Growing on the Go
Last week, I told you about an urban agriculture project that would be floating on the Hudson River. This week I learned about another mobile urban ag project — a greenhouse on wheels rolling around the streets of Indiana.
Architecture students at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana, recently debuted a new mobile greenhouse that will be used to grow plants for Butler University’s Center for Urban Ecology Farm (CUE) to grow produce in economically challenged areas or to sell to Indianapolis area restaurants.
GrOwING GREEN is a mobile greenhouse that was designed and built by 14 fourth-year architecture students at BSU and was funded by a $50,000 grant from Butler University’s Innovation Fund Grant.
The greenhouse is constructed on a flatbed trailer, which, according to the GrOwING GREEN website, “facilitates outreach, education and community engagement by making it possible to literally bring the farm to economically challenged and underserviced communities.”
The mobile nature of the greenhouse allows it “to navigate within the seams of the building codes distinguishing between the temporary and the permanent, facilitating construction,” so the greenhouse can travel to the places it needs to be and where it can be the most productive.
According to Timothy Gray, architecture professor at BSU, the controlled environment greenhouse is fully automated. The greenhouse was built with non-corrosive, non-toxic and decay-resistant materials.
Check out the GrOwING GREEN website and Instagram page to see what the mobile greenhouse looks like and how it was constructed.
Are there any interesting urban agriculture growing projects going on in your area? If there are, I’d like to hear about them. Drop me a line at thodson@greatamericanpublish.com and let me know what’s growing on.
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