“I grew up in a cucumber crop,” Ryan Cramer says, recalling his formative years helping around his father Albert’s greenhouse. Now, Ryan has a cucumber greenhouse of his own, called Big Marble Farms.

In 2009, Ryan started Big Marble as a four-acre greenhouse near Medicine Hat in Alberta, Canada, with his father and his uncle, Rick Wagenaar. Ryan sticks close to his family — he also works with his wife Brianne, who is the company’s executive assistant, and they are raising their daughter, Eden, and son, Rhys, around the greenhouse.

Family was the foundation for Big Marble Farms, and it is now a huge operation. In less than a decade in the role of CEO, Ryan has expanded the business to its present 35 acres of glasshouses. This city of cucumber production, with 190 employees, is the largest produce greenhouse in Alberta, Ryan says. And fitted with high-pressure sodium (HPS) grow lights throughout its entire production area, “It is one of the biggest lit operations in Canada,” he says.

Several key practices have contributed to Big Marble’s success: marketing geared toward healthy diets, crop selection based on market demand, year-round production enabled by the use of supplemental lighting, near-total adoption of beneficial insects for the benefit of both crops and customers, and packing onsite and selling local to ensure freshness.

“You’ve got to be always moving forward,” Ryan says. “That’s a common thing. You always have to be constantly innovating and adapting to the changes — constantly becoming more efficient and looking for ways to produce better.”

From one generation to the next

Raising Ryan on a farm was a natural follow-up to Albert’s own childhood. Albert was raised on a dairy farm where he tended to crops such as alfalfa, timothy and wheat. In the mid-1980s, Albert opened Rolling Acres Greenhouses, an operation that has, at various points, produced cucumbers, peppers, specialty crops and tomatoes. Although Albert brought his experience to Big Marble as founder, he still operates Rolling Acres Greenhouses, which is currently situated on 9.5 acres in Medicine Hat. Albert splits his production between cucumbers and peppers.

“My dad was always close to home,” Ryan recalls. “He worked on the acreage [where we lived] — that’s where the farm was. And he was able to be around. But we were also in the greenhouse a lot. We learned how to work from a young age, from just small jobs like dumping the leaves out in the field to actually having to pick cucumbers when we got a little bit older.”

Albert bought a quarter section (160 acres) of land in the early 2000s with the intention of growing on a larger-scale. He noted how Ryan, who had developed a serious passion for growing, needed an opportunity to advance in the business. “When we had started talking as a group about doing something, I said to my brother-in-law, Rick, and Ryan, ‘Let’s just start our own,’” Albert says. “There was nothing around here with year-round production, and I said, ‘Let’s do something completely different. We’ll put glasshouses up and put lights in it.’ We just had to pull the trigger, and we did, and there we go, and now we’re at 35 acres. It grew fast.”

With 20 years as a grower under his belt, Wagenaar wanted to try something new by 2007, when he sold his own produce greenhouse, Sunquest Growers. Originally, he and Albert had more of a hands-on role at Big Marble. But now Wagenaar, who performs public relations and marketing, and Albert leave most of the day-to-day decisions to Ryan. “[Albert and I] are not scared to take a leap of faith, and we’re not scared of debt — we’re not scared of risk and reward,” Wagenaar says. “Both of us being in that same position, but at an arm’s length to the day-to-day, is perfect. And Ryan, being youthful and spending his whole life within the greenhouse industry, was the perfect third partner.”

Cuke choices

With Ryan at the helm, Big Marble Farms grows Long English Cucumbers and Mini Cucumbers. The Long English Cucumbers fill about 21 acres of production space, and its Mini Cucumbers fill about 14 acres. The offerings and how the greenhouse space is divided are based on market demand, he says.

The operation uses rockwool starter cubes for both types of cucumbers. It then grows them in high-wire systems using bags containing coconut fiber, growing off the main stem of each crop and pruning off the side shoots. “We keep on lowering the plant down so that we keep the head in the same spot so that the cucumbers are always being harvested in the same spot,” Ryan says. “It’s much better for labor, it’s better for quality of the product and it also has potential to yield higher. But it’s a premium system. It’s more labor, so it’s a bit of a commitment, but it also gives you better product quality.”

Growing Mini Cucumbers and Long English Cucumbers are similar practices, Ryan says, but they differ in some ways. For instance, growers need to pick Mini Cucumbers every day, but they can get away without picking Long English Cucumbers for a day. “Mini Cucumbers will grow too fast in two days — they’ll just get too fat,” he says. “They’ll get too big, and then they’ll go to waste.”

Mini Cucumbers are ideal snacks for children’s and adults’ lunches, Ryan says, and Long English Cucumbers are well-suited for slicing up and including in larger dishes.

Growing year-round

Big Marble Farms takes advantage of the sun’s rays at its location near Medicine Hat in Cypress County, Alberta. This part of the country receives the most annual hours of sunlight — it’s what Ryan calls the “sweet spot of Canada’s Sun Belt.”

In Medicine Hat on the Summer Solstice, the sun shines 16 hours a day, but on the Winter Solstice, it shines only eight hours, according to The Old Farmer’s Almanac. Big Marble Farms maximizes light transmission by using glass structures, Ryan says. And when the days get shorter, the farm increases the amount of light its crops receive by using HPS lighting throughout its 35 acres.

“Our tagline is ‘Always Growing,’ which is describing the fact that we produce all 365 days a year,” Ryan says. “It’s a summer-like product, even in the middle of winter. We’re able to turn on the grow lights once the fall light starts to set in, and we can actually push right through November, December, January, February, when most growers are changing crops and cleaning their greenhouses.”

On the marketing and sales side, Wagenaar sees major value in informing purchasers, produce managers and end consumers about the processes that go into a quality cucumber crop, such as supplemental lighting. He notes that not all customers have time to talk to food producers and learn about where the crop came from, but if he could tell all of them about the production systems at Big Marble, he’d be able to secure and maintain their business.

“When you explain it to them — the science of what it takes to grow a good cucumber and the effort of atmospheric computers and the lights and the waking up of the plant — they can’t help but grin,” Wagenaar says. “[They say] ‘You’re kidding? It’s not just a cucumber?’ ‘No, we wake them up in the morning, we put them to bed at night. We have to tickle their feet — tickle the roots — we call them the feet. We tickle them with the little sensations in the morning to get them active, to get them out of their sleepy slumber. And then okay, it’s worktime, let’s go.’”

A biological approach

To fight pests and diseases, Big Marble Farms uses approximately 99 percent beneficial insects, Ryan says. The farm, along with other operations, takes the biological approach rather than using pesticides to assure customers that their food is safe. This is one of the main assurances about produce that is important to customers, he says, along with local and fresh.

In addition, growers are beginning to find more sense in using biological programs than using pesticides, Ryan says. “It might be more expensive, but it’s just easier on your crop,” he says. “If you’re always spraying pesticides on your crop, you’re damaging it, to a degree. Plants don’t like being sprayed. In the long run, people have realized that this is the better option.”

Big Marble Farms’ biological program manager scouts the entire farm for pests and diseases, Ryan says. “He’s got a really good eye for it, a real passion for it,” he says. “What he does is he orders the beneficial insects, and they come from Holland. He monitors on a weekly basis how many good guys and bad guys we have in the greenhouse, and then he makes decisions based on that for how many more good bugs he’s going to need for the next week.”

When it comes to educating end consumers on organics, Wagenaar says he tells them that it is far better that they are eating a vegetable rather than a processed food such as Pizza Pops or Crispy Crunch — Canadian junk food. He never says the product is organic, but he tells them, “Spraying pesticides is always, always, always the very, very last chink in the armor.”

Freshly packed

Once harvested, Big Marble Farms packs its own product to avoid bruising and guarantee freshness and proper labeling. The Mini Cucumbers can be packed in different ways, Ryan says, including six or eight packed together on a foam tray with a labeled plastic-wrap on top; or placed in one, one and a half or two-pound bags. The English Cucumbers are plastic-wrapped either individually or shrink-wrapped with others, placed in a box and sold in bulk.

Big Marble Farms uses grading lines, which Ryan says requires a lot of labor. Employees fill boxes with cucumbers and place the vegetables on trays by hand.

“All the big operations have been packing their product for a long, long time,” Ryan says. “But as far as Alberta goes, we are one of the only ones that do it. So [it’s] somewhat new to Alberta, because we never had big enough operations. We always co-packed.”

Big Marble Farms sells its cucumbers it through the RedHat Co-operative, a co-operative of about 30 growers near Redcliff, Alberta, “The Greenhouse Capital of the Prairies.” Ryan is a board member of the co-op, as is Albert, who chaired it for several years due to his roles at both Rolling Acres and Big Marble. The co-op sells Big Marble’s product throughout Canada — mainly in the Prairie Provinces of Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba.

The importance of family

Family still plays an integral part at Big Marble Farms. As executive assistant, Brianne helps with tasks such as marketing, branding and office work. And Ryan sees a benefit to having his children grow up around the operation.

“One of the things I think that I find very important from running a family business like this family farm, for my kids, is that I hope that they learn the same work ethic values that I learned and they have the same family life that I had,” Ryan says.

The business’ marketing emphasizes the importance of nutrition for children. Images of children — including Eden and Rhys — playing and eating cucumbers are prominent on the company’s website. There are also old photos of Ryan as a child — one of him on a tricycle holding a cucumber and one of him standing beside Albert, who is kneeling.

Albert says he enjoys seeing his grandchildren growing up in Ryan’s greenhouse like Ryan grew up in his. “It’s pretty exciting to see them being involved with that, and the opportunity for them is pretty cool, if they want to go with it,” he says.

The farm’s name also refers to children. “The name Big Marble harkens back to a simpler time when kids would spend hours playing with their friends and family,” according to the company’s site, which offers instructions for playing the game marbles, as well as Jacks and Conkers, two other games. (Ryan says the name is twofold — it also refers to Earth. “The Blue Marble” is a nickname for the planet, and an image the Apollo 17 crew took of it in 1972.)

More developments are on the horizon for Big Marble Farms, which has an expansion plan for 2020. Consumer demand will determine the crop type, and acreage will increase by another 10 or 20 acres, enlarging the greenhouse space to more than 10 times its original four acres.

Big Marble completed its 2016 expansion — a whole 20 acres — within a year of breaking ground, and Ryan has the same plans for this next expansion. “It will be complete in 2020,” he states, confidently. “We would break ground [in] early 2020, and we would have plants in it by the fall of 2020.”

Rooftop farming is intensive agriculture using engineered soil and irrigation on building roofs. Commercial rooftop farming is an emerging practice at the intersection of agriculture and urban planning, where economic and environmental returns are equally important. Rooftop farms can take many forms, including gardens, high tunnels or climate-controlled greenhouses. Rooftop farming enables production of hyper-local food and its associated social and educational benefits in urban areas where land is unavailable or prohibitively expensive for farming.

The basics of rooftop farms

Municipal zoning laws and building height restrictions are barriers to rooftop farms, but some cities are beginning to revise their codes to accommodate urban agriculture and rooftop farms. In New York City, for example, it became easier for property owners to obtain the city’s approvals for constructing rooftop farms in 2012 when a citywide planning initiative known as “Zone Green” removed the zoning impediments for incorporating ornamental and agricultural uses on rooftops. In this new context, the Brooklyn Grange, a 1.5-acre commercial rooftop farm, was constructed atop an 11-story building of the former Brooklyn Navy Yard. For this construction, $592,730 was funded by the Community-Based Green Infrastructure Program of the NYC Department of Environmental Protection based on the expectation that the farm could reduce drainage volume and nutrient load to the East River while producing fresh vegetables for local consumption. While commercial rooftop farming is still in its early stages, New York City alone has 0.9 billion square feet (about 21,000 acres) of flat roof surface, 14 percent of which is considered suitable for large-scale (>10,000 ft2) commercial farms (Ackerman et al. 2013; Acks 2006).

Rooftop farms can increase revenue through diverse social and cultural programs, not just vegetable production. For example, the Brooklyn Grange became a popular destination for environmental and agricultural tourism, and is used for exercise classes, weddings, photo shoots, music events and organic food tasting. Also, the Grange offers farming internships as well as environmental education programs that have engaged approximately 40,000 K-1 students. These programs emphasize participation of immigrants, refugees and other under-represented groups, which are subsidized by the municipal programs for green-job training and diversity.

Growing media in rooftop farms

Load-bearing capacity of the building is among the constraints specific to the design of rooftop farms. In comparison to using field soil, it is relatively easy to specify engineered soil within the weight limitation. These engineered soils can be categorized into the following two types: expanded shale, clay and slate (ESCS); or potting soil (PS). ESCS are common base materials for green roof soil products, which meets the industrial standards for rooftop landscape construction, including ASTM (American Society for Testing and Materials) standards (Ampim et al. 2010). ESCS soils can be useful for rooftop farming if they have sufficient water-holding capacity and nutrients (Whittinghill et al. 2013).

The second type is potting soil, i.e. container media. If peat, coconut coir and other organic materials are used as base material, potting soils can be lighter and have greater water holding capacity than ESCS soils (Harada et al. 2017). Whether ESCS or potting soils are used, the precise management of organic amendments becomes challenging because organic matter lost to decomposition must be replenished. Also, lightweight materials must be self-knitting (ex. peat, coconut coir) because lightweight granules (ex. vermiculate, perlite) can easily be lost by wind erosion.

Production in rooftop farms

Precise management of irrigation and fertilizer inputs can reduce the drainage loss of water and nutrients, which enhances both environmental and economic returns of rooftop farming. Unlike in-ground agriculture, for example, rooftops do not have immediate access to water in the ground level. Thus far, irrigation has used municipal water, which is both expensive and competes directly with human consumption.

The economics of rooftop farms

The economic viability of urban agriculture relies on the sales of quick-turn/high-yielding leafy greens and fruit-bearing vegetables with high market value. These crops also have high demands of water and nutrients, which can make rooftop farming prone to drainage loss of water and nutrients. While the yield of rooftop farms can exceed in-ground agriculture, efficiency of water and nutrients use can be lower. Optimizing these inputs is an exciting area for research at the junction of science and practice (Harada et al. 2017; Sanyé-Mengual et al. 2015). The development of soil mixes with enhanced water-holding capacity combined with drainage recycling systems are central to this effort.

Rooftop greenhouse considerations

The use of climate-controlled greenhouses allows for more intensive year-round vegetable production on rooftops. Design of such facilities involves a complex process of navigating zoning laws, load-bearing capacity of buildings and rooftop access. Rooftop greenhouse design also takes into account the potential for beneficial heat from the underlying building as well as greater wind speed than similarly sited ground-based greenhouses. Because of the challenges in site selection and design, some rooftop greenhouses have found it easier to incorporate rooftop farms into new construction projects rather than retrofit existing buildings. Once constructed, operating a rooftop greenhouse is remarkably similar to traditional greenhouses other than getting loads up and down through the building.

Because greenhouses allow for control of temperature, light and relative humidity, rooftop greenhouse operations usually focus on producing one particular class of vegetables to optimize production efficiency and output. Two examples of rooftop greenhouses include Sky Vegetables based in the Bronx and Gotham Greens with four locations including: Queens, two in Brooklyn, and Chicago. Both Sky Vegetables and Gotham Greens focus on leafy greens and herbs using NFT (nutrient film technique). In a rooftop setting NFT is favored over deep water culture (DWC, raft/pond hydroponics) because DWC uses a large volume/weight of water. Both operations sell to local restaurants and supermarkets.

While rooftop agriculture has its challenges, we may be seeing a lot more of it as the human population becomes increasingly urban. By 2050, 70 percent of the global population is projected to live in urban areas.

Acknowledgements Financial support was received from the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture, Multistate Research Project NE-1335: Resource Management in Commercial Greenhouse Production. Yoshiki Harada (yh535@cornell.edu) is a recent PhD graduate, Tom Whitlow (thw2@cornell.edu) is an associate professor, and Neil Mattson (nsm47@cornell.edu) is an associate professor and extension specialist within the School of Integrative Plant Science at Cornell University.

References Ackerman K, Dahlgren E, Xu X (2013) Sustainable Urban Agriculture: Confirming Viable Scenarios for Production, Final Report No.13-07 vol NYSERDA No. 13-07 [Online] (Accessed on April 01, 2016).

Acks K (2006) A framework for cost-benefit analysis of green roofs: initial estimates Green Roofs in the Metropolitan Region: Research Report Columbia University Center for Climate Systems Research

Ampim PA, Sloan JJ, Cabrera RI, Harp DA, Jaber FH (2010) Green roof growing substrates: types, ingredients, composition and properties Journal of Environmental Horticulture 28:244 Harada Y, Whitlow TH, Bassuk NL, Russell-Anelli J (2017) Biogeochemistry of Rooftop Farm Soils. In: Lal R, Stewart BA (eds) Urban Soils. Advances in Soil Science Series. Taylor & Francis Group, Portland, United States, Sanyé-Mengual E, Orsini F, Oliver-Solà J, Rieradevall J, Montero JI, Gianquinto G (2015) Techniques and crops for efficient rooftop gardens in Bologna, Italy Agronomy for Sustainable Development 35:1477-1488 doi:10.1007/s13593-015-0331-0 Whittinghill LJ, Rowe DB, Cregg BM (2013) Evaluation of vegetable production on extensive green roofs Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems 37:465-484

Photo courtesy Dr. Jeffrey Dorfman

Dr. Jeffrey Dorfman is a professor of agricultural and applied economics at the University of Georgia. He primarily studies food retail, consumer purchasing trends and other food-related topics. Below, he discusses his research, an impending tech revolution in food retail and how the supply chain will be affected by an increase in local food production.

Produce Grower: What are some of the trends you are currently researching in food retail?

Jeffrey Dorfman: There’s one big push, one big part of food retailing [pushing] toward there being more Walmarts and Amazons getting into food. So, there’s a lot of food where you want to pay as little as possible for it. And then the second trend is consumers who want special attributes. So, we want gluten free, we want organic, we want local and we want some sort of health benefits from our food. Consumers will pay extra for those attributes. What I see is that food has all ended up into one of those two buckets, either selling a product to get the premium price because of either its contents or the production process it went through — think fair trade coffee.

PG: You wrote an article for Forbes that a tech revolution is coming to food retail (Editor’s note: you can read that article at bit.ly/2I5o7by). What does that mean and what might that look like?

JD: I think there’s definitely going to be a tech revolution in food retail. I’m not sure we know how it’s going to impact the market yet. I think the likely way is we’re going to spend less time in-store shopping, more time online shopping, and when we do go into the store, to not be wandering around hunting for things. Kroger has a feature now where a light will light up on the shelf in the aisle as you’re walking down to show you where the next item on your shopping list is. Retailers haven’t wanted to do that because supermarkets make most of their profit through impulse buying. And if we can just follow our list through an app on our phone that lights the product up for us so we can find exactly what we’re looking for quickly and easily, we might not make impulse buys. We’re just going to to have to wait and see a little bit how much of this gets widely adopted and how much people like it. But the early indications are people like the tech and it’s going to have to keep coming.

PG: Right now, there’s an emphasis on local food production. How do you see that affecting the supply chain moving forward?

JD: This we actually have a pretty good answer to thanks to Chipotle [and their recent issues]. More local food is going to mean more danger of food safety problems, so having a larger number of smaller suppliers, [and] having a more complicated supply chain, is going to mean everybody’s going to have to step up their game to make sure the food supply remains safe. It’s going to be much more complicated to keep 10,000 small local produce growers following all the regulations instead of a really big group of them.

Logo courtesy of Wageningen University & Research

With a primary focus on food safety and security, Plant Sciences Group managing director Ernst van den Ende and members of the Wageningen team discussed various applications of its mission to focus on the domain of a “healthy food and living environment.” To fulfill this, research is based on the pillars of science, education and value creation, which are, he said, “combined to solve the complex issues in society.” For example: What is needed to bring a GMO to society? How do consumers accept new technologies? And, overarching all: How can we innovate more (e.g., per square meter) with less (e.g., energy), and better (e.g., safer, healthier)? “All our research programs are linked to this mantra,” van den Ende said.

He then illustrated its application to greenhouses, explaining that a high-tech tomato greenhouse can produce 20 times more than that which can be produced in the field — with four times less water. Additionally, it can use biological pest control in the closed system, resulting in less residue. All of this results in more sustainable production. “People aren’t aware that technology and sustainability are linked because they link sustainability to nature,” he said. “We need to carry that message to them.”

This is particularly important because of the challenges facing agriculture. Not only are there current global issues, such as agriculture inequality and availability of healthy food, but this will be exacerbated with the world population expected to increase to 10.5 billion people by 2100. With the impacts of climate change and our current energy and water use are added to this, said WUR Plant Pathology Scientist Geert Kessel, it is critical that agriculture’s ecological impact be reduced.

A renewed vision

The 2016 rebranding of Wageningen University and the research institutes with which it merged in the late ’90s into Wageningen University & Research has strengthened the university’s research, by furthering the blending of education, fundamental research and practical application in collaboration with the business community and social organizations.

As explained by van den Ende, it is a partnership of the public and private sector. It begins with science-driven, pre-competitive work to provide general knowledge for the industry. As the research continues and moves from theory to discovery to application, the process moves further into the private sector with privately funded, proprietary applications developed from the general research.

The purpose and goal is to provide “science with impact,” he said, explaining that to really have an impact, you have to focus on and listen to the industry. “It’s really a balancing between industry and government to find the common interests and come up with sustainable solutions,” he said.

Van den Ende gave seed breeding as an example:

• Through public funding, research has focused on molecular DNA.
• Through 10 percent private funding, the research centered in on tomatoes and potatoes.
• With more private funding and direction, research was directed to the genomics of specific tomatoes.

As such, he said, “The more private funding, the more the intellectual property belongs to industry.”

Up for debate

There is, however, a lot of debate about the value of public/private partnerships, said WUR press officer Erik Toussaint. “But that’s the beauty of the university; we welcome these debates. There isn’t one right approach; you need to use whichever is best.”

“For us, it’s really important to connect to society and do a lot of public debates,” van den Ende agreed. “I would like to have debates on facts, but very often it’s a debate on emotion.”

Just as controversial is the use of genetically modified organisms (GMOs). Kessel’s work is currently focused on developing resistance management in potatoes. Blight, as well as various bacteria, viruses and pests, all provide challenges to production. Therefore, research is focused on how to increase durability in relation to pests and diseases. The project aimed at stimulating research on genetic modification and public debate on innovative genetic techniques. As explained in the study report, “It was decided to clone and transfer late blight resistance (R) genes of crossable wild potato species (cisgenes) by Agrobacterium tumefaciens-mediated transformation without non-potato genes.”

As such, Kessel said, GMO is a tool for which one should determine benefit and risk by looking at the product in which it is used, not at the technology itself. Each application should be assessed from all aspects. “Here, we can afford not to use it,” he said. “But in poorer countries, they would really benefit from a technology like this.” For example, the study shows that if late blight were to be nearly eradicated, global potato production would increase by close to 80 million tons annually — contributing considerably to the needed additional global future food supply.

A lot of today’s plants are very susceptible to environmental conditions, and we need to study these and consider as many options as possible to increase production, said WUR scientist Gerard van der Linden. Why is this plant doing better than that one? Is there a genetic reason? Can we adapt that?

“We need to try to find the traits that breeders can use,” he said. For example, protein and fiber-rich quinoa is very tolerant to drought and salinity; it can grow in salt water and under normal conditions. As such, it has become a key focus of research for van der Linden. “This is a crop you can grow where no other crop can and produce a high yield,” he said. “So we are studying it to find out why. Maybe we can introduce that into other crops.”

Lisa is the editor of sister publication Quality Assurance & Food Safety (QA) magazine. llupo@gie.net