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“You can grow anything. People have grown some crazy stuff with the towers,” Nate Storey, a tower farmer in Wyoming stated in a recent article from Civil Eats. “We’ve grown tomatoes and very large statured crops, watermelons. It works until they’re about 20 pounds apiece and then things start falling.”
Growing indoors in rural Rocky Mountain West, tower farms like these help rural areas provide fresh produce to locals without strain of the harsh climates during winter. Wyoming is considered to have the largest ranches and farms, but the fewest number of vegetable farms of any state.
Having an easily accessible source for local fresh produce is important to Wyoming as many foods are shipped in from other areas and may not stay fresh as long. Latinos living in rural areas need access to fresh healthy foods, and tower gardens may assist in providing more opportunities for economic and health vitality.
Karen Panter, the University of Wyoming’s horticulture extension specialist said in the article, “Because we are a rural state, we don’t have, or did not historically have a lot of our own production. Virtually everything other than beef or a few other crops have been brought in from other states or abroad.”
Expanding local food resources and opening new job opportunities through this type of gardening and farming may help provide fresh foods for Latino families.
By The Numbers
1
Supermarket
for every Latino neighborhood, compared to 3 for every non-Latino neighborhood
