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.

CEA Advisors, in collaboration with Hydrofarm and Sycamore, Illinois-based CM-Fabrication, has announced the delivery of its first Tissue Culture Micropropagation Growtainer® Lab to Nash Nurseries in Owosso, Michigan. The nursery, which has been in operation for over 160 years, specializes in chestnuts, pawpaws, trees, shrubs, and ornamentals.

The Growtainer® Lab is designed to support plant tissue culture and micropropagation through a controlled, modular system housed within insulated shipping containers.

VIDEO: Maine Harvest Farms - Delivery of a Freight Farms Shipping Container Farm.

Welcome to Maine Harvest Farms! We are a farm located in Southern Maine offering all-natural locally produced farm products to our customers.

We will be partnering with other local Maine Farmers to offer you a wide selection of high-quality and ethically raised beef, poultry, pork, produce, and more!

Venus Kau’iokawekiu Rosete-Medeiros, right, CEO of Hale Kipa, and Gerry Labiste, left, communications manager at Hale Kipa, walk toward the Freight Farm structure, Thursday, July 24, 2025, in Ewa Beach.

Hale Kipa installed the “Freight Farm,” a hydroponic agricultural facility built inside of a shipping container, which can grow 2 to 6 tons of green crops a year.

Homeless and at-risk shelter residents will cultivate their own healthy food and share with the community.

Even with vertical farming’s recent struggles, the Freight Farms’ bankruptcy announcement in April 2025 came as a shock. The company, founded in 2011, had been one of the first to commercialize container farming, selling turnkey hydroponic farms housed in retrofitted shipping containers.

It had grown to serve more than 600 customers in all 50 U.S. states and was developing a widespread presence around the world. The day after the bankruptcy announcement, Freight Farms growers were informed via email that they no longer had access to tech support, core software platforms, farm supplies, or replacement parts.

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.”

A local food pantry is making a difference in the Fox Valley.

St. Joseph's Food Program in Menasha uses their hydroponic systems or Flex Farms to ensure the community has better access to fresh food.

Flex Farms are mobile vertical growing systems that only require 9 square feet of space and a standard electrical outlet for operation. A single Flex Farm can grow 25 pounds of lettuce every 28 days.

St. Joe's Food Pantry has 20 Flex Farms to held feed people in the community.

Researchers have developed a new formula to allow urban farmers to design their own "light recipe"—a combination of different colors of lighting that could help increase crop yields in vertical farms.

The study, conducted at Grow It York, an indoor urban community farm based in a shipping container at SPARK in the city, developed a mathematical model that could help inform urban farmers of how light varies in different areas of a confined space and how to use this information to design better lighting systems.

Through partnerships with Growcer, food banks, and community farms, the Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) is positioning vertical farming and controlled environment agriculture (CEA) as a strategic solution to climate, skills, and food access challenges.

When The Ottawa Mission, the city's oldest homeless shelter, recently installed two modular vertical farms, it became more than a food relief effort. The project, a partnership between the shelter, agtech firm Growcer, and the Royal Bank of Canada, represented a collaboration that merges philanthropy with infrastructure building.

We all like to think that the fancy gourmet mushrooms advertised on the menu of our favorite restaurant were foraged in the wild by a grey bearded man with a wooden cane, knee-high forester boots, and a feathered fedora. 

In reality, those mushrooms were likely grown on a farm. But when we say mushroom farm it’s sometimes a climate-controlled shipping container sitting in a gravel parking lot somewhere on the outskirts of town. While this doesn’t sound as glamorous as gallivanting around the woods, the mushrooms are just as good.

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.”

VIDEO: Scott Massey Explains GRO ANU

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.

Global food systems face significant challenges from climate change, population growth, and deteriorating soil quality, necessitating a 70% increase in food production by 2050. Urban vertical farming, utilizing repurposed shipping containers, offers a sustainable solution that efficiently uses space and resources. These systems produce fresh produce year-round and reduce food waste by minimizing transportation distances.

With innovative practices and renewable energy integration, container farms represent a viable future for agriculture in urban settings, addressing both food security and environmental concerns.

Our global food systems are under siege, with climate change, natural disasters disrupting supply chains, and conflicts affecting agriculture in vulnerable regions.

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. 

Ottawa-based modular farming startup now has over 600 new customers from 30 different countries on its plate.

Container-based vertical farming company Freight Farms declared bankruptcy in April after 13 years of operation. Three months later, Ottawa-based Growcer CEO Corey Ellis won a bidding battle in a Boston courthouse to acquire the assets of Freight, his company’s American competitor. 

The $2.6-million USD (about $3.6 million CAD) purchase suddenly adds a lot more than container-grown leafy greens to Growcer’s plate. The startup now has about 600 new customers (including municipalities, food banks, and other community food organizations) and farm containers across 30 different countries, as well as use of Freight’s proprietary software.

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.”

A shipping container in the middle of EPIC Campus in Littleton, Colorado, has become an unexpected training ground for the next generation of controlled environment agriculture (CEA) professionals. Inside, high school students grow crops hydroponically from seed to harvest, building technical knowledge and discovering new career paths in a rapidly evolving sector.

The vertical hydroponic farm, built by FarmBox Foods, operates as part of the school's Natural Resources Pathway. Students manage crop production from start to finish, applying lessons in plant physiology, hydroponics, and food safety, while working toward an industry-recognized BASF plant science certification.