Donation renews interest in agriculture at Stockbridge Jr./Sr. High School

Students growing plants in simulated lunar soil with help of FarmBot

by Bob Richards

Thanks to a donation directed by local farmer Ben Topping, students at Stockbridge Jr./Sr. High School now have access to FarmBot, a high-tech farming machine.

Topping directed a $2,500 America’s Farmers Grow Communities donation to the Stockbridge Area Educational Foundation. The donation was sponsored by the Bayer Fund, a nonprofit organization dedicated to strengthening communities where Bayer customers and employees live and work.

The FarmBot is an open source, computer numerically controlled (CNC) farming machine.  It provides a cutting-edge, hands-on and engaging project for students to learn a variety of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) subjects.

Students can learn plant and soil science, coding, operation of CNC equipment, electronics and hardware engineering, just  to scratch the surface of FarmBot’s possibilities.

Eighth grader Brock Rochow enjoys working with FarmBot because he gets to “experience a new piece of technology in action.”

“Working with the FarmBot allows me to advance in my STEM intelligence,” he said. “In addition, this project has created many opportunities for me to increase my knowledge in coding and programming.”

Alayna Adkins, also an eighth grader, says the project has “given me a better understanding of how to work with coding and electronics.”

Because FarmBot can be operated entirely remotely, it can provide distance learning opportunities from the classroom and lab or home, a valuable option for education during the pandemic.

Students at Stockbridge normally work with underwater robots or ROVs, but this year, the students wanted to focus their efforts on the topic of food insecurity. FarmBot allows them to grow food from a distance.

“This is a perfect project for us to work on because our team is focused on using engineering and technology to solve problems, and this allows us to do that while doing something important for others,” said Jack Hammerberg, a high school sophomore.

Using FarmBot’s web app and integrated camera system, students can tend to their crops while learning from home or from anywhere they have an internet connection, even the moon.

“The Farmbot has allowed us to continue to work with technology and engineering in a COVID environment — something a lot of us were initially unsure of with local pools and the like being closed. We can still pursue our interests while in a slightly drier environment,” said high school junior Hythem Beydoun.

Building and learning more about the FarmBot led the class to discover how NASA is testing the FarmBot for possible use on future missions to the moon and Mars.  This in turn led a group of junior and senior high school students to enroll in the “Plant the Moon Challenge.”

“The opportunity to work directly with NASA has been a dream come true,” Beydoun said. “Organizations like this have always seemed so far out of reach to me, (and) being able to be close to and work with them has been an amazing opportunity.”

The Plant the Moon Challenge is a global science experiment and research challenge to examine how vegetable crops can grow in lunar soil. Each team receives real lunar soil simulant from the University of Central Florida’s CLASS Exolith Lab!

Now, Stockbridge Jr./Sr. High School students are designing and conducting a set of experiments using this lunar simulant to grow crops for a future long-duration lunar mission with the help of their FarmBot.

The team also plans to present their results at next fall’s American Geophysical Union Fall Conference in San Francisco.

“We have a unique opportunity with the Farmbot compared to other people participating in the Plant the Moon project because it allows us to make very accurate adjustments,” said Hammerberg.

FarmBot is catching the attention and drawing interest from many Stockbridge students.

According to eighth grade student Logan Hollenbeck, “The best part about school is working with the FarmBot.”

Bob Richards is a STEM teacher at Stockbridge Jr./Sr. High School.