Hydroponic container farming is poised to be a transformative force in 2025, offering innovative solutions to contemporary challenges in food safety, local sourcing, supply chain resilience, health, and environmental sustainability. Here's why 2025 is an ideal time to embark on a hydroponic farming venture:

Enhanced Food Safety

Foodborne illnesses remain a significant concern, with consumers increasingly vigilant about the origins and safety of their food. Hydroponic systems, operating in controlled environments, substantially reduce the risk of contamination from pathogens like E. coli and salmonella. Additionally, the absence of soil eliminates the need for pesticides, addressing consumer concerns about chemical residues.

At the Good Table F oundation’s property in Castine, a nondescript tan shipping container sits alongside the driveway. But inside the container is one of the area’s most dynamic, high-tech hydroponic farms.

An all-volunteer organization, Good Table Foundation grows fresh greens for distribution through food pantries.

Founder Greg Nitzkowski had seen similar hydroponic container models in California. He and his wife Barbara were inspired to bring the concept to Castine, where they retired after being long-time summer residents in the area. They incorporated the organization as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit in 2023 and began operations in 2024.

The operation supplies fresh greens to Loaves and Fishes Food Pantry in Ellsworth and Caring Community Cupboard in Old Town. They operate the farm 365 days a year, and all of the produce they grow is donated. Volunteers from GTF harvest, process, and deliver the produce in a single day, delivering more than 200 4.5- ounce bags of greens each week. The mix can include kale, lettuces, arugula, and more, all packaged in compostable, labeled bags just as they might be in a traditional retail setting.

The Urban Farming Initiative (UFI) and the Walnut Hills Redevelopment Foundation are thrilled to announce a new partnership aimed at revitalizing and coordinating urban gardens in the Walnut Hills neighborhood. Through this collaboration, UFI will work closely with garden coordinators, volunteers, and community leaders to enhance the gardens' output, while also providing support for local events and programs.

As part of this initiative, Ben Booker, UFI's Executive Director, will lead the project. A University of Cincinnati graduate with an urban agriculture certificate, Booker brings extensive expertise in urban agriculture and community development.

Students at Carter G. Woodson Academy in Lexington show off their lettuce crop. Courtesy of Future Farmers of America Association Agriculture students at the Carter G. Woodson Academy in Lexington have an uncommon opportunity: to grow food that’s served in the school cafeteria and eaten by classmates.

The food — lettuce, mainly — comes from the school’s hydroponic container, part of a program run since 2019 by agriculture teacher Jacob Ball.

It gives students involved in the agricultural program at the academy — an all-male school for students grades six through 12 that offers a rigorous curriculum through the lens of Black history — the opportunity to learn alternatives ways of farming outside of a traditional field.

Hydroponic food is growing at the Red Deer Food Bank thanks to a $75,000 grant from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

The donation allowed the food bank to purchase a hydroponic sea can, which is now growing fresh produce for the food bank’s hamper program.

“This is a big leap forward for the Red Deer Food Bank, as we can now offer a consistent supply of fresh produce to our clients,” said Mitch Thomson, food bank executive director, in a statement. 

“We receive limited amounts of fresh produce from our grocery partners. Outside of harvest time, it has been extremely difficult for us to provide enough fresh produce to our clients. The development of our hydroponic food production initiatives and greenhouse allow us to be more self sufficient in providing healthy food options for our clientele.”

The food bank purchased the hydroponic business from Mike and Lisa Slimmon of Green Euphoria.

An urban farming project is sprouting hope in downtown London, with trays of microgreens grown in a simple office space providing fresh, nutritious food to those facing food insecurity, while offering valuable job skills to adults with disabilities.

The PATCH does this all through an unusual setup that demonstrates how easily urban spaces can be transformed into productive farms in a cost-effective way, and how such transformations can stave off hunger in the community.

"It's really funny. We're in an office space, right in the core of downtown London, and we're growing veggies in trays on shelves that we bought from Costco," said Joe Gansevles, the coordinator of urban agriculture with the PATCH program, a Hutton House initiative.

Hydroponic food is growing at the Red Deer Food Bank thanks to a $75,000 grant from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

The donation allowed the food bank to purchase a hydroponic sea can, which is now growing fresh produce for the food bank’s hamper program.

“This is a big leap forward for the Red Deer Food Bank, as we can now offer a consistent supply of fresh produce to our clients,” said Mitch Thomson, food bank executive director, in a statement. 

“We receive limited amounts of fresh produce from our grocery partners. Outside of harvest time, it has been extremely difficult for us to provide enough fresh produce to our clients. The development of our hydroponic food production initiatives and greenhouse allow us to be more self sufficient in providing healthy food options for our clientele.”

The Quad Cities Community Foundation is awarding Tapestry Farms a $300,000 Transformation Grant to expand their services over the next three years.

QC Community Foundation Vice President of Grantmaking and Community Initiatives Kelly Thompson says the organization is celebrating ten years of offering Transformation Grants. Unlike other grant opportunities at the foundation, this process is decided by a board committee that looks for areas of community need instead of blanket competitive applications.

"[W]e found was this intersection of welcoming refugees, helping them become long-term residents of the Quad Cities, as well as community health and nutrition," Thompson said in a phone interview with WVIK. "And Tapestry Farms welcomes refugees in part by engaging in urban farming. So they're making our Quad Cities community better, not only through helping people, but in making the land around us more sustainable, contributing to people's health and wellness by growing vegetables, all of those things."

In the corner of Cal Poly Pomona President Soraya Coley’s office suite stands an odd-looking, futuristic contraption.

At first glance, it looks like it could be a robot or communications satellite. But instead of solar panels or antennae, it has flexible arms with bright LED lamps that fold over. Leafy greens and herbs grow in little black pots on the gleaming white plastic body.

The appliance is a sustainable aeroponic vertical garden that was donated to the president’s office by LA Urban Farms, a company that is a leader in the local food growing movement.

The company assists customers in creating their own tower farms. It has helped create urban farms at UCLA and USC, which help supply produce for campus dining operations, including dining halls, restaurants, and food pantries.

Near the entrance of a 40-foot container farm installed at New Mexico State University’s Grants campus, dozens of 4-day-old kale plants lined a horizontal nursery bed, sprouting at various lengths in shades of electric green from miniature patches of densely packed soil.

Further inside, instructor Gabriel Garcia flipped a switch. Instantly, red and blue LED lights engulfed the space, illuminating the intricate vertical farming system in a shocking pink glow.

“The lights mimic the sun,” Garcia explained on a July afternoon. “This is where we’ll move the kale when their root structures develop, and they’ll stay here until they reach maturity.”

Nestled between two train cars-turned-restaurants on the other side of town, Henry Krull walks inside his shipping container farm. He points to a wall that's growing hundreds of bunches of butter lettuce.

Krull is the owner of fresh365, another Kenai Peninsula based hydroponic farm. Just like Edgy Veggie, the farm operates entirely indoors.

“The advantage of growing indoors, in a container like we have, is that we can control the environment," Krull said. "We can grow no matter what’s going on outside. It can be 30 below outside, but it’s always 70 degrees or so inside.”

fresh365 also sees an uptick in direct-to-consumer sales in the winter. Otherwise, most of their sales go to other businesses, like local restaurants.

Lettuce sprouts, like these seen at Edgy Veggie in Soldotna, are placed in a specially designed watering system and grown without soil.

The organizations benefiting from this year’s grants represent a tapestry of North Texas neighborhoods, each working on a different piece of the puzzle to make food more accessible, nutritious, and affordable for all. From urban farms to food pantries, the "Growing Good Food" awards are planting the seeds of lasting change. 

One of the standout winners is Tabor Farms, based in Fort Worth. With a mission to address food inequities, Tabor Farms will use its funding to repair its vital wellhouse, which pumps water from 650 feet underground, ensuring that the urban farm can continue irrigating its crops.  

As managing partner of the Club at Renaissance in Fort Myers, Rodney Poole had been a customer of Rosy Tomorrows Heritage Farm in North Fort Myers. So when he saw the farm listed for sale, he knew it was a strong possibility for the new business venture he and his wife, Stacey, wanted to undertake.

Rodney and his partners sold the Club at Renaissance, a low-density gated development, in 2022. He and Stacey had been looking to purchase an event venue, but the couple hadn’t found the right fit yet. The farm checked a lot of boxes both in terms of uniqueness and functionality, since it already had a restaurant on-site.

Rodney looked at the property the day after he first saw the listing, bringing along chef Wesley Robbins (who’s also Stacey’s brother). “And I think from that day, we knew we were going to own it,” says Rodney.

Shipping containers may be rugged steel boxes typically used for transporting goods across the globe. But they’ve been finding new life in innovative and unexpected ways over the last couple of decades.

Beyond ports and freight yards, they’re being repurposed into functional spaces that challenge traditional architecture and design norms. From homes to shops, here’s how containers are being reimagined.

Beyond homes and shops, the adaptability of these structures has inspired a range of creative uses. Artists and architects are turning them into art studios, community centres and even urban farms.

The Enea Casaccia Research Center in Rome, funded by the Italian Space Agency and coordinated by the Federico II University of Naples, Consiglio Nazionale di Ricerca and the University of Rome Tor Vergata, has developed a hi-tech container designed for growing micro-ortages on the Moon and Mars. Thanks to this module, astronauts who would face long space missions will be able to tap into a system for producing fresh, nutrient-rich food.

Designed for the health of astronauts, who usually sustain themselves on freeze-dried foods, the consumption of fresh fruits and vegetables can provide them with a balanced diet needed to counteract the effects of altered gravity and cosmic radiation, which are negative for human health.

It’s a farm inside a kitchen.

Carl Lasley harvested basil plants, using scissors to carefully snip the aromatic herb, trimming some and completely harvesting others. The lush, richly green plants were grown in hydroponic trays in a corner of the food serving area at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business.

Lasley, food and beverage director at the Darden School for the FLIK Hospitality Group, which operates Darden Dining, harvested the basil from an idea that sprouted at the University and has now returned as a realized product. 

Curaçao enjoys year-round sunshine and consistently moderate temperatures, which might seem ideal for cultivating fruits and vegetables. However, appearances can be deceiving. Take tomatoes, for example a tomato plant requires cool night time temperatures at certain stages of growth, but in Curaçao, night time lows rarely fall below 24°C. As a result, much of the horticultural sector relies on systems that allow for partial temperature control.

Ferdinand Bouwman, who had managed a rehabilitation center on the island for years and was seeking a career change about five years ago, also opted for a controlled growing system. After experimenting with a small-scale, self-designed aquaponics setup and spending countless evenings researching vegetable cultivation online, he became intrigued by a highly controlled approach: Freight Farms. This vertical farming system, developed by a Boston-based technology company, involves growing crops in a container.

Collar City will grow its mushrooms in a shipping container, said founder Avery Stempel, which offers about as much space as the company had in Troy. As production ramps up, he said, there is room on the farm for three more containers, and Collar City’s lab and production facility will be in part of an adjacent barn. 

Stempel and Ten Eyck said they expect some mushrooms may be cultivated in natural settings, but those would most likely be for demonstration purposes and perhaps a pick-your-own mushroom patch akin to Indian Ladder’s apple orchards. Stempel said the controlled environment of the shipping container and other indoor facilities is preferred for the edible mushrooms Collar City sells to markets and restaurants and other types used in products, including a skin-care line called Of the Forest that features lotions and scrubs.

Near the entrance of a 40-foot container farm installed at New Mexico State University’s Grants campus, dozens of 4-day-old kale plants lined a horizontal nursery bed, sprouting at various lengths in shades of electric green from miniature patches of densely packed soil.

Further inside, instructor Gabriel Garcia flipped a switch. Instantly, red and blue LED lights engulfed the space, illuminating the intricate vertical farming system in a shocking pink glow.

“The lights mimic the sun,” Garcia explained on a July afternoon. “This is where we’ll move the kale when their root structures develop, and they’ll stay here until they reach maturity.”

The container farm was one of the first projects shepherded by NMSU’s Center of Excellence in Sustainable Food and Agricultural Systems, housed in the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences.

Vertical farming is revolutionizing how we grow food, offering solutions to challenges like land scarcity, water shortages, and the demand for fresh, local produce. Freight Farms' Greenery exemplifies this innovation, turning a standard 320 sq. ft. shipping container into a high-tech, efficient, and scalable farming solution.

What is vertical farming?

Vertical farming is the practice of growing crops in stacked layers, often integrated with controlled-environment agriculture (CEA). Unlike traditional farming, which requires vast horizontal land, vertical farming uses innovative techniques like hydroponics to grow plants upward. This approach minimizes land use, conserves water, and allows for year-round production in urban and rural areas alike.