By Leah Hope, ABC7 Chicago
A vertical farm is coming to the south suburbs.
The anchor of a Calumet City strip mall at 1717 East-West Road left five years ago. Now a local small business plans to turn this red store — green.
“We’ll be growing a whole range of leafy green, many of which may be familiar to the consumer, many of which the consumer has never tasted,” Wilder Fields Founder Jake Counne said. “We’re really excited to blow people’s minds with varieties they’ve never had.”
Wilder Fields operates a vertical farm in Chicago, and will open a larger location in the south suburbs, selling produce locally to residents, restaurants and markets by making use of all the space, floor to ceiling.
“To be able to take big-box space like this and reintroduce jobs that might have been lost, boosting the foot traffic that might have been lost … to come in and revitalize that corridor is really exciting for us,” Counne said.
The red paint was from the previous tenant. Target had been there for 20 years, but closed in 2015.
For those in the area, a small business growing produce and adding jobs is welcomed news.
“Twenty four acres of farmland in the 135,000-square-foot building is pretty exciting when you think about it,” Mayor Michelle Markiewicz Qualkinbush said.
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From The Structural Group:
To turn a former Target store into an indoor farm near Chicago, The Structural Group had to rethink the structure from the top down. The agricultural use depended on substantial mechanical systems, best placed on a roof that had been designed to cover operations, not support them. Instead of costly reinforcement, we designed frames that could span whole bays, bypassing the existing roof and supporting directly off existing columns. Our team then addressed the impacts from the roof all the way down through the foundations, finding cost savings that quickly covered The Structural Group’s own design fees and turned a profit for the client.