26 juin 2025
$5 million to extend Canada’s berry season and deliver healthy, resilient, high-performance strawberry plants
A team from the Faculty of Agriculture and Food Sciences has qualified for the final phase of the Weston Family Foundation's Homegrown Innovation Challenge.
— Getty
A project led by Professor Martine Dorais, a greenhouse and controlled environment specialist at Université Laval’s Faculty of Agriculture and Food Sciences (FSAA), has been awarded a $5 million grant from the Weston Family Foundation as part of the Homegrown Innovation Challenge. Professor Dorais and her team—including colleagues Steeve Pepin and Charles Goulet, and industry partners Cultivar, Ulysse Biotech and Farm3—are one of four teams whose project has qualified for the final phase of this Canada-wide competition which aims to promote the development and implementation of innovative ideas for extending the growing season of berries.
The FSAA team’s project, dubbed VertBerry, is a flexible and scalable bioponic system designed for the large-scale production of healthy, high-performance strawberry transplants specifically adapted to farming in controlled environments. The system combines state-of-the-art phenotyping and microbiome engineering technologies, intelligent resource management and varietal selection.
VertBerry features a modular design, components made from sustainable materials, an optimized vertical infrastructure and intelligent climate control that reduce both environmental impact and investment costs. By operating in a completely closed environment, the system minimizes the risk of disease propagation, optimizes the use of water, nutrients and energy, and guarantees strawberry plants suitable for greenhouse, tunnel or open-field growing, as well as pesticide-free fruit.
The VertBerry system addresses key issues in Canadian agriculture, including the lack of disease-free transplants and dependence on imports, in addition to aiming for greater profitability for growers. “It is crucial to strengthen our food self-sufficiency while preserving our natural resources and adopting innovative, sustainable agricultural technologies,” explains Martine Dorais, who holds the MAPAQ Research Chair in Organic Horticulture in Greenhouses and Controlled Environments. “VertBerry will help improve both the profitability and sustainability of controlled-environment production, while positioning Canada as a world leader in agri-food innovation”.
During the final three-year phase of the Challenge, Martine Dorais and her colleagues will implement and fine-tune their system to demonstrate its effectiveness under large-scale commercial conditions.
For more details on the project, click here.
Source:
ULaval communications
Université Laval
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