Monty Tech grows hydroponic produce for school cafeteria inside a shipping crate

FITCHBURG – It may not look like much from the outside, but an unassuming shipping container that was recently installed on the Monty Tech campus contains a world of agricultural possibilities within.

Called a “Freight Farm,” the retrofitted intermodal crate contains an entire hydroponic farming system, complete with a nursery and cultivation area.

“Essentially, this 8-by-40-foot footprint of a farm is growing the equivalent of a intensively harvested, full acre of conventional farmland,” explained, Jason Yeagle, the nutrition director at Montachusett Regional Vocational Technical School. “It’s a very compact, efficient way of growing a lot of food.”

The new hydroponic system will be used to grow produce for the school’s cafeteria, culinary students and the community, he said. The day-to-day operations of the farm will be incorporated into the school’s curriculum, including engineering, environmental sciences and business.

Jason Yeagle, nutrition director at Monty Tech, and Ayn Yeagle, executive director of Growing Places, pose for a photo in front of the school’s new “Freight Farm.”

The $145,000 Freight Farm, which was purchased via a grant from the state’s Food Security Infrastructure Grant program, was installed in June with the assistance of the school’s masonry students, Yeagle said. The grant also included money to cover the cost of site preparation and installation. The farm is situated on a concrete pad next to the school’s greenhouse.

The system has been up and running for about two weeks, and the first harvest is anticipated to be ready for the first day of school.

“When the students return to school in the fall, they’ll be returning to a farm that’s bursting with greens,” Yeagle said.

They plan to grow a wide variety of plants using the hydroponic system, including lettuce, kale, tomatoes, radish, carrots, beets, cucumbers and assorted culinary herbs. He said the farm could produce up to 1,000 heads of mono-cropped lettuce per week.

“It will be a bit of an experiment in the beginning as far as discovering which plants will thrive in the farm and be productive enough to make their cultivation worthwhile,” he added. “Not all vegetables will find the environment optimal as we have the have farm calibrated for cooler weather crops to optimize for leafy greens. There are some varieties of tomatoes and cucumbers, for example, that are more cold-tolerant, and those are the ones we’ll be experimenting with.”

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The school partnered on the grant with the Leominster nonprofit Growing Places, which is aimed at creating equitable access to health food and environmental sustainability through education, collaboration, and advocacy.

Although the high-tech farm was designed to be run mostly by automation, the system can also be tweaked to allow for plenty of hands-on work by staff and students.

“We’ll be planting seeds and harvesting and doing a lot of basic tasks that go along with growing food,” he explained. “It can be both very easy or really complicated because there is a lot of science and engineering involved.”

The contained hydroponic system uses about 5% or less of the water needed to grow the equivalent amount of produce using conventional methods, according to Yeagle. The system also uses no pesticides, a limited power source, and reduces the need for shipping produce to the area from other parts of the country.

Freight Farms is a Boston-based agricultural technology company founded in 2011. The first container farm prototype was built at Clark University in Worcester.

The Food Security Infrastructure Grant program is aimed at supporting projects that ensure families across the state have equitable access to locally-grown produce.

This article originally appeared on Gardner News: Monty Tech has hydroponic farm in a shipping crate