Indoor Farm Thrives In North York Industrial Unit

Jonah Krochmalnek's crops require less water than traditional farming methods, and taste delicious all year-round.

By ALEX MCKEEN  |  Staff Reporter

Tues., Sept. 5, 2017

Jonah Krochmalnek is a 26-year-old farmer. He pulls up to work every day ready to plant, tend and harvest a variety of organic greens and herbs.

He produces loads, too. In a given year — he doesn’t have to worry about seasons on his farm — Krochmalnek estimates he could grow 16,000 kilograms of pea shoots, if they were his only crop.

Living Earth Farms, the company Krochmalnek started four years ago is no ordinary farm.

That’s because it isn’t on a remote country road where plants have space to stretch out and soak up sunlight, but in an unassuming, 2,300-square-foot industrial unit in North York, the same area where Krochmalnek grew up and lives still.

Living Earth is an indoor, vertical farm where crops grow in stacked rows seven layers high with special red and blue LED lights designed for optimal growing conditions shining down on them. It’s the first of its kind to be organic certified in Ontario.

“It took a long time to figure all this out because there’s no book on this type of thing,” Krochmalnek said.

His farm is closed to the public because Krochmalnek works there alone and doesn’t have the means to run an educational component yet.

Indoor farming is a new industry, especially in Canada where Krochmalnek runs one of the first such businesses to get off the ground. He sells wholesale to distributors all year — a pot of living basil goes for $2.40 ($4-$5 retail) and a 100-gram clamshell of a variety of microgreens sells for $10 (restaurants buy them for around $15).

Since he grows indoors, he has to automate as much of the growing process as possible, and ensure that it’s efficient enough to make money.

In fact, most of what makes up Living Earth Farms was put together by Krochmalnek himself, from the giant fans that control humidity, to the sub-irrigation system that keeps plants watered without risking contamination.

His choice of red and blue LED lights was informed by NASA research aimed at figuring out how to grow food in space.

“This is probably somewhat of a model that will be used if we go to Mars,” he said. Since the lights he uses are energy efficient, his hydro bill has never exceeded $1,600 (usually it’s closer to $1,000-$1,200).

By growing indoors, Krochmalnek is able to produce food year-round. It’s kind of like having a greenhouse — only it requires a seventh of the space to produce the same yield and uses about 95 per cent less water than traditional farms for crops like lettuce.

“In the winter something like basil takes me 16 days to grow. In a greenhouse, almost double that,” Krochmalnek said.

The quality, he said, is “not even close.”

“My basil tastes like summer. Basil in the winter grown in a greenhouse tastes like water.”

The reason for the difference is simply that the space Krochmalnek has designed is ripe for growing. It’s, as Krochmalnek describes it, the “perfect plant environment.”

“Let’s say you want to be in a tropical sunny place to go on vacation generally. This is like plant vacation. The plants have it easy here,” he said.

Well before he ever imagined making a living by designing and operating a plant paradise (he studied business, not agriculture), Krochmalnek cherished a love of gardening.

His dad showed him how to keep a garden at age 14 and he was instantly hooked.

“Whenever I had a summer job I would bring my cherry tomatoes to people at the office, and their face would light up, and that’s the best feeling,” he said.

Krochmalnek began to see agriculture as a career possibility only after he took part in Downsview Park’s urban farming initiative, Fresh City Farms, and loved it.

He chose indoor farming in an attempt to make farming within the city viable, and now he can’t imagine doing anything else.

“It’s 100 per cent certain that this will be part of the future. It won’t be the whole future for agriculture, but it’ll be a big part for leafy greens and perishable crops,” he said.

Rhonda Teitel-Payne, co-coordinator of Toronto Urban Growers, said that, while urban farms like Krochmalnek’s are unlikely to be sufficient to feed cities, they play an important role in food security, and connecting people to the food system.

“We are going to see more and more farmers, more rooftop growers, more vertical systems because people are running out of options in terms of access to land,” she said. Though land is scarce, interest is growing.

Vertical farming is “very new but there are a lot of people who are thinking about it, talking about it,” Teitel-Payne said.

Looking forward, Krochmalnek has imminent plans to hire his first employee, and longer-term ideas about possible expansion.

In the meantime, he hasn’t stopped gardening for joy, in addition to business. Three potted eucalyptus plants sat under his LED lights last month, not for selling “just for fun.”

Krochmalnek marvelled at the genetic differences that caused them to come out looking like a motley trio.

“These are all from the same batch of seeds,” he said. “And they all grew differently.”