ORLANDO, Fla. — AdventHealth Celebration is prioritizing nutrition and sustainability through an innovative program at the hospital. Leaders are utilizing a Freight Farm to grow produce.
“Our idea behind the Freight Farm is we were receiving a lot of produce from suppliers, by the time it got to us, and we put it on the salad bar, it was only lasting a couple hours, it would get wilted,” Sean Toor, the Operations Manager for the Freight Farms at AdventHealth, said. “We were having a lot of waste.”
The Freight Farms are tucked back in a parking lot at AdventHealth’s Celebration campus. From seed to harvest, the eight-week operation produces 180 pounds of lettuce every week for each of the three campuses it feeds.
“To maximize our output, we really stuck to lettuce because it grows so well,” Toor said. “It really stands out when you see it on the salad bar. The visual aspect, the taste, the flavor, the nutrition behind it is much higher than what we were receiving from other suppliers.”
Toor walked Channel 9 through the rows of red and green spring mix they are constantly growing.
“This was a way that we’re able to grow a lot of food in a small space,” Toor said. “We’re able to grow nine acres of produce in eight parking spaces between our farms.
The self-sustaining farm produces its own water through its AC system and is controlled solely through an app on a phone.
Toor hopes this encourages hospital visitors to utilize food as medicine too.
“We just want to have better, cleaner, fresher produce for our community,” Toor said.
AdventHealth hopes to add two freight farms to its fleet by the end of the year. Hospital leaders want to have freight farms for all of its campuses in the future.
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