How vertical farming can help Canada create a self-reliant food chain in an era of tariffs and climate change

Globe and Mail

20-05-2025

This dry patch of land doesn't look like the kind of place where Canada's food future might take shape. On the edge of B.C's South Okanagan – home to one of the country's most arid and fragile ecosystems – a lone steel-sided building stands on the flattened site of the town's former lumber mill, which closed in 2007.
Inside, under bright lights and a steady flow of filtered air, rows of lettuce grow in trays stacked 20 feet high. Workers dressed like astronauts carry trays of seeds and harvest greens destined for grocery stores across British Columbia.
This is Avery Family Farms – a vertical lettuce farm built by Garry and Victoria Peters, a married couple whose family ties run deep in the region. They made their fortune in fine art and print reproduction, selling their business just before the 2008 financial crisis, after it topped $100-million in annual revenue. Today, through the farm's parent company, they invest in agritech as well as industrial and residential real estate.
For OK Falls, as locals call it, the facility is a rare and hopeful sign of new industry in a community still shaken by lumber giant Weyerhaeuser's decision to move the mill about 100 kilometres east to Princeton, B.C.
For Canada, Mr. Peters sees it as a working example of how the country might begin to rebuild self-reliance in an era defined by tariffs, climate instability and fragile supply chains.
Mr. Peters said he understood the risks, but the idea had already taken hold. It started in the earliest days of the pandemic, when, like millions of Canadians, he watched grocery-store shelves empty overnight.
At first, he imagined buying a barn, maybe raising some food for his family and neighbours. But the deeper he looked, the clearer it became that Canada's short growing season wasn't going to cut it. That led him to vertical farming – an idea he said quickly shifted from personal to national.
Canada imports the vast majority of its lettuce, much of it trucked up from California and Arizona – states increasingly strained by drought, wildfires and tightening water restrictions. Mr. Peters sees that dependence as a risk that Canada hasn't taken seriously enough.
'We can't assume the shelves will always be full,' he said.
Demand spiked almost overnight when U.S. President Donald Trump uttered the word 'tariff,' Mr. Peters said. Retailers, worried about the reliability of cross-border supply chains, began looking for Canadian-grown alternatives.
Mr. Peters said the surge in orders was a wake-up call for his farm and the wider food industry about how quickly geopolitical tension can upend assumptions.
Those same themes now sit at the centre of Prime Minister Mark Carney's economic plan. His platform includes targeted support for greenhouses, hydroponics and vertical farms, along with infrastructure and inspection reforms aimed at building a more resilient food system.
Mr. Carney has framed the issue as both economic and sovereign – a way to protect Canadians from inflation, supply shocks and the consequences of a changing climate.
This farm is a relatively small operation. But everything required to build it evokes some of Canada's deeper fault lines. It took the capital of a Canadian entrepreneur in a country where business investment still lags most of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). It sells into a Canadian market disrupted by the breakdown of free trade with the United States. It creates jobs in a region where manufacturing has hollowed out. It offers a glimpse of what Canada's economy could be.
But for now, it reveals just how fragile the vertical-farming model is. Even as Mr. Peters's facility produces thousands of heads of lettuce a day, the economics remain precarious: The constant flow of energy required to grow a perishable product in a desert-adjacent climate – the lights, climate systems and water controls – runs up a huge tab. Labour and training are expensive.
Mr. Peters said it took five years and millions in private investment for the business to break even.
Vertical farms are gaining traction across North America, but the high-profile bankruptcies of U.S. companies such as Plenty and Bowery Farming and have put the viability of the nascent industry under the spotlight. Both raised hundreds of millions in venture capital but couldn't sustain high operational costs with tight margins.
In Canada, Ottawa-based Growcer says it is fielding calls from communities looking to secure local food production before the next shock hits. GoodLeaf, a Guelph, Ont.-based facility backed by McCain Foods, is expanding more cautiously, building upon its background in food production – a more deliberate process than the rapid pace of the tech-driven failures.
That caution reflects the real economic pressures faced by vertical farms, and the need for better support if the industry is to scale, said Evan Fraser, director of the Arrell Food Institute at the University of Guelph.
Dr. Fraser, who advises Mr. Peters and other entrepreneurs, said vertical farming holds 'incredible' promise, but the model is fraught with economic, logistical and regulatory challenges.
'There's huge potential here – but getting from now to next requires derisking the space,' Dr. Fraser said in an interview, pointing to the wall of capital expenditures that are too steep for most entrepreneurs to climb.
'When you've got a $20-million CapEx and a massive burn rate, you've got to sell a lot of lettuce.'
What's happening in Okanagan Falls is a case study in what Dr. Fraser calls the 'science-policy-society interface' – the space where research, regulation and risk collide.
Dr. Fraser has watched more innovators emerge with bold ideas – and seen how quickly they run into structural barriers. He worries that Canada could repeat the mistakes of the tech sector, where early optimism around social media helped concentrate power in the hands of a few.
'If we don't get the policy and regulatory structures right, we risk building the agrifood version of Big Tech – powerful, narrow and not necessarily in the public interest,' he said.
And the rapid pace at which the Silicon Valley efforts approached vertical farming ignored the fact the growing produce at scale is not the same as churning out microchips.
'You can't treat lettuce like an app,' he said. 'It's a living organism, and it needs to be grown by people who understand that.'
Dr. Fraser and Dr. Lenore Newman at the University of Fraser Valley are co-directors of a five-year, $17-million federally funded platform called Sustainable Food Systems for Canada, which will train entrepreneurs. The program, which launches this year, is designed to help ventures such as Avery Farms scale up while ensuring the benefits are broadly distributed.
'We have a chance to flip the switch – to turn agriculture from a source of problems into a driver of solutions,' he said. 'But that only happens if the innovation is built on equity, sustainability and public good.'
That kind of national ambition is on Mr. Peters' mind, too. He sees the land he bought around the farm – cleared and serviced but still empty – as the potential core of a light-industrial hub. Food processors, manufacturers and small-scale distributors could bring stable jobs to a community long dependent on seasonal work. With climate-controlled farming as the anchor, Mr. Peters said the model could be repeated in other parts of the country.
But that would first require a manufacturing and skills base that could help build it. That's why he turned to Japan – a country with decades of experience in greenhouse engineering and closed-loop agriculture – to help design and equip his system. His staff was trained through a Japanese university and flew overseas to learn directly on site.
'We can't expect government to solve everything,' he said. 'Private business needs to step up. This is our country, too.'
Mr. Peters was explaining the cost and time it took to meet strict food-safety regulations when the lights cut out and silence settled over the room. A moment later, it gave way to the sound of hurried footsteps – his daughter Rachelle, walkie-talkie to her ear, stepping in from the hallway. 'The power's out,' she said.
Mr. Peters winced almost imperceptibly. 'That is the first time this has happened,' he said. But then the backup generator kicked in: a $400,000 expenditure required to avoid a total crop loss in moments just like this.
'If the power goes out for a day, you've got thousands and thousands of plants in trouble.'
The outage turned out to be townwide – the first since the farm came online. But the generator did its job. And after 15 tense minutes, the lights returned. The building's full systems powered up. Ms. Peters returned, relieved. 'We're back,' she said. The lettuce would be fine.
Mr. Peters knows a single farm won't change the country's food system. But he said it shows what's possible with investment.
'We could make a real difference. But we've got to stop looking for 20-per-cent returns before anyone's willing to invest,' he said.
'We need to build things that are good for Canada – things that last.'