Students at a New Haven magnet school are learning more than just standard classroom lessons - they're getting hands-on business, science and agricultural experience through the Green Thumbs program at High School in the Community. 

Currently, students in the program are using their skills to grow a mushroom and lettuce farm in a 40-foot storage container. 

When Jort Maarseveen, CEO of Hippotainer, stepped onto the stage at StartLife’s Demo Day, he didn’t begin with technology or business models. He began with a number that made the audience pause. “More than 2.3 billion people are food insecure right now,” he said. “They either have no access to food, no availability, poor quality diets, or unstable food supplies.

Hello! My name is Kenzie Sandusky, and I’m a senior+ studying horticulture, (production and marketing ) at Purdue University! During my time at the container farms, I have several tasks to oversee in order to ensure a plentiful harvest for the CSA!

Inside Oak Meadows Elementary, school leaders have launched a program to hydroponically grow fresh lettuce and basil as part of the school district’s Farm to School initiative.

To grow vegetables hydroponically, plants grow in nutrient-rich water instead of soil.

At Brookville Elementary, the freshest lettuce isn’t grown in a garden bed—it’s grown indoors, without even touching soil.

This innovative approach is thanks to a grant written by Kain Kennemuth, a second-year science teacher, who brought a fully functioning hydroponics system, called the Flex Farm, to the classroom.

In Connecticut’s most populated city, High Ridge Hydroponics has redefined what it means to eat locally.

Over the last six years, this urban hydroponic container farm has become a trusted source of fresh greens for the Fairfield County community—supplying more than 50 restaurants, local farmers’ markets, and a growing network of distributors, schools, and small businesses in the greater Bridgeport area.

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the number of Controlled Environment Agriculture operations in the United States more than doubled between 2009 and 2019, from 1,476 to 2,994. As Aliu began to research the motivations behind this growth, he found that the discourse around CEAs was theoretical or promotional in nature–an unhelpful “agricultural techsplaining” approach to an increasingly consequential method in the food system. 

“There was a clear and urgent need for real-world, holistic data, and that was the inspiration for my dissertation,” he says. “I saw the opportunity to, at the very least, foreground and perhaps trailblaze situational and operational approaches to system sustainability in this rapidly evolving sector.”