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Babylon Microfarms STEM Garden at Indoor Ag-Con

Babylon Introduces The STEM Garden At Indoor Ag-Con 2024

Written by Indoor Ag-Con on March 20, 2024. Posted in Blog, Exhibitor News.

(Richmond, VA) Babylon Micro-Farms, Inc., North America’s leading manufacturer of on-site, modular vertical farms, officially launched its latest Micro-Farm, the STEM Garden, designed for the education market. The team showcased the new design at Indoor Ag-Con, March 11-12, 2024. The company is taking pre-orders and will begin shipping units in June 2024.

Their latest Micro-Farming system is designed to engage the senses and expand the mind by delivering an accessible and affordable interactive farming experience to the education market. After delivering Micro-Farms to hundreds of locations worldwide, Babylon has collected feedback from a wide range of educators to inform the design for the STEM Garden. Their engineering team has carefully designed the product to deliver the highest-quality farming experience available to educators at an accessible price point. STEM Garden is simple, reliable, and configurable, making it a workhorse for teaching various science, technology, nutrition, and mathematics topics.

Alexander Olesen (CEO & Co-Founder) said, “The STEM Garden represents the next step in our journey to make hydroponic agriculture accessible to all. We have set the standard for safe, reliable, remotely managed vertical farms manufactured here in the USA, enabling anyone to become an indoor farmer. The STEM Garden is an accessible device that significantly expands the market for on-site vertical farms in the classroom and, eventually, home.”

After researching the education space over the last few years, Babylon has created a versatile growing system to engage, educate, and inspire students by bringing farm-to-table into the classroom. Here are some of the key features:

Hands-on Learning – Removable trays in workstations promote hands-on learning for crop planting, nurturing, and harvesting.

Classroom-Compatible – Our design fits K-12 classrooms, maximizing space without compromising on the quality of education.

Student Led-Experiments – Designed for simplicity, our unit encourages students to work together, promoting teamwork and collaboration skills.

Exciting Seed Varieties – Students can explore the world of plant biology in depth, including different leafy greens, herbs, flowers, and microgreens.

Educational Integration – Get lesson plans and materials for hands-on gardening integrated into your curriculum.

Food Safe Cultivation – Our enclosed and locked gardening system ensures ideal plant growth with minimal effort and a more efficient and secure learning environment.

A dietician with Aramark at VCU, Julia Danisewicz RD, said, “We love our Babylon Micro-Farm; our students love the knowledge that their food was grown just a few feet away. As a dietician, seeing a university like VCU value sustainable, pesticide-free food choices for its students is exciting. I didn’t have a green thumb before working with the farm, but it is so easy to use that now I feel like a pro.”

The STEM Garden is available for pre-order today. Access the info sheet, spec sheet and please sign up for the waitlist here.

About Babylon
Founded in 2017, Babylon provides an indoor farming service to enable businesses and communities to have a year-round supply of ultra-fresh produce at the touch of a button. They manufacture all their products in the United States. The BabylonIQ software platform remotely manages the modular vertical farming systems network to make sustainable agriculture accessible to institutional food service clients like Compass, Aramark, and Sodexo. The service includes semi-automated vertical farms, software, and supplies wrapped into a flat monthly fee.

Link to TED Talk: Watch my TEDx Talk on “The Next Generation of Vertical Farming

Link to Times Magazine: Top Greentech Companies 2024

NY Sun Works – Supporting the Next Generation of Urban Farmers and Innovators

Written by Elana Mass & Megan Nordgrén on February 8, 2022. Posted in Blog.

For more than 10 years, NY Sun Works, a NYC-based non-profit organization, has used hydroponic technology to teach K-12th grade students about science and sustainability. Their first hydroponic farm-classroom opened in 2010 at a Manhattan public school. Since then, they’ve grown to nearly 200 schools across the five boroughs of NYC and metro NJ, enabling over 65,000 students in 2021 alone to learn biology, ecology, chemistry and environmental science concepts – all while growing fresh produce to share with their families and school community.

To date, NY Sun Works has installed more than 700 hydroponic systems in school farm-classrooms and greenhouses. And this number is growing quickly as the non-profit is set to build at least one new hydroponic classroom every week through 2022 – and demand for the program is only growing. Students plant and grow a wide variety of crops, not only exposing them to critical hands-on science and sustainability topics, but also to new and nutritious vegetables and herbs. As students bring their harvest home to families, they share with them how delicious and fresh vegetables can be when they are grown hydroponically and eaten soon after harvest.

Now, NY Sun Works is introducing its new high school career readiness program in Controlled Environment Agriculture (CEA). Recognizing the need for high school students to have direct-to-work options – and the growth of indoor farming as a green industry in NYC and other urban areas – the program provides high school students with marketable technical skills to enter the job market directly after graduation or to continue with further training in a post-secondary academic program. The program launched in 3 Brooklyn high schools in the 2021-22 school year with pilot funding from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and will expand to other schools and boroughs next year.

This is an exciting time for urban farmers in NYC, and NY Sun Works has been a key driver of new growth and development in this sector. Last fall, NY Sun Works Executive Director Manuela Zamora was appointed to Eric Adams’ Food Policy Transition Team where she worked alongside industry leaders and community farmers to develop plans for the administration to help grow urban agriculture in NYC. As then-Brooklyn Borough President, Mayor Adams stated in 2021, “Urban agriculture has the potential to revolutionize our urban landscape and play a significant role in an equitable recovery process…Programs such as NY Sun Works give high school students technical skills required in the emerging agricultural industry…We should seek to scale this up further.”

NY Sun Works is excited to launch this innovative career readiness program and to help build a greener NYC. For more on our CEA certification program and to learn more about NY Sun Works, please contact: Megan Nordgrén, Director of Program Development: megan@nysunworks.org.

Join Sidsel Robards, Co-Founder, the Greenhouse Project, NY Sunworks for our Indoor Ag-Con 2022 Panel: Cultivating The Workforce Pipeline: Educating the Next Gen Farmers. Learn more & register today!