Under the supervision of faculty from the Agricultural and Biological Engineering Department, graduate students and the Illini Urban Farmers Group will work together to design, build, and operate a hydroponics system to simultaneously generate leafy green produce for human consumption and investigate the use of wastewater in these systems as a demonstration of advanced sustainability practices in agricultural engineering.

The graduate students will build the system off of these preexisting plans and experiments performed in the department. Given that these experiments have been successful previously, the updated model will be used to educate and be implemented by the undergraduate students under direction of both the faculty and senior students.

The department and college already arranges classes, tours, demonstrations, and visits from campus visitors at this site, which would support our community engagement initiatives. As this project is expected to last two years, there will be numerous cycles of growth of different leafy greens, testing variables that maximize the hydroponics production and evaluate the quality of the food grown with wastewater for human consumption. In addition to designing the hydroponics system and collecting data, students will work together to divulge these results to numerous stakeholders.