Videos

From Wall Streeter to Urban Farmer

AOL.com clip on Richard Charles and EcoVeggies

Urban Farming at St. Philips Academy with EcoVeggies

Neighborhood Journal Clip

Super science documentary – EcoVeggies featured

Super science documentary shown in Asia features EcoVeggies and urban farming in Newark

Combating rapidly declining farming conditions

Indoor farming solves many of the problems that face traditional outdoor farming.

EcoVeggies with Ecospaces at St. Philips Academy

Brief expose on how St. Philips Academy is using its Ecospaces program to teach kids about sustainable living. Partnering with EcoVeggies.

Green Scene – EcoVeggies and St. Philips Academy

Green Scene

St. Philip’s Academy teaches students about sustainability and nutrition

By Stuart Thornton

Wednesday, July 20, 2011

On a rooftop in the bustling downtown of Newark, New Jersey, a garden tended by students of St. Philip’s Academy yields a bounty of lettuces, tomatoes, broccoli, watermelons, cantaloupes, corn, beans, lavender, and many other fruits, vegetables, flowers, and herbs.

The garden is one part of the school’s innovative EcoSPACES program, which provides students the tools to lead a healthy and environmentally productive life.

Frank Mentesana, director of EcoSPACES, says the co-curricular program adds another dimension to the kindergarten-through-8th-grade school’s educational offerings -> Read more … Green Scene

Crops Sprouting without sunshine or soil

A Crop Sprouts Without Soil or Sunshine

By TODD WOODY
 
On the rooftop garden at St. Philip’s Academy, a private school in Newark, students tend plots of everything from broccoli and beets to sweet corn and spaghetti squash.But since August, they have also been helping to farm arugula, chervil, fun jen and komatsuna in a machine installed in a fourth-floor science classroom that grows crops without soil or sunshine.

Made by the Ithaca, N.Y., company AeroFarms, the aeroponic growing system is owned by EcoVeggies, a startup formed by three former Wall Street technology workers who aim to transform Newark’s abandoned and vacant buildings into so-called vertical farms.

“The produce will be sold and used in the areas immediately surrounding Newark to start with, and then we expect to be able to service the immediate tri-state area,” Richard Charles, one of EcoVeggies’ founders, wrote in an e-mail … ->Read more … Crops sprout without sunshine or soil – the EcoVeggies way.

Urban Farming Start-up in Newark

An Urban Farming Startup Grows in a New Jersey Classroom

May 2, 2011 |

Students at St. Philip’s Academy, an independent K-8 school in Newark, NJ grow their own salad greens. They use an aeroponic growing system installed in a fourth-floor classroom in which they plant, harvest and package such leafy greens as Chinese lettuce, arugula and komatsuna for delivery to their cafeteria.  “It’s kind of amazing – it doesn’t get more local than this,” said Frank Mentesana, a St. Philip’s Teacher and Program Facilitator.

St. Philip’s aeroponic growing system is part of a pilot project being managed and run by an urban farming startup called EcoVeggies to trial a growing system developed by AeroFarms (see our article on AeroFarms for more information). EcoVeggies, led by three former Wall Streeters, was started out of desire to not only profit from an emergent urban agriculture movement, but also to find a way to revitalize the city of Newark, NJ -> Read more … Urban Farming Start-up in Newark.

Urban Farming Entrepreneurs

EcoVeggies entrepreneurs bring urban farming, fresh produce to Newark

By Barry Carter/Star-Ledger
Follow on Twitter
on December 03, 2010 at 8:00 AM

NEWARK — Seeds are sprinkled from a pizza shaker, the kind you’d normally see filled with red pepper flakes or parmesan cheese.

Tiny granules of arugula are in one. Komatsuna and fun jen, an Asian variety that produces a crunchy like cabbage in each leafy bite, pour out of another. Every 18 days or so, they get doused over a soft, white cloth fabric neatly attached to eight metal trays on two levels of a mechanical contraption at St. Philip’s Academy in Newark -> Read more … EcoVeggies entrepreneurs bring urban farming, fresh produce to Newark

EcoVeggies and ECOSpaces at St. Philips Academy

AeroFarms and EcoVeggies Partner with St. Philip’s Academy to Pioneer Aeroponic Farming in Newark

Newark, NJ (PRWEB) September 20, 2010

Aero Farm Systems LLC (AeroFarms), a provider of aeroponic technology and solutions, and EcoVeggies urban farm, today announced a joint commercial venture in Newark, New Jersey. EcoVeggies has provided the funding for the installation, AeroFarms developed the urban farming solution and St. Philips Academy has provided the location for the first aeroponic farm system in New Jersey.

Already home to a student run rooftop garden, St. Philip’s Academy has graduated into the future of urban agriculture through a new partnership with EcoVeggies, a company formed by three local entrepreneurs interested in using urban farming as part of a greater plan to revitalize the Newark metropolitan area. The school, which provides subsidized private school education to disadvantaged students in the Newark area, is now home to a one-of-a kind aeroponic growing structure, which will revolutionize the future of farming -> Read more …. EcoVeggies and Ecospaces at St. Philips Academy in .Newark, N