On October 10, 2025, Corey Ellis, CEO and co-founder of Growcer and Dave Harris, head of Freight Farmer Success at Growcer, chatted about support options available for Freight Farmers and answered your questions.

• Vertical farming is being adopted by healthcare systems to provide fresh, nutrient-rich food directly onsite.

• FarmBox Foods offers shipping container farms designed for non-farmers, with training and operational support.

• Hospitals use these systems for patient meals, cafeteria offerings, and community outreach.

• Vertical farming contributes to ESG goals and therapeutic agriculture initiatives.

• Early adopters are using it for wellness programs, cost control, and food system resilience.

A small vertical farming facility has been approved for a Red Deer County business park.

The county’s municipal planning commission approved on Tuesday an application by Salad Oasis to set up a hydroponic farming operation in two sea cans in a pair of storage units in Energy Business Park just south of Red Deer.

The primary focus of the new facility will be the year-round cultivation of leafy greens, including lettuce, kale, arigula, spinach and Swiss chard, along with broccoli, radishes and mushrooms. Food grown will go to stores, restaurants and farmers markets and will not be sold at the site.

NEWARK, N.J. – Newark Public Schools Superintendent León and Principal Karisa Neis-Lopez welcomed David Rosenberg, co-founder of Inspired Growing, to Newark Vocational High School today to celebrate the first harvest of produce grown with Inspired Growing aeroponic farms.

The event featured students from Newark Vocational High School’s acclaimed Culinary Arts Academy harvesting greens grown onsite, preparing gourmet dishes under the guidance of professional chefs, and serving their creations to students, school officials, and district leaders.

Ottawa, ON — Freight Farms, a pioneer in containerized farming technology, has found a new home with Growcer, the Canadian agritech company that has been enabling year-round, hyper-local food production across North America for more than a decade.

The acquisition follows Freight Farms’ bankruptcy filing in April 2025, which left its global community of farmers facing uncertainty about the future of their operations. On July 28, Growcer acquired the company’s assets, committing to preserve Freight Farms’ legacy while charting a stronger future for its growers.

"We've been doing hydroponics and vertical farming for about five years," says Ahmed Fawzy, CEO of Taza Farms. "We originally grew for human food, supplying London's top restaurants and hotels. We wanted to do something with more impact, so we took our hydroponics experience into animal feed."

That decision led to Taza's first full-scale pilot at Hunsingo Dairy in Groningen, the Netherlands. "This pilot became our first paying customer," Fawzy says. "The feedback has been better than we hoped. The cows went for the fodder straight away, farmers noticed it's easier to digest, and our system delivered a fresh, consistent supply every single day."

"Clients use our farms to integrate a sustainable food supply chain directly into their business models," says Juan Gabriel Succar, Co-Founder of Mexican container farming company, Verde Compacto. The company's 40-foot container farm, the Huvster Pro, is being adopted by stadiums, resorts, universities, and municipalities, and is shipped fully equipped, with digital monitoring, remote support, and optional service extensions.

Succar says the system is designed to meet more than just production targets, offering a certifiable, financeable path to vertical farming for customers prioritizing year-round supply, sustainability indicators, and on-site visibility.

The Haverhill YMCA is hosting a harvest party to celebrate the second anniversary of its Freight Factory hydroponic farm at the city’s Gateway Academy.

The party is Wednesday, Oct. 2, from 4:30-5:30 p.m. at Gateway Academy, 415 Primrose St., Haverhill. Participants are invited to tour the garden and pick their own lettuce.

The indoor container garden is called a “freight farm” because it is set up inside a 40-by-8-foot shipping container painted on the sides in bright colors with the message “The Y Feeds Kids.” As WHAV reported when it opened in October 2023, it was heralded at the first farm of its kind operated by a YMCA in country.

Jort Maarseveen and Tijmen Blok started as two WUR students who believed that everyone should have access to fresh nutritious food anywhere in the world and ended up with Hippotainer.

Hippotainer’s mission is to design and implement smart vertical farms inside shipping containers to enable people anywhere in the world to access fresh vegetables. “We enable food production anywhere on the globe, regardless of the location, whether it's on the North Pole or in the Sahara Desert, we want to be able to make it possible to produce fresh vegetables”

The concept of Hippotainer began while cofounders Jort Maarseveen and Tijmen Blok were doing their Masters at WUR with backgrounds in biology, business, and biosciences.

Agriculture technology leader, AmplifiedAg, continues to lead the way in vertical farming in the corrections industry. The company has made advancements in two significant partnerships with the South Carolina Department of Corrections and Central California Women’s Facility in Chowchilla, in collaboration with reentry program partner Impact Justice and its Growing Justice initiative, and CEA advisor Skout Strategy. 

Merging sustainable, local food access with job training and reentry programming, these projects set a new precedent for how correctional systems can cultivate healthier communities on both sides of the fence while positively impacting recidivism rates. 

An old double-decker bus has been converted into a mobile farm to help educate people where their food comes from.

The Pony Farm Bus, a joint project by The Pony restaurant in Chew Magna and food distributor Arthur David, will take the vehicle out to community groups and schools to run workshops on food and cooking.

The vehicle, donated by First Bus, includes a greenhouse, a hydroponics system, kitchen and dining areas and a demonstration space.

Owner of The Pony, Josh Eggleton, said: "We want to create learning opportunities - but the main thing is to incite a sense of fun and purpose."

"We've got loads of schools and grassroots organisations coming here, but it wasn't lost on me that not everybody can get here.

"We wanted to take the growing and cooking on tour into Bristol and Somerset.

• FarmBox Foods partners with healthcare systems to deploy container farms for onsite food production.

• Hospitals use fresh produce for patient meals, wellness programs, and community outreach.

• The systems are designed for non-farmers, with training and long-term operational support.

• Benefits include improved nutritional outcomes, predictable food budgets, and reduced reliance on external suppliers.

• FarmBox Foods is contributing to ESG goals and the growing “food as medicine” movement.

Fork Farms, a leader in innovative agriculture technologies, announces the introduction of the Flex Micro™ — the company’s most compact and powerful hydroponic growing system to date. Designed to grow both microgreens and seedlines, the Flex Micro produces thousands of plants efficiently, affordably and consistently.

With the global microgreens market expected to surpass $6 billion by 2030, demand for fresh, sustainability-grown, nutrient-dense microgreens is on the rise. The Flex Micro is designed to meet consumer demand, blending simplicity with flexibility to serve chefs, educators, and community growers.

Restaurants in Havana, Cuba are receiving boxes of sprouting vegetable from a small start-up growing business every few day.

Meanwhile, many of the founder’s neighbors struggle to feed their families in Cuba’s worst economic crisis in decades.

The project, called Enparalelo (Parallel Roads), was created by architect Oliesky Fabre. He proudly shows off a 2022 UN World Food Programme award, given to only 10 projects out of 200 in Latin America and the Caribbean for fighting hunger in innovative ways.

Kris Sutton was an aircraft mechanic for 13 years. Now he grows lettuce, a career picked up during the Covid-19 pandemic, and realized on his property in Enfield, Nova Scotia. In some ways, aircraft were simpler.

“When we got the farm,” says Sutton, “I didn’t realize I was going to be a chemist, an electrician, a plumber, as well as a farmer.”

That’s because his is not a traditional farm, with acres, soil, sunlight, and spring rain. His is an indoor, hydroponic, vertical farm, with 9,000 leafy greens growing simultaneously in a 326 square foot shipping container.

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.

One in four Canadians — more than 10 million people — are struggling to put food on the table, according to a new RBC report published in June.

This is the highest level ever recorded in this country, driven by rising costs and limited access to affordable food.

In Ottawa, a new initiative at The Ottawa Mission shows how community collaborations can make a difference in combatting this important issue.

With two new modular vertical farms built in partnership with local ag-tech company Growcer, and with support from RBC Foundation through the Ottawa Community Foundation’s Food Resilience Foundation Fund, the shelter is now producing up to 20,000 pounds of fresh greens annually.

Founder of Harvest Today Rick Langille, working with his UK & European team Harvest Today EU entrepreneurs Mark and Michelle Emmott, have announced the expansion of their revolutionary hydroponic vertical grow wall, redesigned to meet the needs of both household growers and large-scale commercial producers.

Harvest Today's updated Indoor Grow Wall is durable, scalable, and highly efficient, making it ideal for anyone seeking sustainable solutions for high-volume yields and healthy, organic produce.

Harvest Today EU began when friend Rick Langille showed Mark his initial designs for the "Harvest Wall", a vertical hydroponic system.