Endless Greens From Fieldless Farms
In the depths of Canadian winter, it’s a great luxury to have access to locally grown salad greens, herbs and even strawberries — frost-tender produce grown close to home, despite outside temperatures that turn your fingers to ice in moments.
In an expanding market, with consumer interest in eating locally reaching fever pitch, Jon Lomow, co-founder and CEO of Fieldless Farms, a Cornwall-based business that has been growing salad leaves year-round indoors since 2020, is turning the company’s attention to other products, such as basil, curly kale, strawberries and mushrooms.
The strawberry experiment is the result of a recent million-dollar grant from The Homegrown Innovation Challenge, an initiative funded by the Weston Family Foundation. Called True North Berries, the partnership between Fieldless and University of Ottawa team lead researcher Allyson MacLean, is to produce berries, that “can be grown anytime, anywhere in Canada. Key to the roots-to-shoots approach is a proprietary vertical-farm platform that is turbo-charged by the use of genetically engineered microbes and a carbon dioxide micro-capture,” according to Homegrown’s website. “The goal of the True North Berries team is to find a combination of innovations that will make indoor, locally grown, year-round strawberries able to compete head-to-head with imports across Canada.”
Lomow and MacLean have a small container set up for product testing. It is lined floor to ceiling with strawberry plants, shining red berries hang pendulously between vibrant green leaves, bumblebees buzz busily around the space, fertilizing the flowers to produce fruit. Since the whole thing is a scientific experiment, there’s no sampling allowed, but they look quite unlike the winter product we generally see on store shelves, shipped from California, or further, in the winter. These ones scream, “Eat me.”
In another corner of the vast warehouses, there’s further innovation. A darkened room is stacked with mushroom blocks. With a distinctly earthy smell, the blocks are fruiting what appear to be miniature cauliflowers. This is lion’s mane, a super food that has been found to help support brain function. It is sold shredded, perfect for adding to stirfries, soups and stuffing.
Boundaries for producing local tender greens have been expanding for some time now, as farms, such as Juniper near Wakefield and Ottawa Farm Fresh on Ramsayville Road, are growing later-season salad greens and baby spinach leaves in poly-tunnels, available right through December. Roots and Shoots farm in Masham has been producing spinach year-round for several years, but is also now growing more climate sensitive crops such as cilantro, parsley, salad greens, bok choy, kale, chard and lettuce to add to its winter community-supported agriculture baskets.
However, Fieldless isn’t just extending the season, it is producing highly nutritious greens year-round, day and night, in giant warehouses, without soil. It uses bespoke fertilizer and nutrient recipes mixed in-house to nurture tiny seedlings whose leaves can be harvested 40 days later. Thousands of seed trays rotate vertically through a huge grow-operation under lights. Fieldless has been using this system to grow four different varieties of lettuce since March 2020. No pesticides nor herbicides touch these leaves. The result is vibrant, fresh greens packed with nutrients. As the plants grow, they are transplanted into larger trays twice before harvest.
Next in production is spinach, grown in former shipping containers. Baby spinach leaves can be grown in vast quantity by just one person. The seeds are planted in re-useable clay pebbles from Germany, and nurtured using bioponics, a growth-withoutsoil system that uses microbials — beneficial micro-organisms — developed in Windsor, Ont., to mimic the rich ecology and the very best soils found anywhere in the world. The spinach is grown from seed to harvest on a 28-day cycle.
Fieldless delivers twice weekly to Farm Boy and Real Canadian Superstores across Ontario, as well as Massine’s on Bank Street and McKeen Metro in the Glebe. Local is everything,” says Lomow, who started his professional life as a software engineer. “Pre-COVID it was all about price. Now it’s all about local.”
Given that Canada imports $3.85-billion of fresh vegetables every year, according to a 2022 report by Agriculture Canada, there’s an imperative to produce more locally and sustainably, Lomow says. This food deficit is a threat to our stability on many levels; financial, climate-related and health. Produce is one of the leading sources of food poisoning. Regular romaine lettuce recalls no longer come as a surprise to most consumers. And given that Canada has the largest lettuce trade deficit in the world, worth about $715-million a year in 2022 as reported by Agriculture Canada, this isn’t going to change soon, unless producers such as Fieldless Farms can solve the lettuce import problem.
Lomow, who is clearly passionate about food, explains that what Fieldless Farms is doing is substituting capital expenditure on the infrastructure, which is expensive up front, for the challenges of the field. However, this investment allows Lomow to eliminate the variables of nature. Frost, flood, drought, heat waves and pests are no longer a factor in production that goes on year-round. And because Fieldless delivers direct to its retailers, travel miles for the product are much reduced as well. That’s to say nothing of electricity costs: the indoor farm is strategically located close to the Quebec border on the 401, so that it also benefits from the economics of Quebec electricity prices. “Cornwall is serviced by Cornwall Electric, which has a deal with Quebec Hydro to get all its power from the Quebec grid,” Lomow explains. “As a result we pay less for power than anywhere else on the Ontario grid, and we get power with about three times less CO2 intensity.”
It's not just the local nature of Fieldless that makes it more sustainable, it’s a business-wide approach that encompasses renewable power sources, recycled water, passive cooling and packaging that avoids plastic as much as possible. Recently adopted, their new lettuce boxes are made from cardboard with only a thin plastic layer across the top of the box, reducing plastic use by 90 per cent from previous clamshell packaging. “Our aim is not to play on the fringes.
Our aim is to displace imported items, solve the frustrations with leafy greens and build trust with consumers and grocers too,” Lomow says. “Producing food sustainably brings us sovereignty and joy. We want to create products that people love. It’s that simple.”
Fieldless Farms
Fieldless.com | @fieldlessfarms
