If you visit the FFA Pavilion at the Indiana State Fair every year, you will notice that many of the displays change annually. That’s because a new team of state FFA officers is in charge each year. Joe Martin, Indiana FFA program specialist, and Rob Hays, Indiana FFA executive director, challenge the new officers each year to come up with new ideas to explain agriculture to the urban audience that files through the pavilion during the fair.

Caitlyn Lewis, 2019-20 state secretary from Frontier FFA in White County, accepted the challenge. Her idea was to introduce the public to container farming and how container “farmers” grow plants vertically in confined spaces.

“It’s a growing type of agriculture,” Lewis explains. “There are lots of examples of it on the internet. I decided to make people aware that this was a viable type of farming for certain people.”

Basically, container farming is growing plants inside a literal shipping container, Lewis says. These containers typically aren’t semitrailer beds. They’re shipping containers that may be transported by trucks or shipped on boats to carry materials. People figured out they could buy used containers at low cost and turn them into food factories, of sorts. Typically, plants grow in vertical shelves arranged in rows up and down the container. Common crops are things such as lettuce and kale.

There are companies that build custom modular containers from scratch specifically for growing plants in a vertical farm setting, Lewis notes. Bright Agrotech is one of the companies in this market. Check out the products and systems it offers at zipgrow.com.

Right light

One of the secrets to making container farming work is providing the right amount, duration and kind of light to plants, Lewis says. During her research, she learned that some plants respond to different colors of light and grow better if you provide the right color and right amount of light.

Beside her simulated container farming display, which showed what the inside of a container farm might look like, she added a second display where she could switch colors of lights on plants growing in a hydroponic system. Ivy Tech provided the equipment for this display, Lewis says.

RESPOND TO LIGHT COLOR: Caitlyn Lewis arranged this display to show how growing systems can be set up with the ability to switch light colors during the day. The cucumbers growing here don’t respond to different colors, but many plants do, she says.

“They were growing cucumbers in the unit before it came to the pavilion, and cucumbers don’t actually respond to different colors of light,” she observes. “They grow the same no matter which color of light they receive. If you were actually going to use this system to grow plants effectively, and had the ability to change light colors, you would want to grow plants which respond and grow better under certain types of light.”

Nevertheless, her display made the point. You’ve likely heard of urban gardening, but you may not have heard of urban gardening indoors or vertical farming. Thanks to Lewis, now you know it’s a real method that people are working hard to perfect for producing certain types of locally grown products.