A typical day for Amin Jadavji, President and Chief Executive Officer of Elevate Farms usually begins with calls starting around 8 a.m. He typically visits one of the growing sites and spends time with the growers - discussing any issues, changes and potential improvements. Most of the day is spent on calls with potential partners globally. This usually starts with European calls in the morning and ends with New Zealand in the late afternoon. A portion of each day is also spent with the tech and software team as they continue to test and develop enhanced controls of their system. Finally, a portion of each day is devoted to pitch calls with investors. The process for fundraising seems never ending for a growing vertical farming company trying to make its mark in the world. However, Jadavji did not always know that the emerging sustainable farming technology of Elevate was going to be his calling. Jadavji grew up in north Markham. When he was younger he didn't quite know what he wanted to do yet, but he knew he wanted to go into something business oriented. He studied economics at Western University and also did some studies in the culinary arts at George Brown College. “From that perspective, I was always kind of interested in food, enjoyed cooking, all those sorts of things,” Jadavji says.
Although Jadvji began his entrepreneurial and manufacturing experiences in the paper business for Metro Paper Industries, turning it into one of Canada’s largest and most technologically advanced tissue paper manufactures, he knew he wanted to dive into the food industry. “From the day I exited the paper industry I immediately started working on what’s now Elevate.” Jadavji says he saw an opportunity in the food supply industry and some of its inefficiencies. Northern countries can have a hard time growing delicate vegetables. “It's basically one crop turn per year, and then the rest of the year (the country) is frozen.” Canada has a short window to grow leafy greens so the country has to get them shipped from warmer places such as California. However, California has restrictions on their water usage. “Like if you go down to California and you look at a menu from a restaurant at the bottom, in fine print, it'll say water will only be served on requests due to state laws. Yet, 60% of the state's fresh water goes to agriculture. Then we, as Canadians, rely on that agriculture to come to us, to feed us.” California will then export leafy greens to Canada that are very perishable and only have a shelf life of two weeks. “You can jar and can tomatoes, you can freeze other types of produce, but with lettuce it has to be fresh, it can’t be stockpiled.” In Canada, there are not many solutions offered to produce and conserve leafy green productively. Jadavji realized “there's gotta be a better way. There's gotta be another way to do this.”
That is when Jadavji met his current business partner, Per Aage Lysaa, a Norwegian researcher in advanced photobiology. “He's been studying the effect of light on living organisms for over 20 years,” Jadavji says. The research behind the use of LED (light emitting diode) lighting to grow and affect leafy greens came before Jadavji’s interest in this business. Lysaa focused his research over 20 years ago on how to grow a number of greens under different types of man-made lighting. “It started with looking at the colours of light on offshore fish farms,” Javardi says. This research attracted a lot of attention, including from the European Space Agency and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Being able to grow food in space is an essential for global space agencies projects. With LED lighting, astronauts are able to grow the nutrients they need without natural light nor a lot of water and land. "About 10 years ago (Lysaa) got some funding from the European Space Agency to look at the whole idea of food for space,” Jadavji adds.
Jadavji met Lysaa about five years ago. “When I came around, we'd already proven that we can do this, but what hadn't been done was can we do this at scale? Can we do this cost effectively?” With Jadavji’s background in manufacturing he realized that they were not going to feed the world if we are the most expensive product at whole foods retailers. Jadavji says the nature of Elevate Farms was not to simply feed the top one per cent of the population with expensive products, but to bring this technology to the masses. With this in mind, Jadavji and Lysaa used their respective backgrounds to create Elevate Farms, a company that can grow large quantities of food for market prices. “Our combined objective became ‘how do we bring that together and actually develop a system that can minimize labor, reduce costs and reduce energy consumption.’” Dr. Youbin Zheng, a professor at the School of Environmental Sciences at University of Guelph, says vertical farming close to or within cities is not only environmentally sustainable, but also socially sustainable. “The vertical farming facilities located within or close to urban areas can reduce transportation costs from importing and it can provide employment to people living in the cities,” he says. The investments into this technology and company were not easy to receive. In the early years, the creation of liquid cooled LED lights costs millions of dollars to create and only space agencies had the money and the interest to invest the money for it. “At least when we started five years ago, the concept of LED lighting to grow food was not widely known. I'd say most people today, maybe academics in this space may understand it, but generally speaking, most people still don't know that.” Jadavji says getting the money to grow the business was difficult and they were faced with many skeptics. “They say ‘we'll give you a little bit of money as an angel investor and we'll take a big chunk of your company. And then we're saying you can't value us at a hundred thousand dollars when we've cracked this nut.” Jadavji says he believed that they were too unbelievable many years ago and it has taken some time to build the trust and momentum needed to build a name. “The single biggest challenge has been convincing people that we actually have something here that's worthy of a tens of millions of dollars.”
Two years ago, Elevate Farms had its first pilot facility in Toronto. Some of the facilities main customers are some of the top restaurants in the city. “That in itself is kind of a niche business. We've got a bunch of accolades from a lot of the city's top chefs, but again, that wasn't the business plan. We had to justify this multimillion dollar investment.” In this facility there are conveyors that take product in them and run them through a 150 foot long belt over roughly three to four weeks, depending on the product. This one 100-square feet facility can grow 5000 plants a week. The most astounding part of this facility is that there are actually no physical workers inside of the grow room. “For the process of seeding, packaging, harvesting, cleaning up is only done by three people.” With this technique, Elevate Farms has been able to grow all this produce with 99 per cent less water consumption than traditional farms. Where it can take traditional farms an average of 10 gallons to grow a head of Romain lettuce, this facility can do it with just one. They also 80 per cent less labour than a traditional farm. However, with so little labour needed in these high tech farms, it is not surprising that some may worry that their skills will become obsolete. Jeremy Tessier, candidate for a master degree in the geography, urban and environmental studies at Concordia University remains sceptical of this type of technology. “It may, however, disrupt small- scale ecological farms that rely on a variety of produce to remain viable,” he says. “Disruptive tech has been a driver of social inequality, Uber and Airbnb are prime examples of this. The facilities required for this tech are likely expensive to build and operate, which limits the participation of smaller farmers.” Tessier says with lower labour costs, profits are centralized and spillover effects into the local economy are diminished.
The Covid-19 pandemic has changed a lot of things in the world. The demand for food security and supply chain is one of them.
The pandemic shed some light on the risks of human labour working close to each other and the inefficiency of the supply chain. “When you talk about making actually higher nutrient product it's grown in a sterile environment. There are no pesticides, no chemicals, no additives. Now, there's no possible human contamination. This is food security.” Jadavji says the goal is not to get rid of outdoor field farming and farmers. “But does it make sense for us to be growing food and sending it, you know, 5000 kilometres back and forth across borders, on ships, across containers and around the world.” Zheng says that traditional farming techniques are still needed for products such as grains which can be stored and transported long distance without risk to quality. With globalization and outsourcing, many labourers around the world are paid low wages to harvest vegetables and fruit that will then get sold for very modest prices. “Agriculture is notorious for having the lowest paid and the most vulnerable workers all around the world. And then we are the benefactors of getting relatively cheap price product whenever we want it from wherever it comes from in the world.” Jadavji says it's not about working against farmers and traditional practices, but to work with them to build the most productive food security and supply chain. “I think it will allow us to prioritize what's important for a local market and we can grow some of those things locally and have a smaller environmental footprint.” The future of Elevate Farms looks bright. The company received a US$10 million investment from North Star Agriculture Corp. to construct a number of facilities dedicated to growing leafy greens in the most isolated northern territories in Canada. “We're not driving the process in terms of what it sells for and how much it costs and that sort of metric, certainly from providing the technology, we're excited to get into that food security space and really to do something in an area where there's always been food insecurity.” Elevate Farms is also testing itself within the retail supply chain with a few local grocery stores, but first, they need to figure out how to do the supplying. “If you could picture trays coming out on a conveyor belt and each tray has all these plants. Now we have to package them. So are we tromping and bagging? Are we putting them into cases? So that's where the human element comes in now, as we standardize that we can even drive a lot of that labour out.” They have also started working on new sites with partners across Canada. International interest has grown, with companies and investors reaching out from countries like New Zealand, Saudi Arabia, Spain and some Scandinavian countries. “It's not about necessarily stopping globalization. It's kind of about working with it. Just finding the most adequate and productive ways of being smart. That's kind of the idea.”
コメント