Forever Young Aquaponics: steel buildings for the Andrew J. Young Foundation

The challenge

This was an unusual brief. Rather than a single conventional use, the facility had to house a complete aquaponics food operation: a working fish farm, a space for growing fresh produce, and a building to process the food it produces. The buildings had to suit a live, year-round growing and production environment and the equipment that goes with it, which is a different ask from a standard commercial shell.

The solution

Universal Steel engineered and supplied two buildings for the facility, designed in-house to Georgia’s code and load requirements, then fabricated and shipped from the closest plant. Steel construction suits a project like this: it gives the clear, open, adaptable interior that a working fish farm and a food-processing operation need, in a building system that can be specified around the equipment going inside it. Alongside the buildings Universal Steel supplied, the foundation runs a greenhouse where it grows produce as part of the same aquaponics loop.

The result

The result is a steel-built facility delivering the fish-farming, growing and food-processing space the project was created to provide, in support of the Andrew J. Young Foundation’s goal of feeding the hungry through aquaponics.