Growing Green with Levo International

By Jen­na Out­calt | UConn Jour­nal­ism
Decem­ber 10, 2025

What can be done about food inse­cu­ri­ty in cities? It’s a ques­tion that vex­es many, but the steps tak­en to address often seem insignif­i­cant or inef­fec­tive. How­ev­er, some com­mu­ni­ty mem­bers are step­ping up to cre­ate a more sus­tain­able and afford­able food sys­tem in their city. I spoke with mem­bers and part­ners of Levo Inter­na­tion­al, a non­prof­it using land direct­ly in the city to cre­ate farms in the com­mu­ni­ty.

Tran­script:

*Cars dri­ving by* 

[JENNA] I’m just over a mile from the high­way in North Hart­ford, stand­ing in what for a long time a vacant lot. Now, it’s over­flow­ing with fruit and veg­eta­bles, all cre­at­ed by a Hart­ford-based non­prof­it work­ing to fight food inse­cu­ri­ty. 

[MUSIC] 

[JENNA] Food inse­cu­ri­ty is on the rise in the Unit­ed States. Accord­ing to the USDA, about 18.8 mil­lion peo­ple are in food deserts, mean­ing they are low-income and don’t have easy access to a gro­cery store. In Con­necti­cut alone, over one in sev­en res­i­dents strug­gle with food inse­cu­ri­ty. 

Levo Inter­na­tion­al, devel­oped by UConn grad­u­ate Chris­t­ian Hei­den, has cre­at­ed a farm direct­ly in the city, and they’re not stop­ping there. Levo offi­cial­ly start­ed in 2016, when Chris­t­ian had a very ambi­tious idea for his Eagle Scout project. 

[CHRISTIAN HEIDEN] I basi­cal­ly stum­bled in the back­yard of my Scout Mas­ters house on sim­pli­fied hydro­pon­ics in par­tic­u­lar, and he had done it in the Domini­can Repub­lic close to 30 years ago now, and he explained the ben­e­fits and how sim­ple it was to build and oper­ate, and I was like, I’ve nev­er even heard of this. This is nowhere. Why is this not every­where? Um, and so that was kind of where we start­ed. 

I was like let me let me build a hydro­pon­ic. It worked in DR so let me build a hydro­pon­ic green­house in Haiti. Uh, and that was kind of my, I was like that’ll be my Eagle Scout project. Turns out the Boy Scouts, not huge fans of the idea of send­ing a 16-year-old to Haiti. So it end­ed up that I did my offi­cial project for my high school in West Hart­ford and then went down sep­a­rate­ly with my father and my broth­er. 

We start­ed work­ing with this Iowan-based mis­sion­ary orga­ni­za­tion, Many Hands for Haiti, down there and that’s where we start­ed um work­ing. And you know, fell in love with the coun­try and the peo­ple and most excit­ing­ly is our sys­tems worked. Uh and so that’s kind of where it took off from as we were like, “Okay, this actu­al­ly works. This has huge poten­tial because of the water sav­ing, because of the, you know, the read­i­ly acces­si­ble mate­ri­als, uh we can make this work here.” 

[MUSIC] 

[JENNA] So, what does sim­pli­fied hydro­pon­ic farm­ing actu­al­ly look like? Chris­t­ian took me out­side to show me the rows of hor­i­zon­tal pipes lined up on wood­en frames, each one blos­som­ing with food.  

[CHRISTIAN] So, every sys­tem is the same. So, there’s — all it is, there’s a bin at the base, which is kind of like a 27-gal­lon Home Depot tote. The water gets pumped up to the top pipe, and then it grav­i­ty feeds down and splash­es back into the bin. And so the idea is basi­cal­ly that there’s always water in the pipes. 

So like right now the pump’s not run­ning in this sys­tem, but these pep­per plants still have access to water. And that’s the mod­el that we’ve been devel­op­ing for Haiti, is that you can run the pump only a cou­ple times a day and still have real­ly good pro­duc­tion. 

All these frames are built by peo­ple. A lot of them were built by vol­un­teers or by our work­force devel­op­ment pro­gram this sum­mer. Uh, so they’re very easy to make. So any­body can make them. You need some drills, some 2x4s and we put them togeth­er. So we could build a farm of this size real­ly with­in a cou­ple months.  

The incred­i­ble thing about these tow­er gar­dens is that they’re super flex­i­ble on what you can do. So, you know, we’re look­ing at pars­ley, but if you go and you look at, you know, just walk down this row of sys­tems. 

If you look, right, you can see you’ve got broc­coli, we’ve got pep­pers, right, four dif­fer­ent types of pep­pers. There’s three dif­fer­ent types of sys­tems that we do here. So you’ve got uh six pipe sys­tems, which are for your leafy greens, your let­tuces, your col­lard greens, things like that. And that’s 218 plants in one 20-ft sys­tem. So you can basi­cal­ly pro­duce about 36 heads of let­tuce a week. Uh out of one of our hydro­pon­ic sys­tems. We’ve got about 100 here.  

[JENNA] For the first few years, Levo was main­ly focused on Haiti. Although there are still con­tin­u­ing projects there, the orga­ni­za­tion has expand­ed both inter­na­tion­al­ly and back home in Hart­ford.  

[CHRISTIAN] We’ve done some work in Oax­a­ca, Mex­i­co and work­ing some school sys­tems in Oax­a­ca and we work now in Puer­to Rico and Yabu­coa. And then in the US, for the last 5 years, we’ve been play­ing around with first what we did in Haiti as a back­yard mod­el of hydro­pon­ics. But we real­ized very quick­ly that if we want­ed to fix the food sys­tem, we need­ed to actu­al­ly get into the farm­ing space. 

And so, then we for the last cou­ple years have basi­cal­ly end­ed up devel­op­ing our own approach to urban farm­ing, scal­ing up sim­pli­fied hydro­pon­ics and build­ing, basi­cal­ly, this real­ly excit­ing mod­el that does­n’t just — it’s not just a food source. We’ve built a mod­el that’s real­ly a primer for com­mu­ni­ty devel­op­ment, lever­ag­ing farm­ing and food pro­duc­tion. So, we can very quick­ly and effec­tive­ly beau­ti­fy, cre­ate employ­ment oppor­tu­ni­ties, and cre­ate food access, and uh you know, just real­ly uplift a com­mu­ni­ty and edu­ca­tion and work­force devel­op­ment, and we can do it at a cost point that’s just insane.  

[JENNA] Levo dis­trib­utes its food par­tial­ly through a com­mu­ni­ty-sup­port­ed agri­cul­ture farm share or CSA, where peo­ple pay upfront for a share of the pro­duce. They also have a farm stand that they’re look­ing to expand into a year-round mar­ket. The rest of the food is donat­ed.  

[CHRISTIAN] The goal is not to donate, is to is to get it in peo­ple’s hands buy­ing it because that cre­ates a sus­tain­able rev­enue stream for us that keeps this eco­nom­i­cal­ly sus­tain­able. The risk of grow­ing and donat­ing is just that you — if you run out of grant mon­ey or dona­tions, you can’t give any­one any­thing. And so the idea is can we low­er that price point? Can we sub­si­dize and under­write it with sales to the sub­ur­ban com­mu­ni­ties to make it afford­able and acces­si­ble for the com­mu­ni­ty here in the North End of Hart­ford?  

[CUREENE BLAKE] I take this real­ly seri­ous­ly because I was raised in Jamaica and my moth­er farmed, and it was her farm that ini­tial­ly sup­port­ed us to go to school before she got a job in the in the pub­lic sec­tor.  

[JENNA] That’s Cureene Blake. Her day­care in Hart­ford part­ners with Levo to teach the kids about agri­cul­ture and con­nect them to the food they eat.  

[CUREENE] We’ve done it every year. Every year we have, since we’ve got our sys­tem, we’ve done two or three crops with them pro­vid­ing the tech­ni­cal sup­port, trou­bleshoot­ing any prob­lem. Any­time I call, they’re always there.  

[SOUND EFFECTS] *chil­dren play­ing, shout­ing* 

[CUREENE] Day care, child­care in Con­necti­cut is going to a whole dif­fer­ent process and dif­fer­ent lev­els now. And so I’m envi­sion­ing that soon we can do some­thing like this in any fam­i­ly child­care. The land space that you need is min­i­mal. The, um, the amount of dai­ly atten­tion is min­i­mal, but the expe­ri­ence, the knowl­edge, the under­stand­ing is phe­nom­e­nal.  

They go inside with their one leaf of let­tuce, their lit­tle plas­tic fork, their two toma­toes that they picked, cut them up. And guess what? Chil­dren who don’t nor­mal­ly eat veg­eta­bles are eat­ing it because they grew it. And so, it gives them, even at that ten­der age, a lev­el of expe­ri­ence and a broad­er under­stand­ing that you could ever get from a book or from some­body actu­al­ly telling you that this is valu­able to you.  

[MUSIC] 

[RON WILLIAMS] My name is Cor­nelius Williams. I’m orig­i­nal­ly from the Caribbean, the Caribbean Island of St. Lucia, and I moved here in 2022. Um, I’m now the farm­ing direc­tor for Levo Inter­na­tion­al, but I actu­al­ly start­ed off as a vol­un­teer.  

[JENNA] Cor­nelius, who goes by Ron, has a back­ground in agri­cul­tur­al edu­ca­tion and man­age­ment. Now, he keeps the farm­ing oper­a­tions on track at Levo.  

[RON] So, my biggest role is to ensure that every­thing stays alive and pro­duc­tive. And that the team gen­er­al­ly knows where we’re head­ed and what we’re doing. But most of it is as we have sev­er­al loca­tions includ­ing our clients, the hos­pi­tals, oth­er com­pa­nies that we work with. There I can over­see to ensure that they them­selves are doing fine as well.  

Well, we’ve found out ear­ly on in, when I start­ed with lev­el is that a per­son just thinks every­thing comes from the store. They have no idea the process it takes to get fresh pro­duce to their homes. Um but we’re here try­ing to make it — we’re mak­ing it eas­i­er so any­one can grow some­thing for them­selves to live a hap­pi­er health­i­er life.  

[JENNA] Lev­o’s cur­rent site in Hart­ford was vacant for 25 years before they moved in. Since their lease began in Jan­u­ary, they’ve made it into a ful­ly func­tion­ing farm.  

[CHRISTIAN] Our pitch to the com­mu­ni­ty and increas­ing buy-in is that, you know, peo­ple are real­iz­ing what we can do all over the city and in their com­mu­ni­ty. 

So, that’s, you know, I think the revi­tal­iza­tion and the momen­tum is the is the big thing. And then pro­vid­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties for com­mu­ni­ty mem­bers, every month. There’s some kind of more indi­vid­u­al­ized com­mu­ni­ty ben­e­fits, but then, you know, we are trans­form­ing the com­mu­ni­ty, and we’re doing it at a speed that nobody would have thought pos­si­ble.  

I think the thing that’s real­ly excit­ing that Lev­o’s devel­oped is this like, very inclu­sive mod­el where we can do a whole lot with very lit­tle and it’s not — peo­ple think of us as a hydro­pon­ics com­pa­ny and we are, but we’re sig­nif­i­cant­ly more than that. 

Our mod­el is a way for North Hart­ford res­i­dents to help lift them­selves and their com­mu­ni­ty out of pover­ty, grow healthy food for the com­mu­ni­ty, beau­ti­fy the com­mu­ni­ty, right, in a way that’s not risky for the imme­di­ate com­mu­ni­ty, but also then still can bring in that devel­op­ment long-term that we want to see. It’s just a real­ly excit­ing mod­el that we antic­i­pate not only hav­ing a huge impact here in the North End of Hart­ford, but being a mod­el that we can repli­cate every­where. 

[MUSIC] 

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