Produce is used in player meals and in the Club restaurant.
After successfully harvesting her own hydroponic garden at home, Mary Milne, VP, Guest Experience, Tampa Bay Lightning and Amalie Arena, Tampa, Fla., thought, why not do this at work? “I discovered you really can produce a head of lettuce with hydroponics,” she marveled.
She took her boss at the building and the food and beverage manager on a tour of the local hydroponics farm, Urban Oasis, where she had bought her home-growing equipment, and the light went on immediately. Everyone agreed, why not do this at the arena?
“We ran some numbers and the ROI was a year, maybe a little less,” Milne said, of what became a $30,000 investment. “And we were producing a better product for our guests at a much lower cost than buying it.”
That it serves the environment because the arena uses one less delivery truck each week is icing on the cake. This year they focused on growing lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers and herbs and are self-sustaining on all those items.
Their tenacity and success in growing vegetables hydroponically earned Milne and the venue and team the 2015 Silver Spoon Award for the Best Sustainable Initiative.
With no space available for a garden at the facility, venue management decided to go vertical and build a deck over the cooling pipes on the east side of their arena, which is located in downtown Tampa. The ground-level deck is right outside the loading dock, so it’s not readily visible to guests coming in the front door, but Milne has gotten plenty of questions from artists and team members coming in the back door.
A deck was built on top of the pipes that deliver chilled water to the building from the four cooling towers built 100 feet from the back door. The planters are attached to the exterior wall.
The 14x80-foot deck was completed during the summer of 2014 and now produces the equivalent of an acre of fresh vegetables and plants due to 125 towers of stacked planting pots. There are more than 3,000 growing spaces among the 125 towers of planting pots. The top of the tower system is reaching distance.
It was built with PVC pipes designed to deliver and then recollect water not used by the plants. The closed system captures the unused water and nutrients at the bottom of the tower and drains back into the 900-gallon tank below the deck. This method makes the garden 90 percent more water efficient compared to an open water system, requiring the tanks to only be refilled every 10 days. There are three vats (making up the 900 gallons) beneath the deck filled with water and fertilizer. That is pumped to all the plants three times a day.
The project does require a dedicated farm manager. “We had an internal candidate in the IT department,” Milne said. He spent four weeks at Urban Oasis learning how to farm hydroponically. While he is used in some other capacities at the arena on occasion, his fulltime job is farming, Milne said.
It is seasonal to a point, but Florida has the perfect weather for this type of outdoor project. The summer months, June-August, are too hot for a lot of plants, though herbs do well.
The produce that the garden grows is currently served as player meals, and also helps serve the culinary needs in the Club restaurant at Amalie Arena, as well as in suites and other premium areas. In the future, the hope is to produce enough to have the hydroponic garden help supply the needs of main concourse concessions as well.
Interviewed for this story: Mary Milne, (813) 301-6762