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US (PA): Students build vertical farm to bring fresh food to Pittsburgh

While some Pitt students struggle to keep their houseplants alive, sophomore Vinh Luong and his team are using a school of fish and a shipping container to grow an entire farm.

In March, Luong, a computer science major, and his project partner Joe DiPietro, a sophomore actuarial sciences major, won $10,000 in seed funds from the Betaburgh competition to fund a self-sufficient mini farm that uses fish farming to grow plants.

In their presentation at BetaBurgh, a competition that ended up funding the project, the duo explained how downtown Pittsburgh is a food desert, meaning it has no local sources of fresh produce. Luong and DiPietro saw aquaponics — the use of fish to grow food — as a way to bring fresh leafy greens to an urban area.

When Luong arrived at Pitt in 2015, he realized that not many people had ever heard of aquaponics and decided to put his entrepreneurial passion to the test.

“I wanted to create a system to not only educate people about aquaponics but also build these systems throughout Pittsburgh so that people could actually benefit from them,” Luong said.

Read more at The Pitt News
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