Growing up: The next frontier in farming is vertical and it could cut Canada’s reliance on imported food

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The spicy mustard micro green begins its short life in a plastic tray of mud, filed away in a germination warehouse at an industrial park on the outskirts of Guelph, Ont. It spends several days in hot and humid darkness, using all its energy to open itself, push through the top layer of soil and unfurl its first two tender leaves.

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In the germination room, trays of mustard greens all sit on shelves the size of ping pong tables, stacked in rows up to the roof. The plants are ready after about two days and the automated growing system comes to retrieve them, pulling the shelf from its stack and ejecting it through a slot in the warehouse wall.

Next, they enter another, larger warehouse, with more shelves stacked up three to four storeys high. Here, the spicy mustard greens feel light for the first time. More than 14,000 LED lamps shine for 14 to 20 hours a day, using only the part of the light spectrum that the plants will need: red and blue. So the warehouse is always a thick, glowing magenta.

“It’s always a beautiful, spring day,” says Juanita Moore, the executive director of operations at GoodLeaf Farms, which owns this indoor farm in Guelph.

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It is incredibly important that these mustard greens survive, not just for GoodLeaf — the company uses them for its Spicy Mustard Medley and Ontario Spring Mix — but also for the long-term stability of the Canadian food system.

Canadian agriculture scholars are warning that the country’s dependence on California and other southern growing regions for fresh produce through the winter has become a national security risk.

“We have to really ask the question, ‘How secure are we?’” said Evan Fraser, director of the University of Guelph’s Arrell Food Institute. “On fruits and vegetables, we are not secure at all.”

On fruits and vegetables, we are not secure at all

Evan Fraser

The pandemic has given companies and consumers a glimpse at how a global crisis can stymie supply chains and push trading partners to hold back exports. And the extreme drought and wildfires that have threatened California’s vast crop production this summer are just the latest example of a glaring vulnerability in the Canadian food chain, which relied on $11.2-billion worth of imported vegetables, fruits and nuts last year. Farmers in the United States supplied $5.4 billion of that produce — $3.1 billion of which came from California.

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“Suddenly this idea that California might not be able to provide food is not that farfetched at all — to the point I’m actively kind of worried about it,” said Lenore Newman, director of the Food and Agriculture Institute at the University of the Fraser Valley. “My worry is, we’re going to start having shortages, because California’s production is going to fall. They don’t have the water.”

Fraser and Newman are part of a growing chorus of professors and industry leaders calling for Canada to stop relying on imports from the U.S. and Mexico and start feeding itself, fast. The best hope to do that, in a country with only five or six good growing months, is to farm indoors.

“If the trends continue, we’re in real trouble in North America,” Newman said. “Growing all of this food intensively in one location and moving it all over the continent is not going to work. So we may as well start now. I mean, we should have started five years ago but now is good too.”

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This ambition for Canada to grow its own supply of fresh produce in the dead of winter isn’t as implausible as it might sound. The country actually isn’t bad at growing things indoors. Canada’s greenhouse industry is already proficient at growing tomatoes, cucumbers and peppers — to the point that 81.2 per cent of the domestically grown supply of cucumbers come from a greenhouse, according to Statistics Canada.

Historically, the problem with greenhouses has been that they rely on the sun, which means production dips in the darker, winter months. They’re also expensive to heat. Even in summer, the sun can be confounding, as Newman put it. It’s bright one day, obscured by clouds the next. It hits the plants unevenly, making it tougher to produce the sort of uniform crops that the market demands.

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The new frontier in farming, Newman said, is to sideline the sun. Advancements in more efficient LED light technology have reduced the cost of growing plants indoors, allowing greenhouses to add lights to augment the sun and effectively extend their growing season.

Cheaper LED technology has also made it possible to farm without any sun at all, in the sort of windowless warehouses “you’d put a Costco in,” Newman said.

This new generation of indoor crop factory can pump out more production per acre because the farmer doesn’t have to worry about sun exposure, droughts or pests. In vertical farming — a common method in the rapidly changing world of closed environment agriculture — the plants are stacked one on top of another, in soil trays or in hydroponic fluid, with LED lights in between.

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“You can take a 100-acre farm, compress it into a one-acre farm, and put the rest back into wilderness,” Newman said.

Vertical farms can recycle much of the water they use, and often cost little to heat through winter thanks to warmth from the LED lamps and the plants themselves. But possibly the most important perk, she said, is that “everything will taste better.”

The general vision, for Newman and others, is to have vertical farming operations supplying produce to every region in the country. That would drastically reduce the distance between farm and market, so producers would be able to focus on making varieties that taste good instead of the “wooden” varieties preferred in California because they travel thousands of kilometres without bruising.

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Major food and technology companies have been funnelling capital into the indoor farming sector, including French fry giant McCain Foods Ltd.’s roughly $65-million investment to become the single largest shareholder in GoodLeaf.

But vertical farming hasn’t quite proven itself to be a profitable option yet, according to one analyst who follows the sector. The building costs for new vertical farms and other large-scale indoor models can range as high as $30 million to $50 million per site. Even when the facilities are built, high energy bills and labour costs make it difficult for the farms to make consistent profits. So most operations focus on crops that grow quickly, can be packed into tight spaces and sell at a premium.

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“A lot of these groups are still losing money,” said Steve Hansen, managing director at Raymond James Ltd. “The big challenge is, ultimately, getting to profitability.”

And the goal isn’t just to reach profitability by competing with organic farms on expensive niche products like spicy mustard greens. If the true purpose is to replace Canada’s $11.2-billion reliance on imported produce, indoor operations need to be able to reach the sort of scale that will allow them to compete in the broader fruit and vegetable market. More advancement in LED lighting and automation inside the farms are expected to keep tamping down energy and labour costs.

“The vertical industry is still not quite yet on par with field-grown product,” Hansen said. “They’re getting down there and they’re getting closer but they’re still not there.”

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Hansen estimated that globally, capital investments into vertical farms and next-generation indoor farming technology are now in the “billions of dollars” globally.

“It’s become a large sector very quickly,” he said, adding that some established operations are finally starting to reach a scale where they’re able to make a profit. “The development we’ve seen on the indoor space has really happened in the last five years.”

Still, vertical farms are mostly confined to growing salad greens, which grow within a matter of days and allow the farms to constantly be turning over product.

Branching out to other crops will be a challenge, Hansen said. Tomatoes and cucumbers, for example, can be too tall for vertical farming, which means the farm has to pack fewer rows into the space before hitting the ceiling. (Interestingly, greenhouses actually benefit from the height of cucumbers and tomatoes because they’re essentially vertical farms in and of themselves, Newman said.)

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Other vegetables that take months to reach market size mean months’ worth of energy costs have to be included in the price — which Newman suggested could lead to potatoes that cost $20 per pound.

Seed companies, however, have started to turn their attention to breeding varieties of crops that will work well indoors, though the developments are still in the early stages, Hansen said. “Very little effort has been done on short, stubby plants that can produce really high volume, because why would you have ever wanted that?”

The GoodLeaf vertical farm in Guelph is currently able to produce more than 800,000 pounds of micro greens and baby greens annually, though it’s currently producing less than half that. Hospitality and restaurants were intended to make up half the business, so the pandemic-related shutdown in that sector has significantly impacted sales. But the business is able to break even at an output of around 400,000 to 500,000 pounds, selling boxes at $3.99 for micro greens and $4.99 for baby greens in major Ontario supermarkets , including Whole Foods Market Inc., Metro Inc., Loblaw Cos. Ltd.

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But even a top capacity of 800,000 pounds of greens is considered light. A new GoodLeaf facility in development in Montreal is expected to reach up to 1.4 million pounds, with an expansion option that would double that output.

“We won’t build farms as small as this one going forward,” GoodLeaf’s Juanita Moore said during a tour of the Guelph plant last week. “Every generation of farm will have kind of perfected it a little bit more.”

In Guelph, the spicy mustard greens spend about six days in the glowing purple growing room. In that time, they extend themselves to half a finger long. There are hundreds of them per tray, a mix of vibrant greens and purples, all of them never knowing the sun or a bug or a breeze.

The automated lifts move the shelves of plants from one end of the growing warehouse to the other end, a little bit at a time, gradually pushing the mustard greens through the stages of their lives. At the end of it all, there is what appears to be a blue garage door.

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When the greens are ready, the blue door cranks open and white light shines in. A worker in an overcoat and hardhat pulls them out of the growing warehouse and into a cold, sterile room with a conveyor belt in the centre.

Here, the greens meet the man who made them. As the move along the conveyor, Cesar Cappa, the head grower at the Guelph plant, stands over them and stares.

He calls them by their technical name, cotyledons — the first little leaves to sprout from a seed. He watches for deviations in the cotyledons, aware that any problem means the micro mustard greens could rot and spoil the lettuce when they’re together in the spring mix.

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“It can be something small,” he says, dressed in a lab coat.

After the inspection, the mustard greens continue along the conveyor belt toward a vibrating blade at the end of the line. It saws back and forth at high speed, aimed at the necks of the mustard greens. The trays move closer and closer in a slow, inevitable march. Each stem meets the knife and it severs them, clean and quick. From there, the greens are washed and packaged, and the trays of roots and dirt are sent for compost.

Afterward, in an open-concept office connected to the vertical farm, Moore passed around paper plates of micro greens and lettuces grown at the facility. Everything tasted of the outdoors. 

“It takes me right back to my grandpa’s farm,” she said.

Financial Post

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