Greenhouse Canada

News Handling Systems Structures & Equipment
Second set of funding provided for controlled environment agriculture projects

March 16, 2022  By Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada


The Government of Canada has announced a second set of funding for the Controlled Environment Agriculture (CEA) sector.

Five small businesses in the CEA sector will each receive up to $150,000 to advance automation and robotic technologies for solving challenges such as work productivity and labour shortages and operational efficiency in the agricultural sector. The funding is provided through the Innovative Solutions Canada (ISC) program.

New projects include:

Advertisement
  • Exonetik will develop a robotic system to enable a multitude of tasks that are notoriously difficult to automate, such as fruit and vegetable harvesting.
  • GWS Vertical Farms will build and test a fully functioning vertical farm using aeroponics to grow leafy greens. This will reduce human errors, minimize the introduction of contamination, and reduce the consumption of resources.
  • Sinopa Energy will enhance and provide cost effective and efficient harvesting of mushrooms in existing facilities through their Artiflex system.
  • Stratuscent will tackle labour intensity through their digital nose technology that detects and interprets odours to monitor the crop ripening process and to detect early signs of spoilage.
  • Truly Northern will use their GroStack Automation Project to finalize the vertical farming system design for commercial distribution and reduce identified labour costs by integrating cost-effective automation solutions and increasing production output by using Artificial Intelligence and remote monitoring to optimize growing conditions.

This announcement follows earlier news of four CEA projects previously announced last week.


Print this page

Advertisement

Stories continue below