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Bright ideas and Ray Price go together like fruit and a greenhouse.
As the president of Sunterra Group, which has an eight-store grocery chain (six locations in Calgary, one in Red Deer and one in Edmonton), Price is constantly seeking new ways to offer high-quality products to consumers. His latest venture is a 20-acre greenhouse immediately north of the town of Acme and a stone’s throw from his family farm.
Construction of the $42-million facility began in early 2021 and the first crop was planted late the same year, despite supply chain disruptions. With 2.5 acres of strawberries and another 17.5 acres of tomatoes — beefsteak, on the vine and grape — the facility has already produced its first crops of fruit for eager consumers.
The greenhouse produces 35,000 pounds of strawberries and more than one million pounds of tomatoes every month, virtually year round. (They take a two-month break annually to clean out the greenhouse.)
The first abridged growing year provided a lot of learning for everyone involved and Price said he was pleased the greenhouse stood up well even under the brutal cold snap of late December 2021 when temperatures held steady at -30 C or colder for a week.
“Some of the hot water pipes we had in place weren’t flowing at the right rate, I don’t know if we would have noticed that with the -30 C,” he said. “We burned a lot of natural gas to heat it. It was a good test for us to understand operations; it worked well and we got some bugs out of it at that time.”
The greenhouse is unique in that every row of strawberries is on a hoist gutter system. Lowered to about 1.5 metres during picking, they are usually sitting eight metres off the ground. Every other row, or gutter, is picked, and then the gutters are switched, which allows the greenhouse to have 10 gutters instead of the more traditional seven, in each of its bays.
This equates to a 30 per cent increase in production and is only the third facility of its kind in North America, said Amanda Hehr, president of Sunterra Greenhouse.
“It’s going to be a two-to three-year payback, but it really makes sense if you look at the usable life of the greenhouse,” she said, adding yields are 100 kilograms per square metre of plants.
The greenhouse produces more than a million pounds of tomatoes each month, and once picked, they are on the shelves in Sunterra stores within 24 hours. photo: Sunterra Greenhouse
All strawberries and tomatoes are grown under LED or high-pressure sodium lights. The light spectrum delivered by the energy-efficient LED lights allows them to extend the growing season in March and April as well as September and October.
The strawberries, sold at Sunterra stores and some Alberta farmers’ markets, are harvested and within 24 hours they are sitting on store shelves ready for purchase. Only about 10 per cent of the million-plus pounds of the monthly tomato harvest (which are also on Sunterra shelves within 24 hours of being picked) each month go to the company’s stores, the remainder are sold to a third- party distributor.
The greenhouse motto is ‘Growing the ripe way’ — and the northern European variety of strawberry it grows is bred primarily for taste. It’s considered a ‘flavour forward’ variety and has a shorter shelf life than fruit grown in California or Mexico. It’s considerably sweeter as a result.
A sophisticated controlled-climate software called Priva alerts greenhouse staff when a weather shift is coming and they can adjust venting, temperature and humidity as needed to compensate for the outside ambient air conditions. Throughout the growing season, which runs from October to July, strawberries are maintained between 18 C to19 C ,and tomatoes in a range of 22 C to 24 C. A centre corridor divides the two unique climates and it’s also where workers grade and pack the fruit.
The greenhouse itself is the first of multiple phases that Price plans to introduce over the next three to four years, which includes a master build of 70 acres of production under glass. The project itself had an average of 80 tradespeople during construction and the greenhouse created 60 permanent full-time jobs. With the future expansion plans, Price estimates another 100 full-time jobs will be created once it’s fully built out.
The site itself is across a street from the town, which allows workers to drive, bike or even walk to work, essentially an unheard-of prospect in a rural setting. The spinoff benefits of keeping jobs in the community is being felt, as well. Earlier this year, the Alberta government announced a $13.7-million injection over three years for the Acme School’s modernization, something Price thinks would not have happened without families being in the area.
“With the school and jobs we are creating, there’s momentum that Acme is going to grow and that’s a good thing,” said Price.
Workers can tend to plants on a catwalk or at ground level. photo: Sunterra Greenhouse
With a better estimate of production and when they can expert mature crops, focused plans will be put into place to sell directly to Alberta retailers.
Even though the first year was not without expected hiccups, Price said he is glad they are forging ahead with another diversified offering within the family’s agri-food holdings company, which also includes a feedlot, a cured meats division, and a hog farm which directly ships chilled pork to Japan for the tabletop market.
“Nobody wants to step up and be the first in a lot of ways, everybody else just watches what everybody else does,” he said. “Next season it’s about developing relationships and learnings to implement, and the next thing is a seamless second growing season and making sure the production is getting out there.”
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