“This tomato is blowing my mind,” exclaims architecture graduate student Nermine Hassanin while eating a salad she helped harvest. She, along with several MIT School of Architecture and Planning classmates, spent the morning at Hannan Healthy Foods Farm in Lincoln, MA, then shared lettuce, kale, cucumbers, green onions and tomatoes at a picnic table.\ \ Co‑founder Zachary Rapaport explains that nothing feels fresher than eating straight from the field. MIT Farm is a community‑driven program that gives campus members hands‑on urban‑farming experience and earned the Karl Taylor Compton Prize—the institute’s top citizenship award—in spring 2024.\ \ Rapaport met Aleks Banaś in the first‑year design workshop 4.184 (ClimateCorps@MIT), where they bonded over food‑system activism. Rather than start a farm from scratch, they decided to plug into existing local growers, shaping MIT Farm around community, food security and climate resilience while giving two budding architects a real‑world sustainability laboratory.\ \ In 2025 they secured support from MIT’s Urban Risk Lab, Office of Sustainability and Open Space Committee, entered the iCampus competition and won a cash prize. Their first tangible output was a two‑tier mobile farm cart built from pine, polycarbonate panels and repurposed pipette‑tip containers for seedlings, mounted on four wheels. The cart proved more than a “moveable farm”: it became a DJ booth at happy hours, a teaching tool for nearby schools, a showcase at the MIT Museum’s “Day of Climate,” and a tiny winter greenhouse at East Campus dorms.\ \ MIT Farm also partners with Boston Medical Center’s rooftop farm (producing ~6,000 lb of produce) and Eastie Farm in East Boston, offering student volunteers regular field work and exposure to food‑security and climate‑justice initiatives.\ \ Collaboration with Hannan Farm began four years earlier when anthropology professor Heather Paxson brought her class to the certified‑organic operation. Farm owner Mohammed Hannan, also an MIT lab manager, warned that “farmers are leaving—a silent pandemic.” With Rapaport and Banaś’s help, MIT students began weekend volunteering and, together with the Office of Sustainability and the Anthropology Section, launched the Fresh Food Bag program: discounted produce bags sold on Mondays, quickly sold out each week.\ \ Winter tasks include greenhouse repairs, seed‑tray preparation and planning for the next growing season. During MIT’s Independent Activities Period, the team ran a week‑long root‑cellar design workshop and created a K‑12 curriculum for community‑garden design, funded by a Day of Climate grant.\ \ Volunteers such as associate professor Rania Ghosn, undergraduate Amy Kim and DUSP student Kahlen Wheaton have contributed in many ways—from field labor to designing an upgraded washing station, cold‑storage farm stand, and a campus garden built from reclaimed bricks and wood.\ \ As Rapaport and Banaś prepare to graduate, they will hand over MIT Farm to Wheaton and other students. The consensus is clear: MIT Farm embodies MIT’s spirit—mind and hand, ethics and experimentation, systems thinking with dirt under the fingernails.\ \ Review