B.C. is striving to be a global leader in agritech

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The British Columbia Centre for Agritech Innovation (BCCAI) is up and running at the Simon Fraser University Surrey campus. The centre is part of the province’s StrongerBC Economic Plan that aims to make B.C. a global leader in the agricultural technology market. 

An action of B.C.’s Economic Plan is the creation of an Agritech Centre of Excellence to “help companies grow and scale-up including research and development, piloting, commercialization, incubation and mentorship.” Through the centre, B.C. universities will be able to demonstrate their expertise by working directly with companies and sharing research. The centre will also create economic opportunities for Indigenous Peoples.  

“We are super excited about the potential and opportunity with agritech,” says Ravi Kahlon, B.C. minister of jobs, economic recovery and innovation. 

“Food security is more important now than ever, so this new Centre of Excellence … will help at least 21 projects [for] those producing food to be able to be identified through academic research institutions, and then pilots to be able to run so we can find solutions,” he says. 

Some Kwantlen Polytechnic University experts will be lending their hands to the centre’s innovation. 

In an email response to The Runner, Director of the Institute for Sustainable Horticulture at KPU Dr. Deborah Henderson said the university will host some of the applied research funded by the Agritech Centre. 

“About a year ago, SFU gauged interest from industry in an Agritech Centre by calling for letters of intent from industry regarding agri-technologies they wished to develop,” she said. 

“A few companies who we work with submitted their projects, and two are in the process of being funded. The SFU Agritech Centre is aware of the expertise and facilities available at the KPU Institute for Sustainable Horticulture, and will send other companies to us to develop projects which they can fund.” 

KPU is already involved in agritech by working with small and medium sized companies and assisting them with applied research that brings their products to the market, Henderson said. 

“We have expertise and facilities that these small companies don’t have, and the availability of student research assistants. In addition, KPU has faculty with a broad range of expertise that we can draw on for specific research challenges,” she wrote. 

Some companies she said KPU are working with are Farment Ltd., Organic Path International Inc., Farmers Hive, Solemn Technologies Inc., WildCoast Biologics Inc., Advanced Intelligence Systems Inc., and Aspire Food Group. 

“We are discussing research collaborations with vertical farming companies developing small ‘shed’ farms for northern communities, and responding to Weston Family Foundation Home Grown Challenge with a proposal to grow berry crops in greenhouses year-round,” she said. 

There are several benefits to agri-technology in farming, which includes reductions in greenhouse gas emissions and carbon footprint in agriculture, robotics filling labour needs for repetitive jobs which will keep food affordable, and build resilience through a diverse food systems, Henderson said. 

“There is [a] high interest in growing food close to [the] market. This includes both field-grown food and food grown in protected-culture (greenhouses, indoor farms, vertical farms of various descriptions, small home food-production units),” Henderson said. 

“We need all of the solutions we can come up with. Climate change impacts on agriculture will only get more severe and unpredictable. Agritech will help agriculture recover from severe climate events, help keep growers in business, and feed us,” she wrote. 

“At this time we import a large proportion of food from areas which will be hit by climate change harder than we are (i.e., California, India, Asia, Mexico) and who are net exporters,” she said. “Home food security will trump exports…. From what I see at this time, the agritech innovations coming will make the system more efficient.” 

However, Henderson also acknowledged that the growing tech will remove us further from where our food comes from. She “hopes this doesn’t make us complacent about doing the difficult things we must do to stop the climate from warming further.” 

“It’s about helping our existing farming operations become more productive, more resilient, in the face of climate change, and also finding ways to grow food closer to communities all year round and do it in a more sustainable way,” Kahlon says. 

According to the economic plan, there are over 150 innovative companies developing and using “leading-edge” technologies to improve sustainability and food security. 

One such company, located in Langley, is Refeed Farms, which filters through food waste from grocery stores and sends what is edible to food banks. Refeed also saves the non-edible food to repurpose through their worm farm. 

Stuart Lilley, founder of Refeed Farms, comes from a background in waste management and was inspired when he saw how much food is being wasted. He was contracted as a consultant by Enterra Feed, a black soldier fly technology company which creates sustainable protein out of the fly larvae. 

“Seeing it and understanding the nuances of how you would actually get that food, before it is a waste, to a facility that can find utility from it and using it as a feed ingredient for black soldier fly larvae blew my mind,” he says. 

On a daily basis, Lilley moved five ton loads of produce on pallets that were earmarked for disposal. 

“All this food was anywhere from 70 to 90 per cent good, some of it was 100 per cent good. I had no idea what was wrong with this [food], and it bothered me every day I did it,” he says. 

“Not because there was so much being wasted, it was more the fact that we were also wasting it. And even in this system, we kept on forgetting about feeding people. With the right system in place, we could actually recover the majority of this food for people and then feed livestock or insects and bring sustainable growth.” 

Lilley reached out to the Greater Vancouver Food Bank (GVFB) to offer the excess food before it was dumped, but the food banks don’t have the labour or budget for the disposal. 

“[Food banks] were used as a dumping ground, for the most part, of food waste — dumping costs onto them. Instead of companies being responsible for their own disposal, they would just dump it onto the food banks, and the [food banks] wanted to get away from that,” Lilley says. 

In a conversation with the Director Operations at GVFB Craig Edwards, they came up with a circular model of a facility where produce is recovered for people and redistributed to food banks and non profit organizations so they would not have to use their resources to do it. In return, the facility doing the culling would be able to take the byproduct to use for livestock or insects. 

“Now you’re creating that efficiency, you’re serving both needs, you’re feeding people, you’re feeding livestock, breeding sustainable protein, and then also [creating] soil amendments and fertilizers so you can grow more food,” Lilley says. 

Instead of flies, Refeed uses the world’s first three-level vertical worm farm which bioconverts the waste into microbially dense worm castings to be sold to farmers and growers for soil remediation purposes. 

“We can create a soil microbiology, we feed some of the produce to the worms while also capturing the manure from the cows that we send our feed to, to support the dairy farm issues they’re facing — which is manure management issues, they have too many nutrients — and then using that as a resource into our system to feed worms as well as create sustainable food systems,” Lilley says. 

“We’ve got the entire system here now, where we’re working with farmers, solving their problems, regenerating their land, taking the manure back to our facility and feeding it to the worms, but also creating innovative products that will help generate soil and support regenerative agriculture.” 

Chief Executive Officer of the GVFB David Long says the partnership with Refeed has changed their food waste disposal process dramatically. 

“Any fresh foods that we get that are no longer suitable for human consumption, we have these huge blue totes that we put everything into and then [Lilley] picks them up on a regular basis,” he says. 

The GVFB used to send food waste to an organic composter, but Long says they didn’t have confidence that it wasn’t being taken and dumped into a landfill. He says through Refeed they know where it’s going. 

“[Lilley] gets paid by the companies to take the food away. Most waste hauling companies will literally charge an organization or charge a large grocery chain to get rid of the excess. So there’s already money there, and the beauty of what we’re doing is we’re getting this perfectly amazing food that’s food for human consumption pretty much for free,” Long says. 

According to the Household Food Insecurity in Canada report by the PROOF research program in Toronto, approximately 15.9 per cent of households in Canada’s 10 provinces “experienced some level of food insecurity” last year. This is approximately 5.8 million people, including 1.4 million children, living in food insecure households. 

“There’s so much food that goes to waste, it’s almost criminal. They say Canada produces enough food for 52 million people, there’s 38 million people in the country, and five million go to bed hungry. It’s a broken food system,” Long says. 

“It’s all about impact. We’re able to affect the community by … trying to address [food insecurity] through recovery of food and low cost food for those that are struggling,” Lilley says. “We are reducing the emissions that are generated from organics going into landfill or industrial composting.” 

“Innovation can come into the mix to try and develop new products out of it, and then just work collaboratively to achieve those goals,” he says. 

“The whole concept of Refeed is human consumption first, and then animals first and then the worm farm. It really is a true circular solution. I wish more people would get involved with it,” Long says. 

Lilley and Henderson are working on developing an opportunity for KPU students to work with Refeed Farms sometime in the new year.