Project Media Releases
Project : Village Indoor Farm & Living Lab – a blueprint to nourish our rural communities
This project has been made possible in part by Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (AAFC).
February 21st, 2023
ECW is pleased to announce that the recent investment of up to $126,966 from Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada’s Local Food Infrastructure Fund (LFIF) is a step in the right direction to make our indoor farm and living lab facility in the old Blacks Harbour grocery store a reality. With this funding, we will acquire 50 vertical hydroponic growing towers for fresh food production, electrical and plumbing upgrades to accommodate the new equipment, and a geothermal system. This helps to reduce our carbon footprint while producing food for our community. Work continues to be underway at the old grocery store.
Our mission for Project : Village Indoor Farm & Living Lab is simple. We work alongside fellow non-profits to feed the community through locally grown, nutritious food options. ECW has been in close contact with many food service providers, including the St. George & Area Food Bank, Neighbourhood Works in St. Stephen, and others to develop a plan to optimize food storage and distribution in our region. It is essential that we learn from and work alongside these food service providers to build a strong, resilient food system.
Lori Porelle, Program Coordinator for Neighbourhood Works:
We began meeting with ECW and other food service providers in our region in October of last year. These meetings are a great opportunity to share knowledge among other non-profit providers and to work toward a common goal to nourish our communities. Since July of last year, Neighbourhood Works has served over 10,000 meals and our numbers are climbing. An affordable way to access year-round produce and store our other goods will help us to continue to feed more people in the future.
Once the farm is up and running, we will work over a series of months to develop a learning program for controlled environment agriculture (CEA) to address the skills deficit in the industry and to increase research & innovation in the areas of crop diversification. In October 2022, ECW staff toured other CEA farms in New Brunswick. These partnerships, and many more, will help us to succeed at our goals to increase square footage of CEA in the province.
Our Executive Director, Briana Cowie, had this to say about the indoor farm:
New Brunswick is a food insecure province that is hyper-reliant on imports. With the rising cost of food, limited control over outside impacts to our supply chains, and a lack of skills in the area of controlled environment agriculture, we are thankful to work with community members and the government to be a part of the solution. We are excited to finally start food production this year, with the on-boarded help and expertise of Brian Goggin, from the University of New Brunswick, who has been a critical piece of the puzzle to date.
Brian Goggin, a recent UNB Masters Graduate from Dr. Thierry Chopin’s Integrated Multi-Trophic Aquaculture (IMTA) Laboratory has been providing ECW staff and partners with technical oversight on CEA since 2020, when the project was initially imagined.
While at UNB Saint John, I completed my Master of Science in Biology to understand crop selection and various CEA techniques that can be used to provide fresh vegetables to local communities year-round. I am extremely excited to take some of this expertise and apply it to Project : Village Indoor Farm & Living Lab facility in the old grocery store in Blacks Harbour. This is a great opportunity to use existing infrastructure to employ indoor farming technology in a location that is ideal for food storage and distribution.
Interested in learning more? ECW staff and partners will be putting on 2 public engagement events in the month of March. The first will take place at Sunbury Shores Art Gallery in Saint Andrews on Tuesday, March 14th, from 5:30 until 7:00 PM. The second will take place at the Stella Maris Hall in Blacks Harbour (Eastern Charlotte) on Thursday, March 16th from 5:30 until 7:00 PM. The event is open to all community members and will start promptly with a presentation on the project details and next steps. We welcome anyone to attend! Fresh food & beverages will be provided.
If you have any questions about this event or about ECW’s Project : Village initiative, you can call the office directly (506) 456-6001 or email our central account at info@projectvillage.ca.
For more information, contact:
Briana Cowie, Executive Director
bcowie@ecw.ngo
506-456-6001