BY EMMA JACOBS (FREELANCE REPORTER/PRODUCER) , IN MONTREAL

October 8, 2020 — Cherry tomato plants tower over Lauren Rathmell’s head in the latest greenhouse built by the company she co-founded, called Lufa.

"We train everything vertically so that we can keep these plants a lot longer than a typical garden tomato plant," she explains. "We're in the probably 15 to 20-foot-long plant range now. They're really high."

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Their height makes it hard to tell that the greenhouse encloses a space the size of three football fields — all dedicated to growing varieties of tomatoes and eggplants.

It’s also four stories off the ground, on the roof of a former Sears warehouse not far from Montreal’s Trudeau International Airport.

Greenhouse-grown produce is a relatively small but growing part of agriculture in the Canadian provinces of Ontario and Quebec.

Lufa claims this latest site, opened this summer, becomes the world's largest rooftop greenhouse.

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"Once everything's picked and ready, it's going to go down right to our warehouse below us and packed into tomorrow - early tomorrow morning, into the baskets for the day," says Rathmell. The baskets containing the items customers' order online get delivered around the Montreal area and as far away as Quebec City in the company's electric delivery vehicles.

"We forecast really accurately and we try to pick just what's needed for that day's baskets. It's better for taste, it's better for quality, and it means no waste in the end as well," she says.

 Rathmell, originally from Vermont, founded Lufa with her husband to try and eliminate the environmental footprint associated with shipping produce across the continent. Lufa is named for a Lebanese cucumber. Rathmell’s husband is Lebanese. They call their customers "lufavores."

While greenhouses use a lot of energy, especially up north, Rathmell says putting them on a rooftop cuts winter energy use in half.

"We benefit by just passively receiving the heat that's coming from that building below, rather than being on a cold ground level in wintertime," she said. The greenhouse also creates an insulating bubble over the building below. The former Sears building now also contains other offices and warehousing.

Lufa established what was then the world’s first commercial rooftop greenhouse back in 2011.
With its latest, the company now operates four sites in the greater Montreal area, which have year-round growing seasons. Building on a rooftop does come with extra costs but Rathmell says energy savings and proximity to consumers help to offset them.

At the start of the pandemic, those customers doubled virtually overnight. People looking to order groceries for delivery signed up at rates that took the company by surprise.

"Within a week or two we had gotten a waitlist in place, first time ever we've never had a waitlist before, but we couldn't keep up," Rathmell recalls.

The company had to reorganize its greenhouses and warehouses for safety while also increasing the density of plants in its greenhouses. But Rathmell says it was a useful test for their business, which she’d like to expand someday to other cities, potentially in the northeastern United States.

She’s also interested in expanding the range of crops.

"We do have two banana trees at one of our greenhouses as well," she says. "You can basically grow anything in a greenhouse. Is it worth growing in a greenhouse? Maybe not. But yeah, the bananas, I think they took like a year and a half, but we did get bananas.

So Quebec’s probably not the next banana capital, but certainly, a good place to experiment with greenhouse farming in cold climes.

Related Topics

montreal · environment · quebec · canada · agriculture