The largest vegetable greenhouse in Alberta is about to get larger.
Big Marble Farms, a 35-acre facility just outside Medicine Hat that produces English cucumbers, mini-cucumbers and several types of tomatoes, plans to add another 10 acres to its operation and install a six-megawatt co-generation power plant.
“The whole plan of the expansion is to expand on our current offering of year-round cucumbers, mini cucumbers, tomatoes on the vine, beefsteak tomatoes,” said chief executive officer Ryan Cramer.
“We’re starting to expand into more varieties of tomatoes year round, things like romas and cocktail tomatoes. It’s really to expand on that year-round production.”
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Expansion will entail installation of natural gas-fired generators to produce electrical power. The existing 35 acres are serviced from the City of Medicine Hat. Another 10 acres of greenhouse would require another service agreement, said Cramer, so he and partners Rick Wagenaar and Albert Cramer opted to install a co-generation plant instead.
“The neat story behind the generator project is that we’ll be able to utilize the waste heat off of the generators and put it in our heat storage tank and then use it in the greenhouse,” Cramer said.
“So there’s kind of a dual purpose to that. We use our boilers less because we’ll be making our own power and using the waste heat off of that and putting it into the greenhouse to heat it.”
The co-generation part of the plan will be funded in part by Energy Efficiency Alberta’s Custom Energy Solutions program, which is designed to help large commercial facilities reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.
Big Marble operates year-round, which requires a vast array of grow lights and a major electrical demand. The new approach will generate six megawatts of power and there are future plans to add another four to round out at 10 mW of generation.
That will be needed when Big Marble undertakes additional future expansion to reach the goal of 55 acres of growing space.
Cramer said Big Marble is in discussions with the Medicine Hat utilities department over potential interconnection. The greenhouse will use less of its self-produced electricity in summer, when the region’s long hours of sunlight reduce the need for grow lights.
That means it could run its generators to put electricity into the grid for use by the city.
“We would be able to run the generators for more than just our own usage and be able to use the heat off the generators (for the greenhouse),” said Cramer. “I see it as a win-win. I think they have need for clean, green energy like this, especially in the summertime.”
The expansion, expected to be complete in August 2020, will require another 35 full-time employees added to the current complement of 190 people.
It will also increase the amount of Alberta-grown produce available throughout the south.
“We want to be the ones to fill people’s plates with Alberta-grown product year round,” Cramer said. “There’s no need to bring in product from Mexico or Spain when we can grow it right here. More and more people are looking to see where their food comes from.”
