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Power through your entire to-do list.
DIVERSITY part of plan
HPS lights in conjunction with grid power during the winter months. “For the next calendar year, we have tomato
production, vegetable propagation and we also have the first stages of a cannabis business, which may be both cannabis propagation as well as cannabis cultivation,” Houweling says. “It will be a
challenge ... but I'm interested in learning about the needs of a new plant and about the
therapeutic and medicinal
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benefits of the plant.”
Houweling says
the retrofit currently underway will include special blackout curtains to better control the plant’s photoperiod during long summer days, compartments for different growth stages and special security measures. “It is a
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controlled product and so there will be security upgrades. Some of these are physical and other ones are procedural
implementations,” he says.
These include
controlled access, security clearances for employees, cameras, fences, new food safety or “biosecurity” procedures and special tools to make sure product remains where it’s supposed to be. “A big part of the security is the measuring and the handling of the product through the process and then verifying all of the weights of the product for whatever the activities are,” he says.
All current staff will have the opportunity to remain with the company, he adds.
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New direction Deep roots
The greenhouse industry in BC has evolved to the point where two different types of greenhouses work together to create one product for market: propagation and production greenhouses. The first stage of plant growth for almost all of the greenhouse industry in BC begins with the two propagators. This has allowed production greenhouses to
excel at producing without the worry of extra costs associated with the beginning stages of growing, says BC Greenhouse Grower’s Association chair Linda Delli Santi. She remembers the transition. “When we were growing [in the 1980s], we
[propagated] ourselves,” she says. “When the propagators popped up, we thought, well, let's just focus on what we do best – not what we do for a week or month in the winter – and let someone else do that for us with a purpose- built facility.” As new greenhouses were built, there wasn’t
a need for propagation facilities, so the designs began to exclude them. This has given Bevo and Houweling’s their own corner of the industry and also speaks to possible reasons why a large cannabis company would be interested in their facilities. The move also conveniently skirts an order in council from July 2018. The amendment to the ALR regulation says, in essence, that concrete- based facilities such as Houweling’s and Bevo have given to the cannabis industry cannot be built in the ALR for cannabis production. Meanwhile, the two companies are free to build new facilities on the ALR for production of traditional horticultural crops.
Bevo’s story differs in a few key areas. A public company, it was acquired through a reverse take-over by privately held Sun Pharm Investments Ltd. and is now known as Zenabis. Historically, Bevo’s greenhouse in Langley has focused on propagation only (whereas Houweling’s has production facilities) and produces greenhouse, field and flower plants. Cannabis will move into the Langley facility while Bevo retrofits a greenhouse in Aldergrove for its other crops. “We're expecting it to be a smooth transition and that's why we bought another property with existing facilities that we intend to build new propagation
Sean Hitrec
facilities on. And the goal is to make sure that transition is smooth because the greenhouse vegetable companies have a need for propagated material,” Bevo founder Leo Benne says. “The goal from Zenabis and Bevo Farms is to ensure that that transition happens almost seamlessly.”
If the stock market is any indication of
success for Benne and the new Zenabis (TSX-V: ZENA, but formerly BEVO), the company’s stock price jumped to $3.90 a share from $2.30 on October 25, 2018 and hovers around $6.00 at press time. Both Zenabis and Houweling’s Tomatoes need to complete certain construction obligations in order to seek grow licences from Health Canada. Once that happens, the province’s budding cannabis propagation industry will really begin to take root.
COUNTRY LIFE IN BC • FEBRUARY 2019 nfrom page 21
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