A 40-foot-long shipping container in the parking lot of The Bay will soon be filled with a whole lot of green. In partnership with Beyond School Bells, The Bay is launching The Greenery, a self-contained hydroponic farm housed in a repurposed shipping container. Members of Beyond School Bells and The Bay gathered with local leaders Saturday to officially launch the program.
Much like The Bay’s other youth-focused programs, The Greenery is designed to allow students access to engaging, hands-on activities — in this case growing food. “We are thrilled about the opportunity to be able to turn kids on to sustainable agriculture,” said Andrew Norman, executive director and co-founder of The Bay’s parent organization Rabble Mill. “A lot of the kids in our neighborhood have never seen anything like this; none of us have.”
The Greenery setup is designed by the Boston-based company Freight Farms. Beyond School Bells was able to purchase the unit through a partnership with the Ben Hormel Harris Foundation, said state Sen. Anna Wishart, the director of partnerships for Beyond School Bells. Several local companies and individuals donated their time to help get it up and running.
Through vertical planting that doesn’t require soil, the shipping container is able to house 13,000 plants at a time, or about as much food as a 2.5-acre farm. Throughout the container are thousands of red and blue LED lights that can be precisely controlled through the trailer’s high-tech programming to provide the perfect amount and color of light for each plant, said Doak Field, director of operations at Freight Farms.
Beyond School Bells works statewide to provide after-school opportunities for students like The Greenery, she said. “Our goal is to ensure that every kid, no matter where they grow up in Nebraska, has access to quality out-of-school programming and this freight farm is absolutely an example of that,” she said.
The Greenery project is part of a series of environmental-focused projects across the state that Beyond School Bells is working on, the organization's network lead Jeff Cole said.
“This will be the crown jewel,” he said. “But we're already starting to do investments in rural Nebraska around outdoor classrooms, environmental education and a series of other things across the state.”
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