Quebec leads indoor urban agriculture trend

Quebec is already a leader in urban agriculture. It has many small urban farms and a number of community-led rooftop gardens, and is home to the world's first commercial rooftop greenhouse operation, Lufa Farms, which recently expanded into a new 163,000-square-foot greenhouse atop a former Sears warehouse in the St-Laurent area of Montreal. The Quebec government and City of Montreal have also invested $750,000 in urban agriculture development.

In every way, the time seems right. Two big factors have helped spur innovation and growth in urban agriculture in Quebec, particularly in the areas of greenhouses and indoor vertical farming over the past decade or so. The first was the implementation of LED lighting technology, a more cost-effective and efficient system for greenhouses.

"Prior to LED lighting, we had to use fluorescent, high-pressure sodium, metal halide or external light systems," says Dr. Mark Lefsrud, who leads the Biomass Production Laboratory at McGill University. It focuses on developing new sources of biomass for food, fibre and fuel, and on improving the energy efficiency of greenhouses and indoor plant growth environments. 

"They were very energy intensive and produced a lot of heat, so growers needed cooling technology and the lights had to be kept a long distance from the plants. Once LEDs came along, they had technology that allowed them to locate lights right up against the plants because their ambient temperature was much lower, which allows them to grow plants almost anywhere; they are no longer limited by a cooling capacity."

Quebec also has the advantage of available inexpensive hydroelectricity, since exports to the U.S. have gone down in recent years. With dwindling demand for power, the solution has been to try and add value to the energy produced in the province.

"An easy way to (add value) is to do food production through either greenhouses or indoor agriculture systems," Lefsrud says. "It allows us to be one of the cheapest electricity-providing locations on the planet, which means that people are now trying to grow almost anything for those reasons."

Another big shift that has spurred interest in indoor farming is huge investments made by the cannabis industry in new controlled environment technologies. 

"It's the confluence of low energy prices, LEDs, this huge investment on new technologies that have improved all controlled environment spaces, and then we have NASA as the poster child of how far we can push it and it makes it sexy to grow food indoors," says Lefsrud. "Nobody really cared about it until all these things came together."

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Photo by Christian Chomiak on Unsplash

Source: Country Guide