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CEA Education Standards, Growing Food Beneath the Soil, Plenty Shuts Down San Francisco Branch, and the latest Vertical Farming Podcast
🌿Vertical Farming Weekly - December 20, 2022
Harry Duran
December 20, 2022
If I had to guess, just about all of you reading this newsletter had a similar high school experience. You start with no electives as a freshman and gradually gain more opportunities to explore your post-secondary interests as you grow into a senior. Depending on whether you attended a large school district in the outskirts of a major city or in the midwest with a graduating class of 20, you may have had the choice between taking Woodshop and Agriculture, or you had so many options it was hard to narrow it down to a small handful. Likely, you had a combination of the two. Your course catalog was full of options, but many of them didn't captivate you.
In the time since then, school has changed drastically. Through the implantation of the well-criticized Common Core standards that is driving Gen Z away from traditional corporate jobs, to the ongoing (and slow) appeal of the aforementioned standards, public education shares almost no resemblance to that of the outgoing Gen X or even current Millennials. Public education is shifting away from the corporate-led capitalistic standards of yesteryear into a system that frankly, I'm starting to become jealous of. Hands-on experience in growing fields is more important than ever as growing industries like CEA and Green Energy begin to for hire more and more positions. That hands-on experience could be the single factor that separates a person from being any other job candidate and being an investment.
Schools like New Myrnam School in Alberta, Canada are building programs to aide students into that necessary hands-on experience. Students have access to a number of hands-on learning experiences nothing short of hydroponic agriculture and green engineering. Students get the opportunity to design and build these systems themselves with the guidance, not instruction, of a proctor. This methodology not only provides hands-on experience, but encourages students to think outside the box, to be creative, and to share ideas. No longer are the days of AP Lang and dual-enrollment. In are the days of STEM centered project based learning.
Now, back to your regularly scheduled content.
This Week in CEA...
The latest Vertical Farming Podcast
Brandy Keen is the Co-founder & Senior Technical Advisor at Surna, an organization that designs, engineers and manufactures application-specific environmental control and air sanitation systems for commercial, state, and provincial-regulated indoor cannabis cultivation facilities in the U.S. and Canada. Today, Harry and Brandy discuss the origins of Hydro Innovations and their acquisition by Surna, the powerful impact that controlled environment agriculture has on the world’s water supply, and what the future holds for the growth of the cannabis industry.
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