Image Courtesy of Andrea HankinsonEdmonton’s short growing season has always been a problem for local gardeners, but the volunteer-run Prairie Urban Farm is looking to change that with the Farm on Wheels.
The Prairie Urban Farm is a one-acre volunteer-run farm on South Campus that hosts field trips aimed to educate students on urban agriculture. Its upcoming project, the Farm on Wheels, will be a forty-foot shipping container with an indoor hydroponic garden that will be used to teach K-12 students and other learners.
The Farm on Wheels will allow the Prairie Urban Farm to educate all year-round, Nicole Martin, a volunteer garden leader, said.
“The Farm on Wheels was thought up as a way to bring farm education and food-growing to (students) all year long, not just in the summer growing months,” she said.
The Prairie Urban Farm has been operating on the University of Alberta’s South Campus since 2013. It hosts field trips, volunteer garden sessions, and a weekly farmer’s market.
Recently, local schools have shown increased interest in the farm, but most of the school year lies outside of Edmonton’s growing season. Due to this demand, Martin said the farm’s staff needed to increase their capacity to educate students during the school year.
“We had a lot of children and community members interested in agriculture education, getting their hands dirty, and learning about how to grow food,” Martin said. “But the timeline didn’t quite line up very well with the school year.”
The Farm on Wheels will increase that capacity by retrofitting a forty-foot shipping container with a learning area and a hydroponic farm system made of vertical growing towers. Plants growing in the towers will be supplied with a nutrient-rich medium and water, and because they are in a vertical set-up, three times as many plants can be grown in the same floor area of a traditional garden. The shipping container will be able to produce 75kg of fresh vegetables every week of the year.
“The (hydroponic system) would really empower teachers and learners to grow a lot of their own food in the winter month which is the real power behind it,” she said.
The shipping container will also house a training area where farm staff can teach students about seed germination, transplantation, farm maintenance, and food packaging
Food charities, such as Edmonton’s Food Bank, could also benefit of the Farm on Wheels, Martin said. Using alternative ways to grow food could supplement the food bank’s hampers with fresh greens every week.
Local growers will have to wait for this new development, as the Farm on Wheels is still in the fundraising phase. The project will cost approximately $100,000, which the Prairie Urban Farm will seek from community grants and possibly a crowdfunding campaign, Martin said.
Once the project is complete, the idea is to start out by touring the Farm on Wheels around Edmonton schools and businesses. With enough interest, the Farm on Wheels may take their classroom on the road to northern communities across Canada.
For now, the Prairie Urban Farm is mostly interested in making urban agriculture more accessible, Martin said.
“A big thing we want to do out at the Prairie Urban Farm is to make urban food production … really accessible to the groups that need it most,” she said. “Looking at these new ways of growing food, like the Farm on Wheels, is another way of doing that.”
