Hydroponic System Debuts in Alumni Hall

By Leo Im ’28

Northfield Mount Hermon took a new step in its commitment to sustainability this year by installing a hydroponic growing unit in Alumni Hall. The Babylon Microfarm, a soilless electronic farming system, was established through the collaboration of the NMH farm staff and school administration. The unit is now growing fresh herbs like basil and cilantro, functioning as an educational tool with high visibility and accessibility while also improving the school’s food production tradition and workjob program.

The new unit offers several lessons that traditional farming cannot. Adam Finke, assistant farm manager, said that one of the differences is the technology. While the farm utilizes “older technology and techniques that have been around for a long, long time,” the new hydro farm is a “technologically high way of growing food” that doesn’t need soil. Finke added that the unit functions as a stepping stone for students interested in “the tech sector, the urban development sector, or energy consumption,” even if their interests are unrelated to food production.

Beyond the high level of technology the unit puts into use, the location of the unit itself functions as a huge advantage. Placed right next to the grab-and-go fruit station, the hydroponic growing unit’s high accessibility allows students to check in daily on the process of food production. “Every student and every member of the community comes here every day and they can see their own food grow. They’re like, ‘Oh, what is that? It’s getting bigger.’ That’s really cool,” Finke noted. This factor of the hydroponic growing unit solves the problem of disconnection people have from how their food is produced. 

Besides that, the system serves as a great model for sustainability. Dining Services Director Rich Messer pointed out the benefits of the unit. “We use herbs in our cooking weekly. Besides using those harvested in the NMH farm, we have to buy them, where we pay good money for them,” he said. The newly established system is a novel way to bring those products in, while saving money over time. Functioning as an “educational environment,” the system allows students to see a “micro farm in action, explore the concept of it,” he said.

Pete Sniffen, NMH’s Margaret J. Sieck ’72 Endowed Teaching Chair in Environmental Studies, considers the hydroponic system “one of the real emerging solutions” to environmental problems students can learn about, which is “complete indoor growing of food.” The unit functions as an important model that assists students in understanding complicated environmental issues. For example, through the system’s method of nutrient management, students can learn about nutrient cycling, which is how elements like nitrogen and phosphorus venture through an ecosystem. This experience enables students to “relate to it when we talk about these much bigger systems that are abstractly described in textbooks,” Sniffen said. One of these systems is eutrophication, a process in which an excess of nutrients in a certain area of water causes algae to overgrow, leading to depletion of the water’s oxygen and thus harming or killing aquatic organisms.

The newly established hydroponic unit therefore is not just a highly technological method of growing food but a symbol of the environmentally friendly tradition at NMH and an acknowledgment of the gifts of nature. With the farm staff’s management of the maintenance, fertilization, and harvesting, combined with the assistance of workjob students, the hydroponic unit will function with collaboration as its fuel. 

“Good education, saving money, real-world solutions: Those are really one of the greatest combinations to have in a school,” Sniffen said. This combination, which contains the principles of education, economy, and ecology, shows the unit’s great value to the NMH community. 

Leo Im '28 is a workjob student reporter in the NMH communications office.

Photos by Matthew Cavanaugh