During his years of selling farm equipment, Mark van Deursen has had many conversations with the men and women who grow our food. "I talked to a lot of farmers, and the biggest thing was (that) food security is becoming a big issue."
His family moved from Holland to start farming in Armstrong when he was 14, so he was no stranger to the industry – but he knew there needed to be a new approach. "What could I grow year-round?" he thought. His research into greenhouses proved to be too expensive with the high costs of labor and heating. So his research took him down another road – cubic farming.
He uses a cubic farm system out of Langley, designed to produce food out of a sea can, any time of year. Inside van Deursen's sea cans are layered growing systems that grow hydroponically under stimulant light. It checks all the boxes. Low labor costs, year-round production, and it fits his space. "It's the size of one football field that we are growing in one container," he says.