(soft music) - [Lady] Innovation's such an important part of any successful business.

- There's an immense amount of opportunity to be able to bring technology and innovations particularly around foods, whether they're apps, whether it's technology that helps individuals with their diabetes and cardiovascular disease that makes it more accessible to low income and more food insecure communities.

Then, then I think if we center community's voice around what it wants to see is where innovation can emerge.

So what are the new solutions?

What are the types of businesses or entrepreneurship opportunities that community wants to see in their pursuit of developing more food enterprises or a broader food ecosystem for a place?

(soft music) - Yep.

So right now we're in North Minneapolis.

We're actually inside a freight farm.

This is a hydroponic farm where we grow food vertically in these towers.

Hydroponics is a way of growing food without soil.

Instead, we use these different grow plugs that mimic soil.

They're made of coconut husk and peat moss, a mixture.

And the water that we incorporate has all the nutrients that a plant would usually get from the soil.

This type of technology is fairly new to the Midwest.

This technology is so important here because it gets so cold in the winter.

The growing seasons are unpredictable and shifting and this type of technology we can use year round, get food to people year round at all different price points.

So we transplant all of the seedlings when they're the old enough.

And so these towers, it's a PVC type plastic.

On the inside is a BPA free foam.

Is hydroponics the future of farming?

And to that, I would say hydroponics is now.

And I think it holds a lot of promise for the future.

I don't think that hydroponics will ever replace soil farming and I hope it doesn't.

But I hope it acts as a type of season extension in place of some hoop houses and greenhouse operations that are already up.

(soft music) - It's an eternal optimist that always puts a seed in the ground.

And so in addition to optimism, our farmers are continually reinventing and optimizing their operations.

We've helped farmers who are interested in learning about season extension, growing crops that are not traditional Minnesota crops such as ginger, turmeric, really cool crops that farmers can get a better bang for their buck for.

- Now, we can't be scared of change when it can really help us adapt to a more efficient and more sustainable model.

And it's about how do we really use these technological changes for positive and for good things for the community.

Really embracing technology, but still having the ethos of having the community behind us and being servants and stewards of our community as well.

(soft music)