NMSU: Exploring the Potential of Container Farms Out West
February 13, 2025 Container farming took New Mexico State University (NMSU) by storm in 2020. That fall, the university partnered with Tri-State Generation and Transmission, a regional not-for-profit cooperative power supplier, and the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), a national organization focused on energy resilience, to put a 40-foot-container farm outside of its campus in Grants, N.M. The farm was well-received by students and faculty, sparking an engineering-focused effort at its Las Cruces campus four years later.
For the 2024-2025 school year, NMSU’s College of Agricultural, Consumer, and Environmental Sciences (ACES), Dona Ana Community College (DACC), and College of Engineering joined forces to build a prototype container farm for research purposes. By working together, both ag and engineering students can learn from one another while getting a better understanding of the controlled environment agriculture (CEA) space.
“There are some real challenges in container farms,” says Alexander Wilson, statewide extension agent for the Center of Excellence in Sustainable Food and Agricultural Systems. “We want to provide a good experience for the undergraduate students who are involved, and we want to highlight the need for researching and prototyping agricultural technologies.”
While they come with economic challenges, container farms could make a positive impact in rural areas across New Mexico. | Photo: NMSU
Understanding the Need for Container Farms
Many residents in rural areas of U.S. states have limited access to fresh produce and face food insecurity. This is mainly due to climate change, drought, and the high cost of farmland.
“New Mexico is a really interesting environment for food scarcity challenges,” says Wilson. “We’re very limited in our access to fresh produce. We have low-income rural areas and small population sizes, which makes it really hard to sustain local food production here.”
By having container farms in New Mexico, the state can address these problems and help support rural communities. However, container farming isn’t cheap, which makes it especially challenging in low-income areas.
“It may not be possible to replicate the scale and affordability of traditional agriculture with vertical farming,” says Wilson. “But vertical farms are still evolving. Container farms are the natural progression of ag tech, and they have the potential to provide a step forward for certain kinds of specialized agriculture.”
At NMSU’s Las Cruces campus, students are building a prototype container farm from scratch. | Photo: NMSU
Building the Prototype
At NMSU’s College of Engineering, graduating seniors must complete a capstone project. The container farm serves as one of those projects this year, with students analyzing the power, temperature, and humidity in enclosed growing spaces. They will use their findings to build their own container farm from the ground up.
“We’re doing research on the ag tech and control systems that are already out there,” says Brooke Montgomery, professor of practice at the College of Engineering. “Our team is trying to build a control system for container farms from scratch. We have students who work on the whole design and research analysis of it.”
The prototype is still under construction, but NMSU plans to have it completed by May. Once it’s built, students will conduct research inside; it may also be used for experiments at research stations outside of the university.
“There will be benchmarking done and at some point, this will be an active research platform,” says Wilson. “We’ve also been talking to the farm and ranch museum here because they want to make it into a public exhibit for CEA.”
Looking at Numbers
Both Wilson and Montgomery come from business backgrounds and are interested in the economics of container farms and how to operate them practically in a commercial business structure. In rural New Mexico, there’s very little access to electricity, which is an essential (and costly) part of indoor farming.
“There’s definitely interest in container farming in New Mexico, but that doesn’t mean we know how it will work exactly,” says Montgomery. “We’re doing research, and we’re trying to make it make sense where you’re not spending all this money to run it.”
CEA operations often run into labor concerns as well, both finding it and funding it. By training students to operate a container farm and think innovatively, Wilson and Montgomery hope to send the next generation of CEA professionals into the workforce fully prepared.
“Part of a college’s responsibilities is to produce a workforce,” shares Wilson. “We need to expose our students to cutting-edge ideas and cutting-edge technology. That’s what you need to produce a labor force that’s not just thinking about how we did things before, but how we can innovate to do things better.”
For more information about NMSU’s CEA program, go here.