When Ranjot Singh Dhaliwal started Sustainabite Fresh Farms in a shipping container in Surrey, he knew he couldn't repeat the mistakes of high-tech indoor farms closing their doors around the Lower Mainland. "What I have seen in vertical farms is they put a lot of money in. So much unnecessary technology that was not needed. While I was building it, my main focus was to make it profitable," explained Dhaliwal.
Dhaliwal has seen many indoor farms fail in recent years; a sentiment echoed by Chris Arthur of Sky Harvest, an organic microgreens farm inside an unassuming industrial space in Richmond.
"There was a bit of a bubble five, seven years ago, where sort of indoor agriculture agtech was the next Silicon Valley boom and huge engineering resources were put into sort of reinventing the wheel and growing plants," said Chris Arthur, CEO of Sky Harvest.
Since Trump's 25 percent tariffs were put into place in February, the B.C. Center for Agritech Innovation (BCCAI) has continued to invest millions into agriculture technology projects. "This is something that the government did a really good job in, like, enabling small farmers to actually build something that will be beneficial for them and for the consumers," said Dhaliwal.
Read more at BCIT News