HYDROPONICS

Through hydroponics, CSU senior engineers are feeding both their education and the campus community.

Written by Kirsten Kimbler

At Cleveland State, the future of agriculture isn’t happening on a farm — it’s happening in a lab, where crops are being grown without soil and sustainable crop production in an urban environment is being reimagined. 

At the center of it all are students.

Senior engineering students Grace Moon, Jamison Brennan and Connor O’Brien aren’t just studying systems — they’re building them. For months, the trio has designed, tested and maintained a hydroponic growing system inside the Washkewicz College of Engineering, producing crops that go straight back to the campus community.

Engineering students (from left to right) Connor O’Brien, Grace Moon and Jamison Brennan with the hydroponics system in the Washkewicz College of Engineering. Credits: Cleveland State University.

A New Way To Grow

Hydroponics replaces soil with nutrient-rich water, allowing plants to grow faster and with fewer resources.

“Because of that, you have a shorter growing cycle,” said Chris Rennison, CSU director of academic technologies. “You get to maturity much quicker and you do it with a lot fewer resources.”

The system uses significantly less water than traditional agriculture – up to 90% less, according to Rennison – and removes the limits of Ohio’s growing season.

“In Cleveland, you get 120 days of really good weather,” Rennison said. “ Hydroponics allows us to grow for 365 days a year.”

The project builds on the success of the FarmBot, another one of CSU’s advanced farming tools. But where FarmBot is bound by seasons, hydroponics opens the door to year-round production and continuous student involvement.

Developed in partnership with Crop King, an Ohio-based manufacturer of commercial greenhouse equipment and hydroponic systems, the CSU hydroponics system brings hands-on learning opportunities to engineering students.

“Education has always been a fairly big component of who Crop King is,” said Paul Brentlinger, Crop King Owner.

Hydroponics EdRack with butter lettuce, spinach and arugula. Credits: Kirsten Kimbler.

Butter lettuce growing in the Nutrient Film Technique (NFT) system. Credits: Kirsten Kimbler.

Engineering Growth

For Moon, Brennan and O’Brien, the system is more than a concept, it’s a responsibility.

Moon, a chemical engineering major and senior design team lead, collects data on the plants to monitor their health and evaluate the differences between growing systems. 

“I monitor EC (conductivity), pH and physical heights of the plants with help from others on the team,” Moon explained.

The group is tracking two different ways of growing hydroponically – Nutrient Film Technique (NFT) and the Bato bucket systems – to evaluate efficiency and performance.

Brennan, a computer science major, has taken the lead on building the project’s website and documenting their process and findings.

“I’ve been working on our website. Getting that hands-on experience has been helpful to my major by building a website from the ground up,” she said. 

Unlike other academic projects, the team truly gets to shape the direction of the research and explore experimentation far beyond the classroom. 

“It's a lot more independent because we had a grant that gave us goals to follow, but it's not like that's the only thing we're doing,” Brennan said. “We had to think outside the box and we had to plan a lot on our own. This [project] is us deciding the pace of it.”

That autonomy has pushed students beyond technical skills. For Brennan, who comes from a military background, the collaborative nature of the project has been a shift.

“Getting to work with [different majors] is a new experience for me, because I came from the military where I was working with everybody who had the same job as me,” Brennan said. “It’s been nice getting the work with different students. Working with different generations has also been helpful for me.”

Moon shared that sentiment, pointing to the interpersonal side of engineering.

“It helps us flex our soft skills’ muscles in order to become a better engineer and a better person,” Moon said. 

Like any hands-on project, both Moon and Brennan experienced challenges that tested their problem-solving skills.

For Moon, the most challenging aspect was “maintaining the valve and pump settings in order to keep a proper amount of water flowing to the plants.”

She explained that if there is too much water, the plants can be oversaturated and the systems may leak, but too little water stunts the plants’ growth. 

“Finding the sweet spot of operation is key to healthy and efficient plant growth,” she said.

Similarly, Brennan explained that the biggest difficulties were building the initial system and finding the sources of “a lot of leaks.”

Those challenges became part of the learning process and a source of personal growth.

“This has been a good experience for me to learn to relax and be more patient,” Brennan said. “It's taught me patience with other people, which I was kind of lacking at the beginning of the project.”

Grace Moon on first crop harvest of butter lettuce, Feb. 23, 2026. Credits: CSU Senior Design Team.

Growing for Good

The impact of the project is flourishing beyond the lab.

With support from the College of Health and the Recreation Center, the system contributes fresh produce to CSU’s Lift Up Vikes! food pantry. The first crops, planted in January, were harvested just 39 days later — yielding 80 heads of butter lettuce, all donated.

For students, that moment made the work tangible.

“Knowing that all of the time we put in had a tangible improvement for people in our community was very rewarding,” Moon said. “Directly [impacting] people in a positive way is very motivating and encouraging.”

For Judy Ausherman, Ph.D., professor of health education, the project also reconnects students to Cleveland’s broader history of gardening and self-sufficiency.

“We have a great history of gardening, going back to before food stamps,” Ausherman said. “Children lost this art of growing food when we gave food stamps, and you can go to the grocery store. That’s a part of our history and we need to get back to that.”

The Future of Farming at CSU

As the system continues to grow, faculty see it evolving into something larger than a single project.

“The future is that it becomes an interdisciplinary laboratory,” Rennison said. “We have such a strong history with engineering and with health, but there are so many other people who could benefit from being part of this partnership.”

For the students who built it, that future is already taking shape — one harvest, adjustment and experiment at a time.