Can Canada grow more than its food? Serre, vertical agriculture make it possible, the experts say
Cost of living9:14Should Canada grow more than your food?
While the Canadians take time to the grocery store in search of Canadian manufacturing products and labels such as maple leaf, local food growers are increasing production to satisfy demand.
Jon Lomow is the co-founder of Fieldless Farms, an internal vertical farm in Cornwall, Ontario. Leaf vegetables and mushrooms grow all year round and claims that its products have flown out of the shelf.
“We are running out faster from two to four times, in some cases, perhaps five times faster in high -volume stores, compared to first that this happened. It is a rather strong sign that people have moved in the direction of wanting to buy more local,” Lomow said Cost of living.
They are planning to build another farm to satisfy that growing question and have started a crowdfunding campaign. The company has almost achieved the objective of $ 2.2 million in just one month.
Food production pockets in Ontario, Quebec, Alberta and British Columbia led to volumes of production of fruit and vegetables in greenhouses increasing about five times since 2000, the agricultural policy of the Royal Bank of Canada, the protagonist Lisa Ashton Report on agriculture and Canadian exports.
This growing industry can play a fundamental role in filling the production gap, where vegetable production should double and the production of fruit should grow five times to feed the internal demand, wrote.
Steps to become self -sufficient
The suddenly rocky relationship between Canada and the United States has many Canadians who rethink our dependence on our southern neighbor.
Although they cultivate many fruits and vegetables, the fleeting summer and short season of Canadian growth means that the country is based on the United States and in other parts of the world for fresh products to balance the nutritional needs of consumers, especially during the winter.
Lenore Newman, director of the Food and Agriculture Institute at the University of Fraser Valley in the BC, said that for decades, importing products from the United States was not a big problem.
“It was very easy for a long time to rely on them. And it worked until he did.”
On average, about 50 % of the vegetables, apart from potatoes and 75 % of the fruits eaten in Canada, are imported, According to research from the University of British Columbia. And from this, the United States provide 67 % of Canadian vegetable imports and 36 % of its fruit imports.
The province is once again trying to convince the Quebecs to buy at the local level. This time, the government is launching an advertising campaign that includes Wordplay which refers to the President of the United States Donald Trump, as well as offering financial support for a specific type of local food production.
The Dutch model of food in cultivation
Newman says that we could grow more products all year round as producers in the Netherlands. Although the country is smaller than New Scotland, it is the Second vegetator exporter in the world after the United States
Dutch producers cultivate food in the greenhouses with fertilizers, very small water and labor and use a lot of energy derived from the sun. In the Netherlands, about 5,500 hectares of land – or 2 million hockey NHL track – are dedicated to the cultivation of vegetables inside.
And what pushed this has a lot to do with the story.
“During the Second World War, they had an extreme hunger. They let the war never wanted to experience it, so they invested heavily in agricultural technology, in supporting their agricultural sector and ensuring that they were an agricultural superpower,” said Newman.
Newman added that it can make sense economically importing things that are difficult to cultivate in Canada.
“You can grow anything all year round, you can’t do it and make money. So it’s more intelligent to buy oranges from Spain.”
Time to focus on food safety
It was not always the case.
Canada used many more fruit and vegetables. But after a free trade agreement between Canada and the United States was signed in the late 1980s, fruit and vegetable transformers moved to the United States where they could obtain products for the whole year, says Evan Fraser, director of the Arll Food Institute of the University of Guelph. As a result, farmers in Canada stopped producing as many fruit and vegetables and simply started buying them from the United States
“When it comes to cattle, proteins and dairy products, we produce a lot and we are not worried about those things.”
“The first thing we have to do to become more self-sufficient food is to reinvest in fruit and vegetable-inscription transformation structures, freezing, dehydration-that would require a seasonal harvest and would allow us to keep them all year round,” Fraser said.
The bad news is that this probably involves an increase in costs for healthy and nutritious food at a time when almost Nine million Canadians Live in insecure food families, according to the 2022 data of Statistics Canada.
“I have difficulty imagining a scenario in which it is so convenient to produce things in Canada – at least in the short term – how it would be to produce them in California and send them,” Fraser said.
However, new technologies, such as vertical agriculture and effective greenhouse equipmentThey are making it more economically efficient than ever to produce fresh and healthy foods out of season in Canada, he said.
The current23:40Could vertical agriculture reduce Canada’s need for the production of the United States?
With a large push to buy Canadian and vertical agriculture, it could be a way to grow leafy vegetables in the fantastic winter and reduce our dependence on us products. We look at how vertical agriculture works, what costs and if it can actually be reduced to help feed the Canadians.
Can Canadian products compete on the price?
While entering agriculture can be difficult with all the bureaucracy and the undernantic land costs, Gagan Singh, a blueberry farmer and a local farm lawyer was lucky when he inherited eight acres in Abbotsford, AC
He said that learning to cultivate was the most difficult thing I have ever done, but he met many young people who want to get their hands dirty.
Singh recognizes that it can be difficult to compete with international producers.
“Canadian farmers cannot compete against Chinese and Mexican farmers because everything is cheaper there. They have less regulations, lower labor costs. The reason we are importing so much is because people only want the best possible price,” Singh said.
The increase in the amount of growth all year round in Canada could help reduce prices as the offer increases, says Singh.
And while some consumers can be motivated by prices, think that something has changed and others are open to spend a little more.
“I feel that a big bubble has broken out for many Canadians and I think many people are realizing how many things are actually buying not from Canada,” he said.
“There are seeds that have been planted in the head of consumers. People are like, I don’t want to depend on America … and it was a really important football in the ass that I think the Canadians needed.”
