Fenway Farms is a 5,000-square-foot rooftop garden located on the third-base side of Fenway Park. Established in 2015, the farm supplies the ballpark’s kitchens with fresh produce and grows more than 6,000 pounds of organic vegetables each year. Irrigating and washing that produce requires approximately 33,000 gallons of municipal water annually. For a farm built around sustainability, reducing its reliance on city water was a natural next step. The Fenway Farms team turned to a simple question with potentially far-reaching implications: Could captured rainwater meet the farm’s needs—and eventually help reduce water consumption throughout Fenway Park?
The question was brought to MIT Sloan’s Sustainable Business Lab (S-Lab) where Leah Liebovitz, MBA ’27 and Aditi Athavale, MBA ’26 took on the challenge. Both brought their own personal motivations and perspectives to the project, with Liebovitz explaining " "I studied environmental engineering at the University of Michigan, where I gained hands-on experience with water systems, treatment, and environmental analysis. I was excited by the opportunity to apply that technical background in a business school setting and explore how water management solutions can be implemented in practice."
I studied environmental engineering at the University of Michigan, where I gained hands-on experience with water systems, treatment, and environmental analysis. I was excited by the opportunity to apply that technical background in a business school setting and explore how water management solutions can be implemented in practice.
Athavale, who spent two years involved with the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, was drawn to both the venue and the project. “Having grown up with a large family vegetable garden and involved in Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) programs, seeing Fenway Farms bring hyper-local produce into such an iconic, historic sports venue was inspiring,” she said. “I hope such initiatives can be recreated in other venues and cities.” Before coming to MIT Sloan, Athavale spent five years in management consulting, while Liebovitz spent four years advising major investor-owned electric utilities on infrastructure, strategy, and sustainability.
Testing the waters
Together, the students set out to understand whether rainwater could become a viable resource for Fenway Farms—and potentially for Fenway Park more broadly. They interviewed Green City Growers, which operates the farm, as well as members of the park’s finance team and engineers familiar with its construction constraints. They reviewed water-use records and park drawings, walked the farm, suite level, and park perimeter to identify potential tank locations, and benchmarked four water-reclamation systems at stadiums and sports venues across three continents. Their research ranged from a system built for the 2000 Sydney Olympics that remains in operation today to a cold-climate cistern in St. Paul, Minnesota.
Two findings helped shape their recommendation. The farm’s own roof could capture an estimated 10,000 to 20,000 gallons of rainwater annually—a meaningful portion of its approximately 33,000-gallon municipal water draw. But the students identified a much larger opportunity elsewhere in the park: the post-game stadium hose-down, which uses approximately 160,000 gallons of water.
Turning constraints into a plan
Turning that opportunity into a workable solution, however, required navigating significant constraints. Fenway Park has a construction window of fewer than five months each year, along with city permitting requirements, structural and height limitations, street-view considerations, and a complex group of stakeholders spanning engineering, architecture, legal, and marketing.
Rather than treating those constraints as barriers, Athavale and Liebovitz used them to shape a phased approach. Their recommendation begins with a pilot at Fenway Farms, followed by expanded rainwater capture to support suite-level hose-downs and field irrigation, and ultimately a system capable of supporting the full post-game stadium hose-down. Each phase is designed to fit within a single off-season, allowing the park to test, learn, and build on each step before moving to the next.
The students recommended moving forward with Phase 1, with vendors engaged ahead of the off-season construction period and a goal of introducing reclaimed water at the farm in summer 2027. They also recommended identifying a sponsor to help fund the system, an approach already used by several of the stadiums included in their benchmarking research.
For Fenway Park, the value of the project extended beyond the recommendation itself. “We came to the team with a defined problem, capturing rainwater to irrigate Fenway Farms, and they came back with a workable approach,” said Sam Goy, facility planning and administration coordinator for the Boston Red Sox. “We handed them real permitting, structural, and timeline constraints, and they worked through each one rather than treating them as blockers, landing on viable tank locations and a cost baseline we can take to vendors.”
The pilot serves as more than a solution for the farm: it is a proof of concept for a broader, multi-phase water-reclamation strategy. Benchmarking from comparable sports venues and municipal buildings around the world further demonstrated that each stage of the approach is achievable.
The phased structure is the approach Fenway Park is carrying forward. In the near term, the team is scoping Phase 1 at Fenway Farms while continuing to explore the possibilities presented by Phases 2 and 3.
Making sustainability practical
For both students, the experience reinforced an important lesson about turning ambitious sustainability goals into practical solutions. “Achieving ambitious sustainability goals in a century-old stadium comes down to how you structure stakeholder buy-in and manage operational risk,” Athavale said. Alignment across finance, legal, engineering, city permitting officials, and architects, she added, “is far more realistic when you adopt a phased approach rather than trying to ‘boil the ocean’ all at once.”
Achieving ambitious sustainability goals in a century-old stadium comes down to how you structure stakeholder buy-in and manage operational risk. Alignment across finance, legal, engineering, city permitting officials, and architects, is far more realistic when you adopt a phased approach rather than trying to ‘boil the ocean’ all at once.
Liebovitz similarly emphasized the importance of maintaining the larger purpose while working through the practical challenges: “When we encountered challenges, continuing to focus on the broader sustainability goal helped us stay grounded and think creatively about how to move the project forward. Breaking a bold vision into practical phases can make it achievable without losing sight of its original purpose.”
For Athavale, the project also offered a more personal takeaway. It “proved to me that personal interests and professional skill sets don’t have to exist in silos, but can come together to deliver meaningful, lasting impact.”
