Local Grow Farms is pleased to help the Student Farmers organization by providing logistical support to the growing roster of student members in the U.S. As the organization expands internationally, Local Grow Farms will continue to lend support through strategic partnerships and funding vehicles around the world. To learn more visit Student Farmers.

Here is a preview of some of the language and imagery from the Student Farmers website:

Student Farmers is a growing group of students who are committed to in-home and in-school sustainable farming as a means to promote physical fitness and environmental stewardship.

Our Mission: To improve health and nutrition education, combat the challenges of climate change, and support each other in generating some revenue to help pay for college.

Get your Gear on

In addition to growing fresh, affordable, and pesticide free food, our Student Farmers team has found a sustainable apparel manufacturer that produces the shirts from 60% organic cotton and 40% recycled poly rPET blend that makes the fabric more durable and heavyweight. It saves at least 4 plastic bottles from ending up in a landfill, or worse. Click Sustainable T-Shirt to learn more and order.

Our vision is to increase knowledge about the advantages of eating more heathy and locally grown vegetables across the range of high school and college age students. We also hope that many of the parents of the students will learn from their children’s engagement in our organization and adopt a diet with less processed foods to reduce the growing cost of healthcare.

As we build out the national Student Farmers network, for now our website addresses (URLs) each link into this page. Our URLs include:

Singular: studentfarmer.com | studentfarmer.org | studentfarmer.net

Plural: studentfarmers.com | studentfarmers.org | studentfarmers.net

The complexity of establishing a non-profit 501c3 takes time, and we are exploring the options given that we hope to have a Student Farmers Foundation as part of the “.org” to raise money and support underserved communities, such as Food Deserts, in cities and rural communities. The non-profit would run parallel to the commercial side of Student Farmers operations and may also serve well to develop economies of scale to reduce the cost of supplies such as seeds, grow mats, grow trays and grow lights for our student members.

We were inspired to see how cost-effective in-home farming is for the production of a crop such as microgreens, and these two videos below may help give you perspective on the opportunity to help pay for a portion of college with the proceeds from microgreen sales. Plus, they grow fast (in about a week), have up to 40x the nutrients of their mature counterparts, and taste great.

The microgreen packaging in the photo above looks like clear plastic, but it is made from corn starch without any petroleum products, and it is 100% compostable.

Video (2.5 minutes): In-Home Recruiting Visit – Local Grow Farms’ Charlie Szoradi share his passion and advantages of microgreen production with a high school sophomore and a senior.

Video (25.5 minutes): DIY for Growing Microgreens like a Pro!

Social Media and Best Practices Resource

Social media has come under increasing scrutiny relative to privacy and self-esteem. Like any tool, its all about how you use it. We see Instagram for photographs and YouTube for videos as viable platforms for members of Student Farmers to showcase their plant growth successes, give tips, and also post content with questions about challenges that they may face. Our goal is to use social media as a Best Practices Resource to advance the Future of Food. With over 15 million high school students and over 19 million college students in the U.S., the potential pool of student insights and content is large and hopefully growing!

For Student Farmers, we’re just getting ready to start with social media and create a resource to share tips and best practices for in-home and in-school farming. For Instagram: Student_Farmers: https://www.instagram.com/student_farmers/

For videos, the In-Home Recruiting video is currently up on YouTube here, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ud6HCYF7qho&t=1s and we plan to build out a YouTube Channel specifically for Student Farming as an additional best practices resource.