By ETHAN SHOREY Valley Breeze

Editor ethan@valleybreeze.com

March 14, 2024

CUMBERLAND – Thanks to a whole lot of hard work and many frustrating moments of troubleshooting, a container-to-table movement is re-finding its roots in the back parking lot of Cumberland High School.

Shana DiPetrillo, food service manager at Sodexo, and Rob Mudge, president of the Historic Metcalf Franklin Farm Preservation Association, have spent much of the past two years fixing and tweaking the Freight Farms vertical farm behind the high school. This is a retooled shipping container-turned-indoor garden that was taken offline at the school at the start of the pandemic.

The idea originally, as shared in The Breeze upon the launch of the “Leafy Green Machine” in September of 2017, was to give students access to fresh vegetables on their school meal plates and another educational resource.

Cumberland was the first district in the state at the time to implement such an initiative, a hydroponic growing facility essentially functioning as a “smart home” for growing food.

But the pandemic brought a shutdown with operators unclear on how to proceed within guidelines, and the Leafy Green Machine was all but shut down, with only the cooling left on.

DiPetrillo, a home gardener and mother, said she was hired three years ago and immediately had a goal of getting this resource back up and running.

“I saw so much potential, and I knew what it used to be,” she said.

After hearing from someone at Franklin Farm that they would be interested in partnering, the wheels started turning. Mudge said he got involved because they’ve been collaborating more, including with the Northern Rhode Island Food Pantry, in hopes of “doing a lot less of the same things over and over,” such as volunteer generation and fundraising. They were also seeing demand for fresh vegetables soaring, he said, and trying to figure out how they can extend their growing season.

Mudge said they kept hearing from NRI Food Pantry representatives and others how excited people are to have fresh vegetables in the summer and bummed about not having them in the winter, and they’ve been researching the idea of a greenhouse or some type of container gardening at Franklin Farm. The past two years of work have been both frustrating and ultimately rewarding.

“We spent a whole year just trying to turn it on,” said Mudge, adding that there was a lot of trial and error. He recalled one day when they thought they had everything perfect and by the next day, the container was at 99 degrees and felt like a rainforest.

“It was an emotional rollercoaster,” said DiPetrillo, laughing.

Some of that trial and error has just been getting used to what types of lettuce can and can’t be grown, said DiPetrillo. She mentioned romaine lettuce that can’t be grown vertically, instead snapping at the neck. They’re experimenting with all kinds of varieties of greens, mescalin, butter greens, a spring mix, a fan-favorite wasabi arugula, and kale. Items are grown to go with Sodexo’s “global flavors” that they try to promote, said DiPetrillo, with different types used depending on the days. When there aren’t signs touting “Shana’s greens” in CHS’s cafeteria, students now want to know when more will be available, said DiPetrillo.

Mudge said they contacted Freight Farms to get started, but many of the 20-somethings now working there were puzzled by this older model, as the company has seen many advances since this container garden was installed. He joked that they saw 2017 as ancient history. Part of the challenge has been in finding replacement parts, as they’ve changed dramatically in seven years and few are still selling the original parts.

As of this month, DiPetrillo has been able to supply most of the greens needed to the high school and middle schools.

Mudge said DiPetrillo is very humble about her part in all of this, but she’s hugely responsible for all aspects. He said she also mentored someone who is now running Sodexo’s Freight Farm in West Warwick.

DiPetrillo said she has become close friends with Mudge through this process, and has also now gotten to know his wife, Denise, well. “There have been a lot of relationships built just from this little metal box.”

Rob Mudge said they volunteered to work with the Freight Farm to see if it might be something they can do at Franklin Farm eventually. This will help them understand what they’re taking on before raising the money and buying one. He said the hope is that these two indoor gardens at schools, in Cumberland and West Warwick, will become part of a wider trend, and that schools will also be able to incorporate them into curriculum. DiPetrillo said the plan is to hopefully start having students in the school’s hydroponics program to use the Freight Farm as a classroom.

DiPetrillo says she’s trying to get as much participation as possible so they can carry it on and not have to rely on volunteers such as the ones from Franklin Farm.

The Freight Farm at CHS is at about 40 percent capacity currently, and once fully operational, they expect to have extra to bring to the Northern Rhode Island Food Pantry, which Franklin Farm partners with.

These indoor grow spaces use only about 10 gallons of water per week, with nutrients replenished as the water passes through, and the whole operation once functional takes about 15 to 20 hours a week of labor, said Mudge. There is no waste here, said DiPetrillo, with discarded plants being composted at Franklin Farm and other partners, including potentially Bootstrap Compost.

Ultimately, Mudge said, the dream would be to have three or four Freight Farms centrally located between existing food pantries where unemployed or underemployed people could come work and grow greens.

Lead photo: Rob Mudge, left, and Shana DiPetrillo have brought back Cumberland’s Leafy Green Machine, and they’re hoping the results will go far beyond farm-to-table greens being available to local students. Breeze photo by Ethan Shorey