A 40-foot-long shipping container equipped with LED grow lights and vertical growing racks will soon be a working indoor farm producing thousands of kale plants for East Side residents each month, thanks to a partnership of local food advocates and the New York Power Authority.
NYPA officials and dozens of East Side community leaders gathered Monday to unveil the new container, which was funded by NYPA as part of its Environmental Justice Program.
NYPA’s $300,000 investment brought the colorful container – a refurbished semi-trailer branded with the message “Feeding the Roots. Blossoming a community” – to an urban farm that Buffalo Go Green is developing on Zenner Street near East Ferry Street.
“And it will not be leaving, since it took a crane to get it here,” said Buffalo Go Green CEO Allison DeHonney, whose organization will oversee the farming operation.
Besides helping feed a food-challenged community, the container farm will be part of a multi-state study by the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) on how indoor farming impacts energy and water usage, said EPRI Vice President David Porter.
“This container features the highest efficiency technologies available today – LED lighting, high efficiency cooling, dehumidification, recirculating pumps – and provides the perfect growing environment 24 hours a day, 365 days a year,” Porter said. “And the amount of crops that will come out of here, if grown in the field would use 90% more water. So we are really proud to be part of this project.”
The project was organized by Rita Hubbard-Robinson, founder and CEO of NeuWater & Associates, an urban development company focused on improving community health. Besides NYPA, Neuwater and Buffalo Go Green, the partnership includes the Buffalo Center for Health Equity, which owns the container and will assist in distributing produce to the community.
The container farm is at Buffalo Go Green’s Bailey Green urban…
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