Growing desperate for progress, four students look to UCLA’s hydroponic towers to discover insights on how to replicate their success. As part of Innovation and Impact, these students were given the opportunity to take a trip to meet with the team behind UCLA’s hydroponic towers.
They discovered that the hydroponic system was highly automated and efficient, churning out foods like lettuce, tomatoes, kale, and other veggies. These plants are directly given to the Bruin Plate residential restaurant, located directly below the hydroponic towers. Another fascinating part of the system is that the team managing the towers noted that they only check on them once per week. This check-up is for weekly harvesting and reseeding the towers, which is only a 2-3 hour process with a small crew for all 70 towers.
The team that manages these hydroponic towers is actually a 3rd party organization separate from UCLA. They’ve partnered with UCLA to show that growing food doesn’t have to be complicated and space-heavy. It can be dense, easy, fast, efficient, and automatic with hydroponic technology.
There were two teams that went on this trip to gain insights: the hydroponic group and the garden group. Ironically, the garden group ended up having more attendance on the trip than the hydroponic group due to attendance issues. Out of the four team members, only one of them, Jordan Tao, attended the actual trip.
Although he was the only one from his team who could make it, he had to say the trip was well worth it and was very educational.
“I gained some really good insights on how to better improve our hydroponic planter, ” Tao said, “Specifically regarding how to make the nutrients and harvesting processes more efficient.”
With these newly gained insights, the team plans to bring these improvements back to EF Academy’s hydroponic garden.
