Inside a converted shipping container in Westphal, N.S., the Akoma Hydroponic Garden is growing fresh basil and teaching young people about horticulture.

For African Heritage Month, Akoma Holdings and EduHaus partnered together to teach and employ Black Nova Scotians in hydroponic farming.

A hydroponic classroom container farm is a 40-foot shipping container retrofitted with lighting, irrigation systems, nutrient dosing equipment, and environmental sensors to create a fully controlled indoor growing space.

Unlike traditional school gardens, these systems operate year-round and allow students to manage every variable affecting plant growth.

More than a decade ago, two students at the University of Ottawa, Alida Burke and Corey Ellis, were on a school trip to Nunavut when they got a firsthand look at food insecurity.

Two students looked around for a solution, but seeing none, decided to create one themselves. In 2016, they developed a modular, indoor farm in a shipping container. they called their new venture Growcer.

As southern Nevada works to strengthen food security amid an arid climate and limited arable land, University of Nevada, Reno Extension is offering an educational certificate series on indoor vertical farming, or hydroponics, to equip commercial growers, home gardeners, Master Gardener volunteers and educators with research-based expertise in soil-free vegetable farming.

Rooted Robotics offers products that help farmers with seeding, harvesting and cleaning. Each system is designed with simplicity, reliability and sustainability in mind.

Everything the company sells is also made to be upgradable with customized add-ons, allowing the machines to grow with the farms they support. 

In parallel with its product expansion, FullCircle26 is collaborating with The MARM Farm, a Milwaukee-based nonprofit organization focused on education, conservation, and food accessibility.

The collaboration centers on the development of a 40-foot container-based growing unit that combines hydroponic production with mushroom cultivation.

University City High School is in the center of the sprawl in and around St. Louis — about as insulated as it could be from the wide swaths of farmland outside the city.

Tucked in the back of the school, between the gymnasium and the swimming facility, is a shipping container that contains the school’s new hydroponic farm.

Ray Fankhauser, sustainability lead at the school, was one of the people behind entering the school for the award.

Fankhauser said that with the level of interest from the students to work the garden, they needed something bigger, so they looked at developing a modular hydroponic farm using Canadian technology called Growcer.

Some Mayfield City Schools students are experiencing the satisfaction of having the fruits (or in this case the lettuce) of their classroom efforts result in a real-life application -- helping to feed their fellow students.

Hawaiʻi Department of Education is rolling out a new process that encourages small farm micropurchases of locally grown produce for school meals throughout the state in an effort to advance farm-to-school initiatives.

For a decade, Growcer has been working alongside communities across Canada to prove that local, year-round food production is not only possible, it is transformative.

Just a few miles from our Hamilton office sits an unexpected hub of innovation: a fully operational hydroponic farm tucked inside a refurbished shipping container at the Robbinsville Municipal Complex.

GreenWave, a national nonprofit, opened this first-of-its-kind nursery in Kodiak in August, with Conrad as its nursery manager and lead operator.

It’s Alaska’s newest hatchery. She said her focus is to produce quality kelp by preventing bacteria from growing with the seeds.

Living in a small, remote community can make it hard to get fresh fruit and vegetables in a pinch. Add to that road closures due to wildfires or storms, making access to grocery stores tough for residents of Anacla and Bamfield.

It also makes bringing in fresh produce equally difficult for the local grocer.

A Suffolk church is tackling food insecurity with an indoor aeroponic farm that grows fresh vegetables without soil and gives them away for free. Greater Works Community Outreach Ministries operates the "Garden of Eat'n," a vertical indoor farm that uses a growing method called aeroponics.

According to the data, the food production method will grow from $8 billion in 2025 to $39.7 billion by 2032. The technique is named for growing crops in layers on top of each other, using water-based systems rather than soil.

The report states that the most popular place to build vertical farms commercially is in shipping containers, due to their “flexibility, cost-effectiveness, and scalability.”

The Living Food initiative is being developed in partnership with One Season Farmers and Harvest Today, combining indoor agriculture technology with a health-centered mission to improve access to fresh food, strengthen local food systems, and support long-term community wellness.

To expand the program, Delaware partnered with Growcer to add a modular vertical farm. The indoor farm can grow fresh produce year-round using less water and land than outdoor farming.

Located near the pantry, it will supply members with freshly harvested lettuces, leafy greens like kale and spinach, and herbs like mint and basil to take home.