The New York winter has been long, but that hasn’t stopped West Hollow’s “Farmers of the Future.” A big thank you to Red Hat Open Source Stories for featuring our work in their most recent release. You can view it HERE.

Our student engineers have worked long and hard to construct their very own community garden just inches away from their cafeteria. Each day students watch as the CNC farming robot that they built with their own hands seeds, waters, weeds, and photographs the crops they have coded it to tend to. Over the last 100 days, students have designed algorithms that tend to one dozen different species of plants. This week we were finally able to harvest our first yield of fresh vegetables that were weighed, packaged, and donated to the Island Harvest food bank based out of Hauppauge. In total, we collected 20 pounds of produce that will find its way to the dinner tables of those suffering from food insecurity in nearby communities.

In the coming weeks, we will be restocking our garden with nearly 75 new plants that span almost two dozen species. The goal is to use the automation capabilities of our FarmBot to raise a new crop of donations during the summer vacation. We will code and monitor it from remote locations to truly see what our future farm is made of. Check back next week when we will be updating the progress of the new plantings and welcoming some high school students from Kuopio, Finland into our farming community.