Businesses are transforming rooftops, courtyards, parking lots, and unused land into working farms, growing their own food to reduce reliance on suppliers and serve fresher meals.

At the JW Marriott Grande Lakes in Orlando, guests are often eating produce grown just steps from where they’re staying.

Farmer-in-residence Leslie Wilber oversees the hotel’s on-site farm, where a wide variety of crops are grown throughout the year.

People working in remote locations like the open sea, deep-sea areas and polar regions have long struggled with limited access to fresh vegetables, but are now able to grow and enjoy their own produce.

Notably, a smart farm designed for ship applications made its debut at Marintec China 2025 held in Shanghai in east China this week.

In 2016, Growcer installed its first modular, vertical farm in Churchill, Man., where food security can be precarious. Growcer’s team trained the local community how to operate and maintain the hydroponic farm that is housed inside what looks like a shipping container where plants grow on stacked shelves under LED lights.

Within weeks, the community saw the cost of vegetables plummet by 50 percent simply because the locally grown produce replaced leafy imports.

Aquaponics in Action Exhibit Brings Sustainable Food Systems Education to Families

As part of MAD’s commitment to community engagement and workforce development, Southern Miss, Symbiotic LLC, the GULF BLUE Initiative and LMDC have partnered to create a public aquaponics education exhibit housed in a retrofitted shipping container.

Growcer is taking a prudent approach to growth and capital, as the Canadian indoor ag company scales up with the help of Mars Discovery District

Summer Street is an organization supporting people with diverse abilities and is participant led. This project to start growing local food was years in the making with goals to:
1) Grow fresh local food to eat
2) Create meaningful employment
3) Grow food to give back to the community

Kimbal Musk's journey encompasses school gardens, vertical farms in shipping containers, and educational projects that advocate for local cultivation, healthy consumption, and agriculture as a tool for continuous social transformation.

While Elon Musk dominates global debates about technology and transportation, his younger brother, Kimbal Musk, follows a different path because he sees food as a way to have a direct social impact.

Objective: To reduce Barbados' 85% dependence on imported food, create a new generation of climate-resilient farmers, and provide a consistent, high-quality local produce supply that is protected from extreme weather events.

The installation uses modular, containerized vertical farms (three units total: two for production, one for nursery/support) equipped with aeroponic systems and energy-efficient LED lighting.

The state recently awarded the Watertown Schools a grant to run its farm-to-school program, including its Freight Farm.

Watertown Public Schools has received more than $80,000 in state grant funding to continue its farm-to-school efforts, expanding learning opportunities for Watertown’s students while also increasing local food production.

Growcer is taking a prudent approach to growth and capital, as the Canadian indoor ag company scales up with the help of Mars Discovery District

Canada imports as much as 90 per cent of its lettuce, a fact that seems woefully out of step with a Buy Canadian ethos. It’s not just a greens issue — according to tracking from UBC, roughly 60 per cent of the vegetables and 80 per cent of the fruit consumed in the country comes from elsewhere. Most of us are hoping to change this reality: a survey by KPMG in February found that 93 per cent of Canadians prefer locally grown produce.

Shipping containers are popping up across Harlem in ways that go far beyond their industrial past.

They’re growing food, cleaning up streets, inspiring urban design, and reshaping how Harlem thinks about space and sustainability. Here is how used containers in New York are repurposed for a new life in Harlem.

With farms across western Jamaica badly damaged after Hurricane Melissa and warnings of food shortages beginning to surface, Blueprint Farms is already seeing early signs of rising demand for its climate-resilient hydroponic systems.

Founder Jermaine Bryan says the surge in interest comes as households and businesses look for alternative ways to secure fresh produce amid supply disruptions.

“We anticipate that smart vertical farming will play a significant future role in our winter food supply using big warehouses for cities like Winnipeg and shipping containers for smaller Northern communities,” says Cha.

With vertical farms, producers accelerate plant growth at night to take advantage of lower electricity rates outside of peak hours.

Hofstra University unveiled plans to install a Freight Farms Greenery™ S hydroponic container farm on its North Campus as part of the University’s ongoing “Pride Farm” sustainability initiatives. The container farm is supported by New York State Senator Siela A. Bynoe.

Based in New York, the company began with container retrofits and has since expanded into scalable panel rooms and full facility fitouts. To date, it has delivered more than 200 grow systems across North America.

"We design modular grow rooms that can be delivered and up and running in under 12 weeks," says Greg Payne, Founder of Box4Grow. "Whether it's a standalone grow room or a multi-room facility, we help you get growing faster and for less cost."

Lettuce grows in one of Auburn University's six AmplifiedAg vertical units. The university's FoodU program recently added four units to the two already in use. (contributed)

The Auburn University College of Agriculture and Campus Dining recently added four new container farms to its vertical farming operation. The four new farms, outfitted in shipping containers, are from AmplifiedAg, a leader in indoor agriculture.

Interview explores how Joaquin Gonzalez Chilean ranch upbringing and agricultural engineering background led to a career focused on hydroponic fodder systems.

Eleusis Feed is targeting drought-prone regions and larger livestock operations with industrial-scale fodder production using significantly less water than conventional systems.