Out There | The Urban Farmer

Last summer I had the honor of watching just over a dozen of students from our school of architecture design, raise funds, and fabricate a completely self sustaining and portable urban farming tool for the Renaissance Project in New Orleans, all in less than four weeks. Starting with a shipping container, donated by Portable Storage of Minnesota, the little guy holds a composting toilet, donated by Sancor, in a deployable room made of steel, donated by Discount Steel. On top of that, a few solar panels power the whole show, donated by Prairie Technologies.

For their final review, students deployed the solar powered, rainwater harvesting, water filtrating, self composting urban farming machine in less than one hour. And two weeks after that, it was delivered to New Orleans where it sits on a vacant site as part of a network of small community gardens.