The Arkansas Colleges of Health Education Research Institute Health & Wellness Center expanded its hydroponic gardening efforts this summer by equipping area teachers with the tools and knowledge to bring hydroponics directly into their classrooms.

It’s a win-win as Lima City Schools and the West Ohio Food Bank partner to provide fresh produce while addressing food insecurity in the area.

The West Ohio Food Bank used grant dollars to purchase five hydroponic growing towers for the program. Students plant, care for and harvest leafy greens, including lettuce, arugula and collard greens.

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What began as an idea for a few hydroponic towers has grown into something much bigger at Melrose schools. The student-run operation now includes hydroponics, aquaponics, a traditional garden, chickens, composting and plans for even more.

They call it Buffalo Farms.

Most schools stop at "we'd need a grant." There are five other ways to fund a container farm, and one of them probably already fits your calendar. Answer five questions and find out which.

Officially founded in Toronto by Christopher Klich and Justin Cheng, the startup joined the University of Waterloo’s Velocity incubator in mid-2023 to scale its AI-driven gourmet mushroom farms in shipping containers. 

This summer, the Arkansas Colleges of Health Education (ACHE) Research Institute Health & Wellness Center (RIHWC) expanded its hydroponic gardening efforts by equipping area teachers with the tools and knowledge to bring hydroponics directly into their classrooms.

Harvest London and Crate to Plate are trialling a platform designed to plan crop production from confirmed customer orders instead of forecasts, under a DEFRA-funded ADOPT project led by InnoPhyte Consulting. The deployment runs across Harvest London's Canada Water and Lea Bridge facilities and Crate to Plate's site in Canary Wharf.

At Meadowbrook Apartments, growing fresh food is also growing curiosity, confidence, and connection.

Since 2023, the Meadowbrook Garden Club has been growing with a Flex Farm alongside the Heaven’s Windows team.

A containerised controlled-environment agriculture (CEA) system has been christened ahead of its planned deployment to Bonaire, marking the next stage of a project focused on local food production, resource efficiency and decentralised growing.

The first time I visited KC Sullivan, founder of Two River Gourmet Mushrooms, his entire operation fit inside a retrofitted shipping container tucked behind White Chapel Project in Long Branch.

Inside a shipping container in downtown Raleigh, there is no soil, rain or sunshine. At Nanue Farms, lettuce grows vertically under LED lights. Water mixed with nutrients drips through panels to the plants’ roots, drains into a holding tank and circulates through the system again.

AmplifiedAg CEO David Flynn doesn’t see institutional and commercial agriculture as competing priorities — he sees them as two inputs into the same platform. The institutional side alone ranges from USDA research labs to compliant farm programs inside correctional facilities, part of the company’s Growing Justice initiative.

By locating the container within the footprint of Hancock Health’s medical fitness campus, the health system is creating a new model for integrating fresh food access into preventive health, chronic disease management and wellness education.

C Lazy U is using a container farm to broaden its focus on farm-to-table options for guests.

The ranch’s culinary program will soon be growing some of its leafy greens on site in an automated Vertical Hydroponic Farm built by Colorado-based FarmBox Foods.

The hydroponic farm is designed by Growcer, an Ottawa-based company that was initially founded in response to high food costs in northern communities. It’s a serious need — according to Statistics Canada, 60% of Nunavut (Canada’s northernmost territory) residents are food insecure, and food prices have risen by 22% (as opposed to 12% across the rest of the country) in recent years.

The container eco-culture system trialed at the Au Tau Fisheries Office in Yuen Long reported a yield three times that of traditional fish ponds after eight months, according to the Agriculture, Fisheries and Conservation Department (AFCD).

The harvest took place after over 100 fish fry were released into the system, which operates primarily within shipping containers.

What began as a singular machine in 2021 has blossomed into a state-of-the-art hydroponics hub operated by the Boys and Girls Club of Detroit Lakes.