Farm Cart

The Farm Cart represents an exciting proof of concept: a highly visible, modular, and participatory tool that embodies the larger aspirations of MIT Farm while remaining flexible enough to adapt to different uses and contexts.
Design Team:
Zachary Rapaport, Courage Dzidula Kpodo, Aleksandra Banaś Build Team: Zachary Rapaport, Courage Dzidula KpodoBuild Advisor: Christopher DewartMaterials: Reclaimed pine wood, polycarbonate panels, stainless steel sheetSize: 2.5 x 6 x 6.5 ft.Date: July - August 2025
The Farm Cart project was conceived as a mobile, adaptable, and visible object to anchor MIT Farm on campus. A cart allows us to navigate the challenges of space allocation and permanence by creating a growing space that can move between classrooms, dorms, and outdoor sites. It is both a testing platform and engagement tool as something that can travel to different communities across MIT while embodying the broader ambitions of the MIT Farm project.

In this sense, the cart is an embodiment of MIT Farm’s larger vision: modular, seasonal, participatory, and circular. It carries the “DNA” of the MIT Farm project in tangible form, while remaining flexible enough to adapt to different users, contexts, and scales.
The farm cart at the Kresge Oval during its inaugural picnic


Design

The design priorities centered on flexibility, adaptability, and engagement. The cart needed to work across campus in different settings and seasons serving as a greenhouse-like enclosure in winter, a tool for storage and preservation, and an open planter in warmer months.

A key feature is its two detachable towers, and mini planters, which allow for distributed growing. These elements can be placed on windowsills, in classrooms, or in community spaces, extending the farm’s reach beyond a single site. This mobility also fosters ownership and stewardship, inviting student groups, labs, and campus partners to adopt and adapt the system to their own purposes, creating a shared responsibility for its care and evolution.


Construction Process
Initial design and consultation process

Initial consultation process with Chris Dewart at the Architecture Department Wood Workshop at N51. 
We examined existing cart typologies and ways to adaptively reuse them.











Material preparation

Ripping the wood and reinforcing the base structure. Both the wood and the base plate were recycled from material leftovers of previous projects in the N51 courtyard. 












Superstructure build

Building out the vertical frame and bracing the structure. We fastened the pieces with screws, bolt-and-nuts, and dowels.












Envelope and finishing

Adding the greenhouse envelope and building the detachable planters. The envelope was made from polycarbonate panels, also repurposed from a previous project in the yard.




Material Circularity

We sought to embed material circularity directly into the design and the program of the cart. In addition to repurposing material leftovers (wood, polycarbonate panels and the steel base plate), we repurposed pipette tip boxes from campus labs sourced through MIT EHS to serve as seedling containers. This creates a tangible link between MIT’s research culture and its food systems, while diverting a significant waste stream.
This initial step continues into the program of the cart, with efforts underway to hold seedling workshops using these repurposed pippette tip containers.











The mobile farm cart was constructed from up-cycled materials, resulting in both retained biogenic carbon and avoided embodied emissions. The reused white pine structure stores approximately 109.8 kgCO₂e in biogenic carbon, representing carbon removed from the atmosphere and retained in the wood for the duration of the cart’s service life. In addition, the reuse of the pine avoids an estimated 21.6 kgCO₂e of emissions that would otherwise have resulted from the production of new softwood lumber. The cart also incorporates reused hollow polycarbonate panels, whose reuse avoids approximately 54.3 kgCO₂e associated with new polycarbonate production, and an up-cycled steel kitchen countertop, avoiding a further ~38.7 kgCO₂e of emissions by displacing new steel manufacture. 

Overall, the farm cart keeps roughly 220 kilograms of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere by reusing existing materials instead of making new ones. This is comparable to avoiding about 550 miles of driving in a typical North American car, roughly the distance from Boston to Raleigh. While modest in scale, the value of the project lies in demonstrating how small, everyday construction choices, especially reuse, can meaningfully reduce emissions by extending the life of materials that already exist.



The Farm Cart was primarily to demonstrate that it is possible to grow food in tight spaces, that are not necessarily fixed and may even be mobile. Due to this, it was important for it be an engagement piece, to activate and programming for people to gather around. We periodically wheel the farm cart to student events on MIT’s campus, such as this Friday Happy Hour by the Architecture Department where it was transformed into a food and music hub.