High-Tech Farming Sprouts in New Jersey Shipping Container

It's a typical early spring landscape in the northern state of New Jersey.

The trees are bare.

The grass looks dull and brown,

but in the heart of Robinsville Township inside what used to be a shipping container,

a high-tech farm is flourishing.

The ones at the top may be a little bit smaller as the drainage goes through,

and nutrients will have a little bit of maybe a larger lettuce at the bottom,

and then we'll extract them.

You can see the final product is a very small root system.

There are 256 stands with greens at this high tech farm.

Every week there's a new harvest.

The secret is hydroponics,

a special draining system that circulates calcium nitrate solution as well as nitrogen,phosphorus and potassium.

It's not liquid soil but it does hold a lot of the nutrients that the plants will need.

Believe it or not, soil actually holds a lot of beneficial organisms: bacteria,

just those microorganisms in general, just so important and that's the nutrients that the plants need.

Excess water and nutrients return to special reservoirs and then start circulating again.

Plants are watered every three hours for about 10 minutes.

The sunlight is artificial and comes from 196 LED strips.

The temperature and the chemical makeup of air is strictly controlled.

It is always plus 22 degrees Celsius.

The humidity level is at 56 percent and the amount of carbon dioxide is 1800 parts per million.

We actually have to emit CO2 into the atmosphere.

We have to pump it in if we're not here,

so if I'm on vacation or it's the weekend we have to pump in CO2.

And just like everything else these days this farm can be run through a smartphone app.

Robinsville Township has been involved with this kind of farming since 2017.

We were the first in the United States to have a freight farm.

We still might be the only one but I'm hoping there will be more,

because one of our main objectives of getting this was to create a model that's sustainable

that we can share with other municipalities to say,

"Hey, you can bring this to your community too.

You can help your people too with fresh nutrition 24X7-365."

A very special relationship system has sprung to life around the farm as well.

Senior citizens volunteers and school children help maintain this unique ecosystem created around one old shipping container.

For Vladimir Lenski New Jersey Anna Rice VOA news