Pitt Meadows vertical farm revolutionizes produce production in B.C.

Lettuce and leafy greens, produce that would typically be trucked into B.C. from California at this time of year, began rolling out of Up Vertical Farms’ brand-new greenhouse-like operation in Pitt Meadows last week.

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Displacing what are typically field-grown imports is a big part of Up’s proposition to grow high-density, hydroponic crops in clean, climate-controlled conditions, according to company co-founder Bahram Rashti.

Rashti was first drawn to the idea while still a practicing dentist, conducting remote clinics on Haida Gwaii, where he saw similar produce that was expensive with little shelf life.

“There’s a huge market opportunity,” Rashti said of the venture he and brother Shahram, an IT and business expert, started eight years ago.

“The more we looked into it, the more we were drawn because we knew there was an intersection in time where the supply, the centralized supply from California and Arizona, the western U.S., was going to collapse due to the adverse effects of climate change that are ever-increasing.”

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They view their product as more sustainable as well, with the highly automated operation using 99-per-cent less water, which is continuously recycled, 99-per-cent less fertilizer, no pesticides and no herbicides, Rashti said.

So they view their 50,000-sq.-ft., high-tech vertical farm — about one acre (less than half a hectare) — as food security for B.C., capable of turning out 350-acres (142 hectares) worth of field-grown greens per year under custom-controlled LED lights.

“We built this facility with the intent to feed Western Canada and the Pacific Northwest,” Rashti said. “It’s with that intent that we plan to scale up and build these across Canada.”

Their vertical farm — constructed inside a 15-metre-tall greenhouse they built on a dormant hay field at the edge of Pitt Meadows’ agricultural zone — doesn’t necessarily fit the vision that others have for vertical farming.

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The high-tech, capital-intensive methods involved in vertical farming clash with the views of agriculturalists who view them more as ways to further industrialize and capture wealth from food production than building sustainable, land-based, regional food systems.

“There’s nothing wrong with vertical greenhouses, it’s where do you put them,” according to Harold Steves, now retired from Richmond city council and a long-time agricultural advocate. “And they don’t want to be out of town, they want to go downtown.”

Before he retired, Steves said he communicated with a U.S.-based company that looked to locate vertical operations on vacant lots in urban areas that were central to customers. The catch there, however, is cost of urban land versus agricultural land.

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In February, 2022, the province changed the rules for vertical farming within B.C.’s agricultural land reserve, allowing such operations on farm land on the same basis as greenhouses or livestock barns.

Agriculture Minister Lana Popham said it was a matter of allowing innovation in increasing B.C.’s food supply, “allowing farmers new options to produce more food year-round in more challenging climates.”

The new rules don’t require vertical-farm proponents to obtain permission from the agricultural land reserve’s governing Agricultural Land Commission, unless they want to build a facility that is larger than 1,000 square metres, or 10,760 square feet.

Up Vertical Farms didn’t fall under those rules because it was built as a greenhouse and only had to work with the City of Pitt Meadows for permits.

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So far, two applications have been made to the Agricultural Land Commission for operations larger than 1,000 square metres, one in Abbotsford and one in Squamish, both of which were approved, said commission CEO Kim Grout in an email.

Popham announced the changes for vertical farming mere months after the catastrophic floods and landslides in 2021 that cut much of the province off from some of its usual supply chains.

However, Steves said vertical farms are also limited in the kinds of produce they can grow, and B.C. still needs to increase production of crops that need to be produced on land.

To agriculturalist Kent Mullinix at Kwantlen Polytechnic University, the problems B.C. has around food production could be dealt with if more of its existing, productive agricultural land were used to grow crops.

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“Fifty per cent of our agricultural land is not farmed, and that, to me, is a far more glaring challenge than advancing this kind of technology,” Mullinix said.

His key criticism of vertical farming is the cost involved in highly automated operations that takes it out of the hands of family farmers and puts it in the hands of investors looking to capitalize on food production.

“It’s kind of like the Gucci handbag of agriculture,” Mullinix said.

Up Vertical Farms has put “millions” into building their operation, Rashti said, although he wouldn’t specify how much. They are producing their greens to be competitive with field-grown produce that is already in the market.

He added that in Metro Vancouver, that would be cost prohibitive if they had to locate on commercial or industrial land.

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“At the end of the day, we are producing food, we are growing food,” Rashti said.

And Rashti argued that Up can make its produce more nutritious through carefully controlled growing conditions inside an almost-sterile facility free from pathogens such as E.coli or listeria.

An onsite test-and-hold lab allows them to directly package their produce as it is harvested. The entire growing process is fully automated and overseen by some 15 technicians who work year-round. Up has no need for temporary foreign farm workers.

“It’s an evolution of greenhouse growing,” Rashti said.

So far, the brothers have built Up Vertical Farms mostly on their own with some help from Farm Credit Canada and regular bank loans. Their hope is to raise capital from investors to expand on a manufacturing franchise basis.

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At one end of the operation, automated machinery fills custom styrofoam rafts with a peat-growing medium that is seeded with a computer-controlled mix of leafy greens and set aside in a dark, climate-controlled room to germinate.

Technicians load those rafts into trays of carefully titrated nutrient-rich water stacked into racks that are 12 trays high under high-intensity LED lights for 21 to 25 days, depending on the plants.

Planting is timed for just-in-time production, Rashti said, so they are constantly seeding, growing, harvesting and packaging produce to fill orders.

The nine rows of racks should be able to produce 450 tonnes of produce per year, but their plan is to build out another seven racks that would produce 850 tonnes of leafy greens per year.

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Rashti added that the industry is working on expanding the range of crops than can be effectively grown in controlled-environment agriculture. Full-head romaine lettuce and strawberries are among the possibilities.

“Industry leaders are doing a lot of (research and development) to make dwarf plants and shrubs,” Rashti said.

In the long-run, Shahram Rashti said the extent of what vertical farming can produce will depend on the cost of electricity declining as the price of food keeps rising. Within 10 years, crops such as tomatoes or cucumbers should be in reach.

Within 30 years, the curves of food prices going up and electricity prices — their biggest operating expense — coming down will intersect to make crops such as rice and wheat viable.

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