A local school celebrated the opening of its on-campus wellness farm with a ribbon-cutting ceremony.

The Wellness Farm at UMass Chan Medical School was officially unveiled on Friday. It's a 40-foot hydroponic container farm that can produce up to three tons of produce every year.

UMass Chan hopes that the farm will help fight food insecurity in the community. It will provide food for Worcester Public Schools’ North Quadrant schools and the Max Baker Resource Center, a student food pantry located on UMass Chan’s campus, as well as support staff members in need.

FENNIMORE, Wis. (WMTV) - Fennimore High School is one of 22 area schools receiving a hydroponic indoor flex farm, a compact system to grow plants and produce. Southwest Wisconsin Technical College funded the farms to support learning experiences in K-12 schools.

Executive Dean at Southwest Tech, Kim Maier, says the partnership to provide flex farms to school districts supports their goals to support agriculture education.

Fennimore High School is one of 22 area schools receiving a hydroponic indoor flex farm, a compact system to grow plants and produce.

What happens when a Boys & Girls Club starts container farming? In Boston Metro South, two Freight Farms hydroponic container farms are doing far more than just growing food.

They are creating hands-on learning opportunities for kids, engaging community volunteers, attracting major donors, and supporting local nonprofits.

Discover how these farms became teaching tools, hands-on labs for youth programs, and a powerful way to bring the community together.

On the quiet coast off the traditional territory of the Squamish people in British Columbia, a retired Canadian warship lies moored in the still waters of Burrard Inlet. Once a Bay-class minesweeper, she braved Arctic ice and Pacific storms, serving the Canadian Navy through tense decades of the Cold War. Today, her mission has shifted dramatically: she grows food.

Inside her steel hull, the armory has been cleared, sailors’ bunks disinfected, and reflective film laid along the walls. Rows of vertical racks glow with violet LED light, cradling lettuces, cherry tomatoes, and bright red peppers. What was once a machine of war has been reborn as a floating vertical farm, a vessel now committed not to combat but to sustenance, resilience, and innovation.

Mario Vitalis, owner and founder of New Age Provisions in Indianapolis, Indiana.

Hydroponic farming is a growing industry in Indiana.

“Hydroponic farming allows us to reimagine how and where we can grow food,” says Mario Vitalis. “We are no longer bound to the rules of traditional farming. Technology gives us a new way to farm and a fresh take on the supply chain.”

Vitalis is owner of New Age Provisions, where he grows a variety of leafy greens inside two 40-foot shipping containers on a repurposed used car lot off 10th Street in Indianapolis. His Indiana-based hydroponic farming operation requires no land or soil, and it uses controlled lighting and less water to produce nutritious, locally grown kale, lettuce, herbs and collard greens.

Makers Row, a food and beverage hub in West Allis, has secured a partnership with a Green Bay-based agriculture technology that will bring one of the largest hydroponic farms to the area.

Fork Farms plans to open a farm within the Makers Row development, at the corner of West National Avenue and 66th Street, Fork Farms said in an Aug. 25 news release. The farm will be able to grow up to 34,000 pounds of fresh produce annually.

This site will also serve as Fork Farms' new Milwaukee-area headquarters and would feature a hydroponic showroom.

The farm will occupy more than 5,000 square feet and will use Fork Farms' vertical growing systems, stacked indoor setups that grow plants with water and nutrients.

Fox Urban Farms, which grew produce at 1001 S. Loudoun St. using a hydroponic system inside two specially accessorized trailers, has closed due to what owners John and Ann Fox say was a disappointing lack of support from local shoppers.

"Last year, we really looked at it and it wasn't making the money it needed to make," John Fox said on Tuesday. "We didn't have the people that we needed to have, and some of that was due to market fit. Winchester is not a big foodie town."

But there is a silver lining. The Foxes sold the two hydroponic trailers — each valued at $150,000 and each capable of growing plants in nutrient-enriched water rather than soil — to Frederick County Public Schools.

Southwest Wisconsin Technical College is launching a new initiative that places hydroponic indoor farms in 22 K–12 school districts across its five-county region. The project officially kicked off during an event Aug. 13 on Southwest Tech’s campus. Each school district will receive a state-of-the-art indoor vertical farming tower from Fork Farms, valued at $5,000.

The farms were funded, in part, with a grant from Cummins. Southwest Tech provided funding for the remaining farms. In addition, Rockwell Automation is supporting the project’s technological and automation components.

At Fork Farms, we believe everyone deserves access to fresh, nutritious food, no matter their zip code. As a planet-and-people-first company, we’re building a future where food is grown locally, sustainably, and equitably. Our hydroponic growing systems – the Flex Farm and Flex Acre – enable schools, hospitals, nonprofits, and businesses to grow food on-site with 98 percent less water and land than traditional farming. They’re compact, efficient, and built for controlled-environment agriculture, making it possible to grow fresh produce year-round, anywhere.

As we grow our company and continue to innovate on our systems and mission, we are utilizing artificial intelligence (AI) not as a novelty, but as a critical tool to scale impact, remove barriers, and democratize access to fresh food.

A South Side agricultural hub where young people grow food, cook healthy dishes and supply fresh produce for neighbors was one of 14 projects awarded a Neighborhood Opportunity Fund grant Thursday. 

The Gary Comer Youth Center Food Sovereignty Hub will receive $250,000 through the grant program. Mayor Brandon Johnson joined campus leaders and Ald. Desmon Yancy (5th), whose ward includes the youth center, to announce the news in Greater Grand Crossing Wednesday. 

The money will be used to expand the Food Sovereignty Hub, 7230 S. South Chicago Ave., which will include a greenhouse, an outdoor kitchen classroom, a Farmbox container farm with an indoor hydroponic garden, a newly designed commercial space for Farmers Markets and a chicken coop.

Oxbow High School is in the process of setting up a hydroponic farm built inside a modular container that will serve as an educational tool for students year-round.

Stony Brook University in New York donated the structure, which was designed by Boston-based company Freight Farms, to Oxbow last fall. An average Leafy Green Machine unit costs about $76,000. 

Oxbow staff learned about Stony Brook’s plan to part ways with the Freight Farm through a facilities person at the college who is a relative of a staff member at Oxbow. The high school “seized the opportunity” to acquire the farm, Oxbow Principal Ken Cadow said via email.

Oxbow’s Freight Farm will be located behind the school’s library and STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) lab, which opened last fall.

On Saturday morning, a hydroponic farm was launched at Africville Lookoff Park to provide the immigrant and African Nova Scotian communities access to culturally relevant food.

The project, co-founded by Dr. Simone Le Gendre and Chukwuku Orji under EduHaus Inc., is called the Roots and Harvest Africville Farm Project. It was initiated when Feed Nova Scotia announced its Shipping Containers Community Pitch Project — which called for pitches from community organizations working to promote food justice. 

The co-founders participated in the contest and won two shipping containers. They then converted the containers into an AI-powered hydroponic farm with the help of several partners, including Halifax Regional Municipality.

Illinois State University has launched its first Vertical Farm, a high-tech, climate-controlled agriculture system housed inside a repurposed shipping container. After years of planning, the farm opened in the spring and is now producing its first crop of leafy greens, with a focus on student learning and sustainable food production.

“This project started five years ago, so to finally have seeds growing and students involved is incredibly rewarding,” said Dr. David Kopsell, a horticulture professor in the Department of Agriculture. “We’re creating an environment where plants can thrive year-round, and where students can explore the future of food.”

Eastie Farm’s paid Climate Corps fellowship helps address the food security issue by offering hands-on work and leadership opportunities for teens and young adults. That’s how they connected with Jose Manuel, an 18-year-old who arrived from Colombia about a year and a half ago. After completing the fellowship, he now runs one of Eastie Farm’s newest projects: a hydroponic freight farm inside a shipping container capable of growing the equivalent of about 2.5 acres of food. 

I visited the Chelsea Terrace site — home to the freight farm and geothermal greenhouse, and about a mile from the Sumner Street location — on a freezing but sunny day in March.

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.”

Kuwait Financial Centre “Markaz” announces its sponsorship of an innovative educational initiative in partnership with The English School (TES), providing students with hands-on, experiential learning opportunities in sustainable agriculture and its applications through vertical farming inside the school. The sponsorship reflects the ‘building human capacity’ pillar of Markaz’s corporate social responsibility (CSR) strategy by equipping students with future-ready skills, fostering environmental responsibility and developing the knowledge and critical thinking skills needed to confront global challenges through localized solutions.

The initiative offers students the opportunity to explore vertical farming through a school-based facility designed for indoor sustainable agriculture.

The Vertical Farm at Illinois State University officially opened May 1, 2025, to serve as an example of sustainable urban agriculture and train and prepare students for careers in agriculture and horticulture specialty crop production. The facility is a joint partnership among the College of Applied Science and Technology, Department of Agriculture, and Office of Sustainability that will serve as a demonstration site for local community groups, schools, and business entrepreneurs.

The Vertical Farm uses a repurposed shipping container with an enclosed, controlled environment to grow plants year-round. The 40-foot-by-8-foot (320 square feet) container is designed using a vertical hydroponic growing system with a recirculating nutrient solution and light-emitting diode (LED) lighting system. The unit will be able to grow 4,600 plants, production equivalent to 1-2 acres of field production, using 95% less water or approximately 5 gallons of water per day. 

Across the Mississippi River on the Wisconsin border, a student at Winona Senior High School in Minnesota is growing up to 200 pounds of lettuce each month for school lunches — right in her school’s cafeteria. 

Sophomore Miriam Jackson is in charge of her school’s Flex Farms, which are hydroponic farms developed by Green Bay company Fork Farms for use in educational environments. Under Jackson’s care, the compact indoor growing systems have turned into a significant food source for more than 800 students at Winona Senior High School.

“They really like it. When we serve our Fork Farms lettuce, the students are actually building more salads,” Jennifer Walters, school nutrition director for the district, told WPR’s “Wisconsin Today.”