While the rest of the Wyoming is fast asleep, there’s a secret world in Lander filled with thousands of green and growing things that are all wide awake, bathed in bright LED sunshine.
The green and growing things are mostly stuff you’d eat in a salad — big Bibb lettuces and crinkly, crunchy kale. But there’s also mounds of emerald-green basil, whose leaves fill the air with the most enchanting aroma whenever a passerby happens to brush the leaves, no matter how gently.
These green creatures live in a most unlikely space. An 80-by-40-foot shipping container that a casual visitor could easily mistake for a storage unit. But open the doors and an amazing George Jetson-style farm is revealed.
Four sliding walls with 88 growing panels that have five growth channels each are growing hundreds upon hundreds of plants vertically, like some sort of spaceship from the future. A fully automated computer system is also looking after each and every plant’s needs, deciding when it’s time to turn on the bright LED sunshine each day, as well as delivering the right amount of water and nutrients and keeping the humidity just right.
Made by Boston-based Freight Farms, the shipping container greenhouse is the latest addition to Central Wyoming College’s Regenerative Small-Scale Farming AAS degree, which, according to CWC, is the first of its kind in Wyoming.
“We’ve been fortunate to be able to bring this kind of technology to the area,” Local Food and Agriculture Instructor Ethan Page told Cowboy State Daily. “I think this is one of two freight farms in the state, and the only one that’s kind of served, or has like an educational purpose.”
The greenhouse sleeps during the day for a couple of reasons. First, energy costs are cheaper at night. And it’s also cooler at night — a plus, since the LED lights in the greenhouse put off enough heat that, even in winter, it’s sometimes necessary to cool the greenhouse.
Letting the plants sleep during the day also fits the classroom schedule better. That way, nothing is moving around while students are there working in the greenhouse.
The unit, meanwhile, will work in all sorts of climates and situations — a real desert, a concrete jungle, a frozen mountain at several thousand feet of elevation.
“The idea is that you can bring one of these really anywhere, hook it up to power and water, and start growing fresh produce year-round,” Page said. “They like to say it’s from minus 30 to 150 degrees.”
Local Food and Agriculture Instructor Ethan Page demonstrates how the panels in Central Wyoming College's new shipping container greenhouse can be moved back and forth. The 40-foot shipping container can grow 4 acres worth of produce. (Renee Jean, Cowboy State Daily) 
Nutrient tanks in Central Wyoming College's shipping container greenhouse are fed into the watering system automatically. Sensors, to the right, determine when a given nutrient is low, triggering the addition of just the right amount of whatever is needed. (Renee Jean, Cowboy State Daily) 
The work station inside Central Wyoming College's new shipping container greenhouse. (Renee Jean, Cowboy State Daily) 
Local Food and Agriculture instructor Ethan Page demonstrates how one of the planting panels work in Central Wyoming College's new shipping container greenhouse. (Renee Jean, Cowboy State Daily)
A Solution For Food Deserts?
Vertical growing using controlled environment agriculture has become a multibillion-dollar industry, Page said, which means there are lots of opportunities for students who want to work in that field or entrepreneurs who want to start small businesses.
Among the advantages of these types of vertical growing systems are reduced water and chemical usage and year-round production in almost any climate.
But what Page really likes is that it’s bringing local food options to Wyoming, with its growing seasons that are painfully short for the long ambitions of hopeful gardeners.
Growing local food helps reduce food deserts, which is a problem in many states, including Wyoming. The Cowboy State has 80 food deserts in 21 counties, according to Wyoming Community Foundation, which defines a food desert as either a rural area where a person needs to travel 10 or more miles to get to a grocery store, or, in urban areas, 1 mile or more.
Produce from CWC’s shipping container greenhouse in Lander gets used by CWC’s culinary students. The students provided fresh salad bowls at the recent CWC Innovation & Entrepreneurship Conference in Riverton using some of the produce from the Lander shipping container greenhouse.
Some of CWC’s Lander produce is also sold in the Meadowlark Market and Kitchen in Lander, as well as in Riverton at the Fremont Local Market — food freedom stores that sell a variety of locally produced food and food products.
While some of the mega vertical growers have struggled lately — like Plenty, which recently declared bankruptcy — Page believes controlled environment agriculture still has a lot of merit, particularly in Mountain West states like Wyoming.
“We don’t really get local food here in Wyoming year-round,” Page said. “It all comes in that heart of the growing season.
“And we’re trying to both offer education — and that’s a big piece — and we’re trying to develop some of that workforce in this industry and develop young entrepreneurs who might want to go out and do this.”
The side effect to all that is more than just economic development. Those entrepreneurs starting such businesses help improve food resiliency, and that’s also helping improve quality of life.
Up To 4 Acres Of Produce From One Unit
Shipping container greenhouses are costly. CWC’s unit cost $150,000, not including water and power hookups and a solid concrete pad on which to place it.
Page believes they can still pencil out because land itself is so costly these days.
“If you think about the price of land versus the price of this, I think it’s pretty comparable,” he said. “And land access is sometimes very difficult. This gives people access.”
The shipping container is highly efficient, Page added, cranking out between 2 to 4 acres worth of produce from its tiny space. And the containers are stackable, so that means an awful lot of growing can happen in a relatively small footprint.
Among the advantages of local food is higher-quality nutrition because food hasn’t traveled as far and hasn’t sat around in a warehouse before being sold. Some produce can lose as much as half of their nutrients within a couple days of harvest. Vitamin C is particularly fleeting. Green peas can lose about half of their Vitamin C within a couple of days, as may broccoli and beans.
While leafy herbs and greens are the easiest things to grow in a controlled environment agriculture setting, the containers can be used to grow just about anything, Page said, including tomatoes or strawberries — though neither of these would be the easiest choices.
“You could theoretically grow tomatoes, but then it would grow out and then just kind of grow down and sprawl,” Page said. “Space-wise, it’s kind of tough. We tried some snap peas in there just as an experiment. They grew out and got so close to the supplemental lighting that they actually were like burning on the lights.”
Renée Jean can be reached at renee@cowboystatedaily.com.
