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Canada’s Farm Show kicked off Day 2 with more tools and tricks for people to grow their own food at home.
For Rick Langille, growing great-tasting food comes with an easy-to-use growing system operated from a person’s phone.
Langille is the founder and CEO of Harvest Today, a company that promotes indoor agriculture for year-round growing.
“It’s amazing; we are finding people that want good, healthy food,” Langille said Wednesday. “I think the world is trying to wake up. Every piece of produce that’s on the grocers’ (shelves) has travelled 1,500 miles to get there. That’s ridiculous.
“We have to stop doing this. We just have to so we have to enable people to grow food locally, and that’s what we are doing.”
Harvest Today’s product, The Harvest Wall, has six small grow pots per tile with vertical irrigation channels down the backside. Each tile can be stacked one by one and side by side to make 120 tiles growing 720 plants.
Langille said the best part of his product is that it is incredibly easy to fit into small areas. It makes it simple for people to have smaller operations going on in their house, and kids can get involved in the gardening.
The company has garnered international attention from grocery stores in Australia to restaurants in Winnipeg to the prison systems in the United Kingdom.
(Gillian Massie/980 CJME)
The hydroponic system uses vertical irrigation channels. The flow of water drips down onto the plants in the holsters into a tray below, then to the flood rail to the plants and back again.
According to Langille, the system uses 97 per cent less water than other growing systems. After testing prototypes, the company finally has the product it wants.
“We started drawing all of the things to get it into the solid works program about two years ago, and through about six months or so of trial and error of getting things growing,” said Langille. “We had a handmade prototype first so we got that growing pretty well at first.”
Prior to his operations with Harvest Today, Langille operated a tech company, which helped him design an app that controls the water flow within the wall.
“The pump is activated through an app, and the app can change the frequency and the duration of the pump,” he said. “So you want to do that to monitor the types of plants you are growing, and what stages they are at.”
The app is designed with different settings for germination, early propagation, or full vegetation.
Langille said a typical problem with other controlled indoor growing systems is that while they work, the roots end up growing bigger than the actual vegetation of the plant.
“We don’t eat the roots,” said Langille. “The energy of the plant is typically put into growing a large amount of root.”
The amount of energy going into the root lessens the quality and taste of the plant.
“One of the things my wife always says is, ‘It tastes fine, but where did the flavour go?’ ” said Langille.
He said he perfected his system by making sure the roots stay efficient while not causing the produce to be limited.
“Our system really allows the plant to focus because we have that small element of organic material in the coconut core pod, and the coconut core allows to bind the nutrient’s density of the nutrient solution to the roots,” he said. “That’s why we get plant mass, which is what we eat, versus great big roots.”