At a glance
Project Indoor Farm provides University of Washington students with a hands-on space to explore sustainable food systems,… Read full summary
- Funding received
- 2025-2026
- Mini
- Awarded
- $4,481
- Funding partners
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- Services and Activities Fee (SAF)
Project Indoor Farm provides University of Washington students with a hands-on space to explore sustainable food systems, hydroponics, and engineering-driven innovation. Operating out of Condon Hall, students maintain vertical hydroponic systems producing dozens of crops while developing automated nutrient and growth-monitoring technologies that reduce labor and improve crop efficiency. Now, Project Indoor Farm will implement precision-dosing and sensor-driven systems, enabling longer harvest cycles, larger-scale data analytics, and new research opportunities. The project fosters collaboration, technical skill-building, and open-access innovation in sustainable farming, creating lasting impact for both students and the broader hydroponics community. Funds will be used to purchase all required materials to implement this automated approach.
Project Indoor Farm has been a vibrant space for students at UW to build a community centered around ideals of sustainability and innovation, allowing them to develop technical skills and knowledge to build food systems in a regenerative manner. We operate out of a dedicated lab space in Condon Hall, where we maintain two vertical drip-wick hydroponic systems capable of producing up to 260 heads of lettuce in a four-week cycle. With more than 40+ active members, the farm is sustained through daily maintenance sessions and has served as a testing ground and research space for growing dozens of crops hydroponically.
Our current efforts are focused on introducing engineering-focused initiatives into our farm in order to increase the scale, consistency, and quality of our day-to-day operations, allowing us to open up important avenues for larger scale hydroponics research. Over the last year, we’ve developed robust nutrient regulation (automation) control systems in the farm, leveraging embedded computing and machine learning technologies to increase crop-efficiency and cut down on required human labor significantly.
Concurrently, we are developing novel ways to correlate visual growth metrics with sensor data, allowing for large scale data-analytics that can generate important insights into crop efficiency. Throughout the development process of our projects, we’ve been closely tracking and contributing to open-source hydroponics projects like the Mycodo Environmental Monitoring and Regulation System, ensuring our work reaches a global community of sustainable farming initiatives.
The systems that we’re developing will be instrumental to the continued function of our farm as a student-run RSO, especially during quarter breaks in which members are often not available to maintain the farm. Reduced on-site maintenance requirements will help keep our crops alive through these breaks, enabling us to grow crops with longer harvest cycles, such as strawberries. Furthermore, our precision-dosing technology will allow us to have many orders of magnitude more control over growth conditions for the plants, opening up many technical research opportunities for students to explore.
The equipment that we acquire through this fund will enable us to fully implement these systems, allowing us to continue fostering Project IF as an open space for collaboration, learning, and innovation around ideas of sustainability, with a deep technical backbone. We hope that as we go through the hands-on engineering process of implementing our projects, we will continue to uncover unexplored ideas and opportunities that can leave a lasting impact on the emerging field of sustainable farming and the students who work with us to explore it.
Request amount and budget
Plans for financial longevity
CSF Funding will primarily supplement ongoing automation and engineering research projects on the farm. The materials and equipment we are purchasing with this money will last for five or more years, allowing these projects to continue for the foreseeable future. In addition, we have funding to sustain our normal operations cost via our affiliation with FSNH (Food Systems, Nutrition, and Health) and through our previous CSF grant. We plan for CSF funding to be a way to purchase more expensive, longer term items that will allow our farm to continue functioning for the next 5+ years.
Phase 1 — Nutrient Monitoring Expansion (6–8 weeks)
- Weeks 1–2: Finalize BLE-mesh firmware/software between server, sensors, and actuators; bench tests with simulated loads.
- Weeks 3–4: Install expanded monitoring hardware (EC/pH/temp flow sensors, gateways) on both towers; wiring and enclosure fit-up.
- Weeks 5–8: Close monitoring period; calibrations, bug fixes, alert thresholds, and reliability burn-in.
- Deliverables: Validated sensor network, calibration logs, uptime ≥95% over 2 consecutive weeks.
Phase 1 (in parallel) — Nutrient Distribution/Dosing (10–14 weeks)
- Weeks 1–2: Finalize 3D designs; fabricate/print pump mounts and manifolds; leak/pressure tests.
- Weeks 3–6: Firmware/app development for full-scale dosing (PID/EC-pH setpoint logic, safety mechanisms, audit logs).
- Weeks 7–10: Integrated wet testing with inert solution; characterize dosing accuracy and response time.
- Weeks 11–14 (as needed): Iterations on tubing, check valves, priming routines; finalize SOPs
- Deliverables: Precision dosing to ±0.05 EC / ±0.05 pH, auto-shutoff on faults.
Phase 1 (in parallel) — Computer Vision (6 weeks)
- Weeks 1–2: Camera rig install; data pipeline for image capture, labeling, and storage tied to sensor timestamps.
- Weeks 3–6: Baseline growth-metric extraction (crop volume, color index) and correlation dashboard with EC/pH
- Deliverables: CV dashboard; weekly growth analytics report
Phase 2 — Final Integration & Deployment (4+ weeks)
- Weeks 1–2: End-to-end test with live crops; alerts/escalation drill; documentation (wiring, configs, SOPs)
- Weeks 3–4: Training for officers/project leads; handoff checklist; publish open-source configs back to Mycodo.
- Weeks 5+: Continue ideating project ideas to expand using implemented systems (e.g. larger scale data aggregation/analysis, growth forecasting, live-stream)
- Deliverables: Production release, trained operators, public repo updates
Plans for long-term project management
Since Project IF is entirely student run, we necessarily have a robust club leadership structure to keep our farm operating. Our club’s main leadership takes an officer/member format, generally with 5-7 officers a year to run all aspects of club operations. In order to ensure that we always have officers able to run the farm, we recruit for new officers every single spring quarter to replace any graduating seniors. We prioritize choosing freshman or sophomore students with more time to grow as leaders of the club, and currently have two sophomores on our board.
Furthermore, we employ a horizontal leadership structure when it comes to project teams, led by official “project leads” who communicate directly with the officer team. These positions are less competitive and aim to offer accessible opportunities to contribute specific projects to the farm. Our criteria for accepting these positions are based on demonstrated responsibility, understanding, and foresight when it comes to project implementation. This kind of engagement from our students allows us to be confident that we’ll have capable leadership candidates to step up if our farm is in need.
Problem statement
The University of Washington has a growing need for accessible, research-driven sustainability projects that combine technical innovation with environmental stewardship. While UW has several food system initiatives, few provide reliable and hands-on opportunities for students to apply engineering and data-driven methods to sustainability challenges. Project Indoor Farm addresses this gap by launching a project to integrate automated hydroponics systems into our student-run urban farm environment, allowing us to apply industry-relevant engineering fundamentals to tangibly advance sustainable technologies.
Traditional farming methods require high water and nutrient inputs, are space-intensive, and depend heavily on human labor—barriers that make sustainable food production challenging in urban contexts like Seattle. Our initiative responds to this issue by developing and implementing precision-controlled hydroponic systems that minimize waste, reduce labor requirements, and optimize crop growth, using a wide range of cutting-edge technologies from embedded computing design to machine learning and computer vision.
The idea was informed deeply by our lived experience maintaining the UW Indoor Farm year-round, where inconsistent human availability and environmental fluctuations posed real challenges to sustaining crop health. By automating nutrient delivery and environmental monitoring, we aim to make the farm more resilient and scalable, empowering students to explore sustainable technologies that have applications beyond campus.
Problem context
Project IF sees ourselves as a part of the broader food systems opportunities at UW. We offer year-round, accessible opportunities for students to get involved with sustainability. We support the various other opportunities to do the same thing around campus and are always open to collaboration with such entities. We open our space to any UW undergraduate or graduate student looking to do a research project, helping to lower barriers for participation. Hands-on experience with engineering and research in sustainability is especially meaningful, as there are not many similar opportunities, particularly at the undergraduate level, that are openly accessible to the average student. We routinely participate in campus-wide food systems events and collaborate with sustainability-oriented organizations. Our goal is to be another resource on campus where students can get hands-on experience with innovative, sustainable solutions to global problems.
Measure the impacts
| Impact / goal | Metric(s) of success | UW stakeholders impacted |
|---|---|---|
| Create an accessible research space where students can develop and apply technical skills and knowledge in sustainable engineering and food systems. | 40+ students engaged, 5+ sustainable engineering projects accommodated, 3+ sustainability research projects accommodated | Undergraduate, Graduate |
| Grow crops sustainably for education and local distribution (Woodland Park Zoo, club members). | Saved 70%+ water compared to traditional farming, Create up to 30% greater yield by leveraging nutrient insights and quarter breaks, Reduction in manual labor hours by 40% through automation | Undergraduate, Graduate |
| Create a community educational space for understanding and applying sustainable farming technologies. | 80+ students engaged, 12+ class tours scheduled this academic year, Presentations for high school students on UW tours | Undergraduate, Graduate, Alumni, Academic staff, Admin staff |
Communication tactics and tools
Our key communication tactics are tabling, tours, Instagram, Discord, and weekly events. As our farm needs daily maintenance, we offer a 1 hour officer-led session open to any UW student every single day of the week. These are opportunities for students to learn about general farm maintenance and interact with engineering project progress on the farm. For example, last year students were able to observe sensors on the farm as they collected data on the EC and pH of our nutrient solution on one side of our towers. They were then able to compare this data to manually collected data, learning about the technology behind it while also recording it for further project development.
We advertise our maintenance schedule and research progress through our Instagram and our main club communication platform, discord. We also advertise opportunities for students to get involved in ongoing research on the farm, as well as pursue their own projects. In addition, we host workshops and potlucks around 8 times a year. We also frequently host tours with other sustainability-oriented RSOs and classes, including BeautifyUDub and ENVIR 240. During our general meetings, tours, workshops, and potlucks, updates about the progress of engineering research on the farm are shared.
Outreach communication plan
One of our primary goals as an RSO is to build community. We have many communication systems set up to make sure that all UW students know that they belong. We continue to table at all relevant events every year, such as the Activities Fair, Engineering RSO Fair, and the Earth Day Fair. We utilize Instagram to share our progress with the entire community and make information about all of our weekly events accessible. We host tours for UW classes, increasing awareness of our farm and its technicalities. We’ve presented to high schoolers touring UW, exposing future students to the ways they can take part in sustainable farming through our club. Looking to the future, we have goals to have partnerships with local high schools in order to provide sustainability workshops for students in the greater Seattle area.
Student involvement
Our project is entirely volunteer based. We encourage students to identify a problem they see on the farm and collaborate with other club members to develop a solution to improve our farm. Anyone is able to join the automation team at any given time. Interested students can attend weekly automation meetings whose time and location are sent in the Project IF Discord channel. Students can participate in ongoing automation projects or apply to start their own project to explore new avenues for research on the farm. Any UW student who joins is able to get a basic knowledge of hydroponic systems which can be applicable to other scenarios or work opportunities.