Vancouver Park Board’s plan to rebuild the roof of the West End Community Centre to incorporate a community garden is a great way to produce hobby food and wonderful social benefits, but it’s an indicator of a market that is opening up for local food production on a much more serious commercial scale.
When Choices customers pop a $4.98 clamshell of Ecospirit spinach into their cart, they’re helping seed a new enterprise that is about to transform the way we grow our food. Ecospirit spinach is licensed by the Squamish First Nation (an early investor), produced by Terrasphere Systems in a prototype automated greenhouse in Surrey, partly owned by Boston-based Converted Organics. It uses indoor growing technology developed by those dedicated horticulturalists in B.C.’s marijuana industry, who are now churning out 600 pounds of greens a day for Choices and IGA.
Terrasphere isn’t alone.
Longtime hydroponic seller BC Northern Lights has developed an in-home herb and micro-green grow-box (“the kitchen cultivator”) that can fit under the counter like a small fridge that just keeps replacing what you take out of it: “a living spice rack.”
Coming from the more conventional side of the street, Stephen Fane, former CEO of locally based Hot House Growers, is now CEO of Valcent Products. It’s a Vancouver company that’s taken over technology developed in the U.K., where a Valcent vertical greenhouse has been successfully growing lettuce for the animals in the Devon Zoo for two years and is now setting up with a major food processor.
Christopher Ng, former Lululemon supply chain officer, is the company’s CEO.
They’re still raising capital for a rollout of installations, but Fane said the interest in his technology is “spectacular.” Time magazine named it one of the 50 top innovations in 2009.
And why not? Every time oil prices go up, imported – and exported – food becomes more expensive. With the average food item being shipped 2,000 kilometres, growing close to home guarantees big savings on shipping – as much as $1 per head of lettuce – not to mention attractive societal benefits of less traffic, lower emissions, less waste and decreased greenhouse gas emissions.
Hydroponic growing uses about 5% of the water needed for field crops at a time when critical water supplies for field agriculture are dwindling in volume and rising in price. One acre of hydroponic greenhouse can produce 600,000 pounds of food per year, 10 times what a one-acre field could produce, with no wasted petroleum-dependent fertilizer.
There’s another advantage to fresh-picked produce. It has far more nutritional value, which is one reason why local food was the No. 1 trend in the Canadian restaurant industry last year. Fane said a leafy green loses more than half its nutritional value within four days after it has been picked. With no chemicals or pesticides involved in hydroponic growing, food safety is also improved.
The Forbes 2020 team of experts and authors predicts that by the year 2018, 20% of all food consumed in U.S. cities will come from rooftop and parking lot farms. All the major supermarket chains are looking at this now, with four rooftop greenhouses already under construction in the U.S. A one-acre rooftop farm costs around $2 million to set up and can gross over $1 million a year. On a do-it-yourself scale, one calculation shows that most of a family’s fresh vegetable needs could be met by a 50-square-foot indoor hydroponic garden. For architects and planners aimed at the new post-LEED living building standards, food production is a natural. Harnessing technology and dodging seasonal variations in production removes the biggest barrier to commercial local food production – unreliability.
The Lower Mainland’s constrained land base and – let’s admit it – extensive experience with growing indoors with minimal power, make this a great fit for this region, one that would put real meaning into Green Capital.