What if a single campus building could prepare students to both grow North Carolina’s food supply and protect it from cyberattacks?
At Blue Ridge Community College, we believe that well-designed facilities do more than house programs — they bring disciplines together, reflect industry realities and prepare students for the interconnected workforce. As higher education evolves to meet the needs of busy, career-focused learners, our campus spaces must evolve, too — becoming strategic hubs where collaboration, innovation and hands-on experience intersect.
One roof, many opportunities
A successful campus facility is a multi-purpose one. Not only does a versatile facility make sense financially, but it also brings students of varying interests together under one roof. At Blue Ridge Community College, one of our strategic goals over the past five years has been to “create a long-term vision for campus facilities that supports our mission, advances our vision, and responds to community needs.”
In creating this vision, we found it crucial that new facilities serve multiple disciplines.
Growing with a greenhouse
Our state’s workforce needs to drive our institution’s strategic planning. In order to supply the workforce for North Carolina’s agriculture and agribusiness industry — an industry that made an $111.1 billion impact in 2024 — we must offer robust and up-to-date horticulture programs. This requires facilities that reflect modern production and research practices.
However, it is also important that any new facilities create learning opportunities across disciplines.
With all of this in mind, Blue Ridge Community College recently constructed an automated greenhouse at the Henderson County Campus. This 4,320-square-foot facility contains advanced technology that gives horticulture students hands-on experience with the systems that make today’s agriculture industry possible.
The greenhouse is equipped with automated irrigation and fertilization systems, motorized shade curtains, real-time weather tracking and integrated data systems. And all of that technology opens the door to more educational opportunities: a cybersecurity learning lab.
Cybersecurity in agriculture
This cutting-edge technology not only allows horticulture students to experience high-tech production and research, but it also allows our information technology (IT) and cybersecurity students to learn how to tackle an ever-growing concern: managing the systems at the heart of automated greenhouses, and protecting them — and the food pipeline overall — from external threats.
Technology has become crucial to the agricultural industry, from automated greenhouses like ours to programmed tractors, drones that spread pesticides and watering systems. Everywhere technology is used, it needs to be maintained and secured by cybersecurity professionals. Without strong firewalls, software vital to North Carolina’s food supply chain will be left vulnerable to cyberattacks.
In 2024, ransomware attacks on the food and agriculture industry accounted for 5% of the total cyberattacks on critical infrastructure sectors tracked by the Information Technology – Information Sharing and Analysis Center.
As I have learned from Rachel Meriwether, Blue Ridge Community College’s horticulture instructor, cybersecurity training is just as essential to the successful operation of a high-tech greenhouse as is horticultural knowledge. If bad actors gain access to a controlled environmental system, they can disrupt crop cycles and destroy infrastructure, leading to potential gaps in regional food supply chains.
As we train our horticulture and cybersecurity students on the unique technologies used in the agriculture industry, we’re building a workforce that can both grow our food and safeguard the systems that produce it.
Facilities like our new greenhouse allow for productive, cross-disciplinary training that ensures the future of North Carolina’s agriculture is fruitful and resilient. This experiential learning hub will bring students together to gain a deeper understanding of how digital and biological systems intersect, preparing them to excel in an industry where technology and agriculture are more connected than they’ve ever been before.
A focus on the future
Through intentional facilities that bring students of different disciplines together, community colleges can provide opportunities for hands-on, engaging learning; foster collaboration; and achieve long-term goals.
At Blue Ridge, we are committed to the vision of “transforming lives through the power of learning.” Our goals for our facilities are the same as our goals for our entire organization: to transform our students’ lives through learning experiences that prepare them for the future.
Fields like agriculture, cybersecurity, computer engineering and IT need trained professionals, and through our greenhouse, we’re preparing our students to fill high-demand positions across North Carolina. Through their experience in this dynamic facility, these students will have the technical insight and problem-solving abilities needed to make a meaningful impact on their fields – and innovate as new challenges arise.
