UM Campus Farm’s Freight Farm Tour

So we’re still here at the campus farm at the Botanical Gardens and we’re outside of the Freight Farm that you talked about earlier, so Jeremy I think we’re going to walk inside. Can you give us a quick little tour? Absolutely. Let’s take a peek. All right, sounds good. Watch your step. So you can see that this is a repurposed insulated shipping container. You can see from the pink-purple glow that we’ve got, there’s blue and red spectrum LED lights. There’s a set-up here, we don’t have any plants happening right now. We’re actually sanitizing the system down to get started with some new plants.

The baby plants grow under lights in here and after they’re about two weeks old, they’re going to get moved up into these grow towers. So if you want to take a peek in here, you can see the plants will go into here. There will be a lettuce plant that sits out like this and a whole row of them. The product claims are that it’s super water use sufficient and I think we’re going to collect data on that and the energy use efficiency, and try to check and compare it to those pesticides just to have more information about what it is that they’re eating. Wonderful. Well, once again a nice living learning laboratory. Absolutely.

Some of the students are very interested in technological based solutions to some of our complex issues, and a system like this that is computer controlled temperature and lighting that you can monitor from an app on your phone, like all that looks like the future. For engineering students and other people who are really interested in thinking about the interface between technology and sustainability, it provides a whole other playing field. Absolutely. Well, thank you for the quick tour, Jeremy. Yeah, for sure. Thanks for joining us.