Based on a new garden trend, a greenhouse aloft in a Montreal warehouse that develops aubergines and tomatoes to meet local food demand set a record as the largest in the world.
It is not an apparent selection of location for growing organic vegetables, in the center of Canada’s largest city at the time, but Lufa Farms opens the 160,000-square-foot (15,000-square-meter) facility on Wednesday, about the length of 3 footballs. the fields.
“The company’s project is to grow food where other people live and sustainably,” spokesman Thibault Sorret told AFP when presenting its first crop of giant aubergines.
This is the fourth rooftop greenhouse the company builds in the city. The first, built in 2011 at a price of more than C$2 million (US$1. 5 million), has innovated.
Since then, the competition has taken over the new idea, American Gotham Greens, which has built 8 rooftop greenhouses in New York, Chicago and Denver, and French Urban Nature, which plans to open in Paris in 2022.
A local Montreal supermarket has also been providing a collection of roof-grown vegetables since 2017, which have been “adapted” to greenhouse fuel emissions due to climate change.
– ‘Reinvent the system’ –
Lebanese Mohamed Hage and his wife Lauren Rathmell, an American from neighboring Vermont, Lufa Farms in 2009 with the ambition to “reinvent the food system. “
In Lufa, around one hundred types of vegetables and herbs are grown year-round in hydroponic boxes covered with coconut and fed liquid nutrients, adding lettuce, cucumbers, zucchini, Chinese cabbage, celery and sprouts.
Bumblebees pollinate plants, while wasps and ladybugs do so without pesticides.
Enough vegetables are harvested per week to feed 20,000 families, with baskets suitable for a base value of C$30.
The company’s “online marketplace” also sells products produced through local spouse farms, adding “bread, pasta, rice, etc. ,” Sorret said.
On the grounds of the new greenhouse, a huge distribution center combines about 2,000 groceries to offer to the “Lufavores”, adding restaurants.
Buyer Catherine Bonin tells the AFP that she likes the freshness of the products, but regrets that some pieces are still sold out. “I can never eat chili peppers,” he says.
– Sales doubled the pandemic –
“Now we’re going to feed almost 2% of Montreal with our greenhouses and farms,” Sorret said.
“The credit for being on a roof is that you get a lot of energy from the back of the building,” which saves a lot of money on heating, an asset from Quebec’s harsh winter, he explains.
“We also used spaces that in the past were completely unused,” he said.
Fully automated, the new greenhouse also has a water formula that collects and reuses rainwater, saving “up to 90 percent” to a classic farm.
Lufa “more than doubled” its sales with the new coronavirus pandemic, a leap attributable “to contactless delivery from our online site,” Sorret says.
Profitable since 2016, the personal company now employs 500 people, about 200 more than before the pandemic, he said.
Lately it works with the electrification of its delivery truck fleet and is exporting its style “to other cities around the world,” starting with Canada and the United States, Sorret said.
“What’s a little crazy,” he recalls, is that none of the founders “had grown a tomato in their life” when they opened the company.