MADISON, Ohio — Outside the Madison Public Library in Lake County, visitors can see the next generation of farming.
Library staff just completed the setup for Farmbot, an automated farming device that resembles the inside of a printer.
"Essentially this garden will weed, water, and plant itself," Shawn Walsh, emerging services and technologies librarian, said. "It’s definitely a neat way to show robotics in action."
The garden gadget was paid for with the help of a nearly $250,000 grant, taking technology and truly applying it for a practical purpose.
"Madison is greenhouse country," Walsh said. "We’re surrounded by amazing greenhouses so it's a logical thing for us to do something that ties technology into our heritage."
Walsh told News 5 it’s all part of a push past the traditional viewpoint of a library.
"Libraries are beyond books," Walsh said. "Books are still our core thing. Go to your public library and see what they have. They loan out so many unique things and interesting things and have so many experiences for adults and kids."
Walsh remembers when he first started his career in a library system, the same week servers arrived for a new innovation called the internet.
Nowadays, kids can be seen inside this library creating their own YouTube videos and stop-motion LEGO animation.
"A lot of what we can do, we can launch the next 500 small home businesses out of here," Walsh said. "That's one of our goals here; allow someone to use a machine through us and produce a product and maybe make that side hustle or make it their primary business."
To learn more about the new technology at the library, click here.
Clay LePard is a special projects reporter at News 5 Cleveland. Follow him on Twitter @ClayLePard or on Facebook Clay LePard News 5.
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