KPU’s Institute for Sustainable Horticulture wins $1 million to grow year-round berries

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Kwantlen Polytechnic University’s Institute for Sustainable Horticulture (ISH), an in-house research institute, has won a $1 million award from the Weston Family Foundation. ISH will use the award to advance their plans of growing sustainable berries outside of their regular season in Canada. 

The Weston Family Foundation’s Homegrown Innovation Challenge recognized KPU alongside 11 other teams. Over the next six years, the foundation is committing $33 million to ideas that will extend berry growing season in Canada. Four teams will be selected by 2025 and asked to demonstrate their solutions. The Weston Family Foundation will then donate two $1 million prizes for the winners by 2028. 

ISH’s proposal for the project is to grow strawberries and blackberries in an advanced greenhouse system, using AI-driven robots and sensors to reduce costs and pesticides. They will also be creating a carbon-neutral environment with support from industry collaborators and researchers from Simon Fraser University. 

“The Weston Foundation asked that we propose systems to grow berries out of season, and our system was greenhouses,” wrote Deborah Henderson, director of ISH in an email statement to The Runner. 

“[M]ost of what we are doing in the carbon-neutral effort will apply to all greenhouses, not just those that grow berries. One aspect, which is our SFU partners expertise, is to develop a heat storage system using patented sorption technology, so that clean energy such as solar, can be stored and used in winter,” Henderson wrote.  

Those from ISH who will be working on the project include Henderson, Li Ma, Anders Torres, and Aria Tamanaei, who is a recent horticulture graduate. They will also be hiring two new graduates through the received funding. 

“The origins of the challenge go back to COVID-19, which exposed a lot of the vulnerabilities in our systems, and the foundation was thinking about how to best respond to this,” says Lukasz Aleksandrowicz, senior program manager for the Homegrown Innovation Challenge at the Weston Family Foundation.

“There was a desire to support something that would make Canada and Canadians more resilient to future shocks. … As much as 80 per cent of our fresh fruit and produce is imported, … so we do have this high reliance on imports for fresh fruit and vegetables.” 

The project also aims to address sustainable farming and food insecurity within Canada. 

“The pandemic and closed borders made us realize we could not always count on far away places to grow our food. Climate change is going to impact those places perhaps sooner and with more vigour than we have experienced in BC. One day I expect those countries will not be able to supply us as well as their own needs,” Henderson wrote.

“We need to do the responsible thing and learn how to grow our own food. In addition, as climate change impacts our farmers, more and more crops will need to be grown in protected culture – like greenhouses – just to keep farmers in business,” she wrote. 

To make growing more efficient, AI-driven robots will be on-site inside the greenhouses. 

The robots will help the farmers become more efficient as they don’t have the labour required for greenhouse crops, Henderson wrote. To harvest these crops, foreign labour is brought in annually, a practice that became difficult during the pandemic. 

These robots can also detect diseases in plants the human eye is unable to see and monitor the plants during all hours of the day.  

“This is a great opportunity to help transform the future of food production in Canada. It helps us contribute to Canada’s path to leadership in innovation and agriculture, where I think there is a big potential for us,” Aleksandrowicz says.