How Canada Became a Greenhouse Superpower | Hacker News Reader

How Canada Became a Greenhouse Superpower

npr.org

109 pointssignor_bosco50 comments

My family is from Leamington and my grandfather laments to this day about how sad it is that the acres upon acres of glass and plastic have been plopped on top of the most fertile land in Canada. The Leamington area has seriously mild and fair weather compared to the rest of Canada and a sizeable chunk of its farmland comes from drained marshes. Fresh water is limitless as well (Lake Erie). That combo is killer and is the reason Leamington became the tomato capital of North America. Leamington was so successful in this that Heinz dropped a large factory directly in the heart of the city and bought up the majority of the area's tomato supply. Good on the farmers for making the most of their acreages but it's sad to see land you don't find just anywhere trapped beneath glass.

I should also add that outdoor tomatoes are still so much tastier. You could test the same type of plant grown inside and outside, just meters apart, and know immediately which one is which.

In the summer I like to get tomatoes from my garden slice it up and put it on some rosemary ciabatta bread, toasted. Maybe a bit of mayo or instead some olive oil.

It is far better than anything grown inside.

How many million pounds of tomatoes did you produce?

You're nearly there, go on! http://www.telegraph.co.uk/foodanddrink/foodanddrinkadvice/1...

But the output per acre is multiples of regular outdoor farming, so it's the opposite of wasting the fertile land. It's making the land area even more productive.

W/re taste it's possibly just the variety grown rather than the cultivation method.

I don't know anything about lemmington, but assuming the land is highly fertile, you could greenhouse elsewhere rather than covering high-quality land with concrete.

Greenhouse doesn't mean you can't use the soil. That'd be hydroponics...

All the greenhouses around Leamington do use hydroponics.

Interesting. I'd be curious why they'd do that given the high quality soil available...

It's hard to google for, but it appears that hydroponics allow for more crop per acre. So the article is actually conflating greenhouses and hydroponics (outdoor hydroponics seems to be very rare, so the latter more-or-less implies the former)

I can grok that, but it's not like land is at a premium in Canada, and hydroponics is generally very capital intensive.

Pouring concrete on top of fertile land so you can grow plants in hydroponic systems is absolutely a waste of fertile land. They could poor that concrete and put those greenhouses anywhere. Put them somewhere with bad soil, and leave the good soil for growing food.

Likely run in land use issues where as putting green houses on existing farm land would not raise many if any objections. Plus farm land is generally flat which makes it easier.

Though it might be a great way to reuse a lot of old industrial areas provided the tax load can be adjusted appropriately to reflect its use in farming. Just look to Detroit and such. Surely all those dead neighborhoods with proper permanent tax changes would be great for such as this.

Several of our customers are Leamington tomato processors. I think part of it has to do with where the processing infrastructure is located. I doubt there is 1M+ square feet of tomato grading, sorting, processing and canning equipment other places in North Eastern North America. The whole downstream industry is built around Leamington and area (northern Michigan/southern Ontario). I would argue that building hydroponics near all the infrastructure makes sense then rebuilding the infrastructure somewhere more arid.

I'm not saying it doesn't make sense, just that it is a waste of good farm land. Lots of unoptimal things happen for perfectly logical reasons.

Ontario is blessed with great farm land and plenty of water. If the weather was better it could feed all of North America.

I have been commenting to my wife about why are all the Tomatoes down here in TX from Ontario?

Now I know.

I have been commenting to my wife about why are all the Tomatoes down here in TX from Ontario?

We in Ontario are still left wondering why all our tomatoes are from the southern US. We're stocked with GMO products these days that aren't nearly as good as what we were used to.

I guess our tomatoes sell better in Texas than they do here...

In another plot twist, the biggest tomato grower in Texas, Village Farms, is Canadian!

And another twist: America's Got Talent is entirely judged by foreigners! Including a Canadian!

apparently we have talent but lack judgment.

What's interesting is that with global warming, more of that land is available. Spring is coming weeks earlier in the far north, and the father north you go the more daylight hours you have in the summer.

I'm originally from neighbouring Kingsville (small world!). It's been interesting to me that more development of greenhouses hasn't happened in Harrow where the land is less fertile, and vastly cheaper.

Lol, I thought this would be about Canada and carbon emissions, greenhouse gasses.

As for the greenhouses, as a canadian it also makes me laugh when to buy tomatoes at Costco that were grown only a couple miles away, sans chemicals, and picked the day before. You don't need to go to a farmer's market to buy local.

And, well, much as I like our local industry... generally they taste nothing like a tomato.

Every tomato I've ever eaten has always tasted pretty much the same?

Nothing I can find compares to an outdoor grown tomato from Leamington, Ontario.

Nothing I can find compares to an outdoor-grown heirloom varietal.

You may be trying tomatoes from the same region. Comparing North American tomatoes (personal experiences include Ontario and N/S California) versus European (Italy/Swiss), the taste, sweetness and juicyness, is more bland in North America.

As for tomatoes from the same region, I've never really tasted a difference either.

Home grown tomatoes taste more flavourful because they're allowed to ripen on the plant. Many store bought tomatoes are indoor when picked then ripened with ethylene gas.

If you grow your own tomatoes you can use cultivars that are optimized for taste, not for looking beautiful on a shelf for several days after being transported a hundred miles. It also helps to pluck them only when they're most ripe.

> It also helps to pluck them only when they're most ripe.

And to eat them well before they even catch a whiff of a refrigerator.

Come on over in August when my garden tomatoes are ripe.

Not even in the same league.

Growing up in Northern Europe I spent the first ~19-20 years of life believing I didn't like tomatoes. Then one day when I was in Italy I had a tomato bought from a local farmers stall in some small village and realized that I tomatoes can be awesome.

Still don't like most tomatoes available at supermarkets though.

Note as well that for 50-80% of the year (depending on location), the farmers market tomatoes are just Mexico tomatoes bought at Costco.

China is also a greenhouse superpower, they've built huge numbers in the north. They tend to be lower tech, focusing on an earth insulated design.

http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2015/12/reinventing-the-green...

So is Spain, almost every green/red/yellow/orange pepper sold in Canada is from greenhouses there. http://www.amusingplanet.com/2013/08/the-greenhouses-of-alme... (article chosen for pictures, not content which is suspiciously political/biased).

This is likely the future of food. More and more needs to be squeezed out of every acre of land.

>> "This is likely the future of food. More and more needs to be squeezed out of every acre of land."

Is it really necessary? I understand the population is increasing but the population is also getting fatter. From what I understand we already grow more than enough food for everyone on the planet. Difficulties is distributing that to everyone, overeating, and too much choice (and wasted resources to create a lot of it) seem to be the problem.

One could argue that greenhouses could help decentralize the farming industry, thereby mitigating the problem you mention, but these greenhouses would need reliable energy and transport infrastructure. If a given country already has reliable energy and transport then they likely have no issue with food distribution either.

Then again, countries may be more inclined to invest in local greenhouse infrastructure if it meant raising the expertise level of the country (which leads to more local jobs, better education, etc).

Per capita, people in developing countries consume a small fraction of the amount of meat that people in the developed world do. That amount is growing rapidly as they gain wealth, so in the future much more land will need to be devoted to growing animal feed like corn and soybeans.

That said, this article has to do with vegetables which require much less land than animal feed crops. Its unlikely that they will be a major stress point in the future food system compared with commodity crops.

No, it doesn't. We already grow more than enough food to feed everyone. And our population is going to level off. There's no need for industrial nutrient production facilities, we can grow delicious food instead.

Acreage for vegetables is tiny compared to commodities like wheat, corn and soybeans. Those will likely never be grown in greenhouses given the lower yield per acre, you couldn't grow enough of them in a greenhouse to cover the capital cost of construction.

greenhouse veggies are a premium product? people pay more for lots of stupid things i guess. my wife pays triple for organic milk no matter how many scientific studies i send her way.

Nobody wants to admit it, but most of this tech has been driven by (and often funded by) the prohibition of marijuana. Due to the extremely short spring/summer in most of Canada, indoor grows became the norm, and much of that technology/knowledge was transferred over to these locations almost decades later.

When legalization occurs next spring, you'll see lots of these greenhouses switch to the new cash crop.

That's nonsense. MJ plantations are amateur hour, nothing compared to the high tech inside modern greenhouses.

I don't know what grow houses you've been in but here in Florida many are absolutely sophisticated, even including CO2 management.

Having some climate/AQ control systems does not make a setup advanced. I'm not claiming there is not a single illicit system that has some automated equipment in it, the gp's claim was that current greenhouse tech was developed in/for mj growing ops, which is preposterous.

MIT's OpenAG (state-of-the-art in the industry) must be boring you to tears, then.

> you'll see lots of these greenhouses switch to the new cash crop

Will they? Or will the marijuana farms just move outside, in the open since they no longer need to be hidden.

Pot isn't hard to grow (I'm told), it's just hard to hide the fact that you're growing it.

I'm not an expert, but while hemp in general might be a fairly hardy crop, the strains of cannabis prized for their cannabinoids might be a little more finicky. Hemp can endure a wide variety of molds and diseases and keep growing without losing much yield, but this might be less of a virtue in a crop destined to be commodity-graded for human consumption. Also, I'm given to understand that the intensity of the sunlight available to the plant is a major factor in determining the potency of the final product. I would be surprised to learn that any of the excellent marijuana grown in Canada was planted outdoors.

Combine that with how responsive the yield and quality of harvest is to intensive cultivation, and it seems a more likely competitor for greenhouse space in Niagara than for acreage around Tillsonburg.

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