technology.
Meyer has pledged to donate a second vertical growing tower to the school before the summer starts. The towers cost anywhere from $500 to $750, the company said.
In fact, school officials say the idea to implement this structure came from a Rotary connection: former club President John Calderon, who’s connected with Holy Cross Principal Greg Koerner.
“I said, ‘John, I really need to get a curriculum that’s going to make Holy Cross pop, that’s going to put it on the map,’” Koerner recalled. Calderon suggested aquaponics and linked him up with Tryon.
Aquaponics is an agricultural concept, which, like the name suggests, pairs aquaculture — growing fish in tanks — with hydroponics, or growing plants in water.
The tilapia will be fed once a day, supplemented with algae and duckweed the plants produce, filtered back into the tank. With the help of certain bacteria, the ammonia from the fish wastewater is converted into nitrites, which is then converted into nitrates to aid the carrier plants’ growth.
Once the news of the pending aquaponics lab was announced, “five teachers said ‘I want to be on the curriculum team,’” Koerner said.
One of them was fifth-grade teacher Meghan Burgess, who imagines a range of classroom possibilities for the students — illustrating a sustainable food-making process, maybe even economics lessons if they bring the food to market.
“As a smaller Catholic school, it’s cool to be the guinea pig for this kind of thing,” Burgess said.
The group flipped on the lights of the tower after a blessing from the Rev. Joseph Donton, a ribbon cutting from a few Holy Cross students and words from Chief Operating Officer Benjamin Khachaturian and Tryon himself, who spoke via Zoom on a nearby computer.
“Food, water, shelter — everyone needs that to survive. In this way, we’re going to help the next generation learn how to grow their own food, and what that takes,” Khachaturian said.
The tower was built about a mile north of the school, at the Sky-High division located at 2 Henson Place, C.
“I couldn’t be happier that Holy Cross is going to be the first candle,” Khachaturian said. “I’m hoping we’ll get to see this technology spread.”
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