My name is Rachel Veenstra, and I’m a junior environmental plant science major. I’m planning to get my master’s in plant science and I’m also in the accelerated program for that.

We’re the Chartwells Green Team. Tori and I take care of the Grow Room, where we grow and harvest plants that are served in Missouri State’s dining halls.

Hi, I’m Tori Armstrong. I’m a senior, and I’m graduating this December with a bachelor’s degree in natural resources. I’m starting my master’s degree simultaneously in plant science.

Hydroponics is basically growing plants without soil. There are multiple ways that you can grow plants without soil. Hydroponics is just one of them.

Basically, the plants are submerged in water but they don’t drown because the roots still have access to air.

In our system, the water flows through sponges. We mix nutrients through the water. The roots can just take the nutrients directly from the water instead of having to pull them from the soil.

We can directly manipulate the nutrients the plants have access to. It’s a lot more efficient, and plants can grow a lot faster as well.

Certain plants work better, depending on the amount of time that you want to put into it. You could grow plants like tomatoes or beans or really anything that you wanted to.

The only problem with plants that need to be pollinated, is that obviously in this room, there’s no bees. Also, you’d have to come up with certain trellising systems and stuff like that for the tomatoes.

That’s why we basically grow herbs and greens. Mostly because it’s easy, but also because that’s something that the kitchens always have a need for.

It makes the most sense to grow those in our system that we have.

When I came in over the summer, there wasn’t a whole lot growing back there.

I started to get it back up to speed in preparation for the coming semester so that it would be ready for the dining centers on campus.

Day to day, there’s some pruning, transplanting, and you’ve got to keep your eye on the water levels, pH levels, nutrient levels, things like that.

Look for deficiency symptoms in plants so you can kind of head off problems as or before they start.

Hydroponics requires some intensive maintenance and constant upkeep, but the efficiency and the speed at which these plants grow really makes it worthwhile.

We also regularly harvest plants and take them over to the dining centers.

We change out towers that are on display there in the dining centers as well.

They’re kind of their own separate, stand-alone hydroponics setup. A smaller version of what we’ve got in the grow room here.

We change that out as the chefs use the plants and as they harvest them.

It’s kind of a neat, hands-on experience to get to talk to people while I’m there and then show them a little bit about hydroponics and how it can be integrated so easily into the culture here at school.

I would have to say that the most interesting thing that I not only learned but observed is how efficient the system can be and how fast the plants grow.

One thing that’s really cool about our system is that, because it’s literally in a basement and there’s no light, we can adjust them to different amounts of light like every day.

We’ve currently got it set on 15 hours a day, which is obviously more than what’s outside.

The plants have more exposure to light. We can concentrate the nutrients differently and see how fast they can grow. I can get lettuce from seed to a harvest-able state in like a month or less, which is really, really fast.

Seeing the future of agriculture and what we can do with the knowledge of how to grow plants so much quicker — in literally in a basement — and being able to produce plants that fast, it’s just something that I think would be really cool to apply to the future.

We can make it more sustainable in that way and use the knowledge that we have in hydroponics to grow plants more efficiently, more quickly and just apply that to real-world production on a larger scale.

We grow a wide variety of things. Some of the things are used very quickly here in the kitchens are different types of basil. Kales, lettuces, things of that nature.

The particular kind of vertical setup that we have back there tends to work best for kale.

It’s been kind of amazing for me to see, really, you can grow anything, depending on the setup that you have.

We’ve got the lights in there that we can change the wavelengths of. We can change it from red to blue to white.

Different plants respond to different light wavelengths in different ways. So, we can extend vegetative growth stages and prolong the amount of time that we can harvest these crops.

Like Rachel said, we can even put them in for 15 hours of artificial sunlight a day. Some crops can even handle 24 hours, a continuous cycle.

Not to mention growing things vertically is far less taxing on resources and space. This is really kind of the future of agriculture. It’s really cool to be a part of that.

The College of Ag recommends interns to work here based on students who have this as their major, or this is something they’re interested in, and Chartwells takes us in.

Head Chef Quentin, one of our supervisors, basically told me, “I want you to take this and I want you to run it like it’s your own business.”

We are able to grow whatever we want. We use it as a way to learn about produce production and horticulture and hydroponics all at the same time.

Of course, our supervisors will buy us supplies if we need them or give us advice, but basically, we’re running it by ourselves, and it’s awesome.

It’s such great work experience and it’s applicable and it’s hands-on and it’s a great educational tool, but it’s also a really awesome job that I really enjoy.

I actually started out studying entomology, which is about bugs. I had to take some time off of school to save up money.

When I had saved up enough to return, I actually transferred to MSU, because that’s where my dad went.

I remember I had chosen wildlife conservation as my major.

I heard that I would have to take several soils classes, and a few days before that semester started, I was looking at my schedule like, “Man, soils. That sounds like the worst class ever.” That just doesn’t sound very interesting to me, and it ended up being my favorite class.

The more that I learned about, literally about growing plants from the ground up, the more I started leaning toward moving away from bugs and getting more into plants.

That’s when I started growing my own plants more and I have gotten involved and interested in plants relatively recently, to be honest.

Growing up at home in Houston, Texas, I didn’t have a lot of accessibility to land that I could use to grow anything.

We lived in a very wooded area. It wasn’t practical for us and I never got that hands-on experience growing up.

I’ve kind of had a crash course since I came here to MSU, learning things in the classroom, by personal experience, trial and error at home, trying to grow my own stuff and coming here and trying something completely new to me, which is growing without soil at all.

My interest in hydroponics has kind of been the culmination of all these different factors that have pushed me into this.

I really love it. I didn’t ever think that this would be where I would end up if you asked me five years ago, but I’m so happy that life has kind of sent me down this little path.

I actually grew up on a 750-acre beef farm in Hartville, Missouri. I was never really a plant person, but I was around cattle my whole life.

When I was younger, I spent a lot of time at my grandma’s house, and my grandma can grow anything.

She always had a huge garden and so many flowers. She taught me everything I know about gardening.

Plants have always had a very special place in my heart just because of memories of my grandma and stuff like that. From the time I was like 8, I was managing gardens at our house and growing produce for our family.

We would freeze corn and can tomato sauce and pizza sauce from my tomatoes and everything, which is really cool.

Then, I got a little bit older and I was like, “People are buying these in the grocery store. Why can’t I sell them to people?”

I started selling at farmer’s markets in Ava, which is a town pretty close to us, and I really enjoyed that.

When I went to college and I was trying to figure out a major, it was a no-brainer for me. I got to Missouri State and started taking classes that were in my major.

I knew right away that I had made the correct choice because I loved soils, I loved all my plants classes and I took a conservation class I really enjoyed.

I’ve loved college because I found something that I love. It’s not like work. If you love what you do, you don’t work a day in your life. That saying, that’s how I feel about college and this job too.

I originally wanted to be a crop consultant. Taking more classes, I figured out that I would much rather do horticulture.

I also have had a couple of lab internships and I liked that too. I’m thinking about possibly genetics lab work, but I also want to do field work.

I don’t want to be stuck in a lab the rest of my life. I’m a farm girl. I want to be outside. I just think that that would be a great way to have an impact on the world and be able to help people.

Coming up with different ways to feed our insanely exploding population and help people with nutrition issues across the world and malnourished … that’s just something that’s always been really important to me and something that I think I can have a very big impact in.

I’ll admit, I learned the hard way on something when a hose came disconnected and there was a little bit of a flood.

That was probably my greatest learning experience because it required me to really take things apart, put them back together and figure out the hard way how things worked out.

I have learned so much about not just growing the plants, but creating a synchronized kind of ecosystem.

I guess what we’re trying to do is create nature, but better.

It kind of, in a way, felt good to get a fresh start. I was able to solve a couple of the problems like different pests that we had back there that I was able to eradicate for the most part.

By the end of that ordeal, everything was definitely my own in that room. It was kind of rewarding to know that I had done that from start to finish.

If anything like that happens again, I’ll know exactly what to do. Trial and error is definitely the best way to learn sometimes. Frustrating at first, very rewarding in the end.

I’m proud that I can say we’ve done this for students, because of all the time that I’ve invested in it and the work that I’ve done and everything, to see that come to fruition in these baskets of stuff I get to deliver to the dining halls.

Seeing the students looking at the towers in the dining halls is just really cool.

You can tell that they love the plants, and just knowing that you’re making someone happy and you’re also feeding them is a good feeling.

It’s an educational tool, for sure. I think it’s really important for people to know where their food comes from because a lot of people think it comes from the dining hall or it comes from the grocery store.

No, it came from a plant that someone grew and took care of and there was a farmer who’s behind that. The stuff on your fork, there was a farmer that grew it.

We were like the first ones with the towers in the dining halls, and then we did the grow room. It’s spread to other Chartwells at 32 other campuses.

I’ve had such a wonderful experience here, because of the professors. The people who teach here make all the difference.

They care, they’re interested and they’re involved. I have had so many opportunities here than I would have ever expected I would have had. It’s been quite a ride.

I definitely now plan on having a hydroponics setup, at least at my house if nothing else.

This project in general is very important, because it’s important for students to know where their food comes from.

It’s important for us to know how we can be more sustainable because our environment is important.

Agriculture isn’t always the bad guy. I feel like that’s something that there are a lot of misconceptions about.

I feel like that this is a great opportunity to showcase the fact that agriculture is not a bad thing. Agriculture is the reason that we can eat and plants are the reason that we breathe every day.

I just feel like it’s a great educational tool but it’s also an awesome way for Chartwells to be more sustainable and reduce their costs as well.