One of Manitoba's largest microgreen farmers is hanging up his vertical shelves. Fresh Forage — which produces microgreens, herbs, wheatgrass and flowers out of an indoor farm on Waverley Street in Winnipeg — is closing on Jan. 30 after nearly a decade. Company owner Joel Weber said the long hours of maintaining a vertical farm are no longer sustainable and he's focusing on another aspect of creating a greener city: mitigating the growing amount of phosphorus entering Lake Winnipeg.
"To many, it seems like a sad moment in time. To me, it's more of a stepping stone to a much larger problem that needs to be solved," he said. Fresh Forage owner Joel Weber says the industry is currently a niche market with tough margins. He will shutter his indoor farm Jan. 30. He founded Lakewater Nutrient Capture, which uses shipping containers with filters to capture phosphorus, in 2024, but is now scaling up operations.
Weber said he has worked on bodies of water in the Stonewall and East St. Paul areas and wants to tackle the issue in Lake Winnipeg, where high phosphorus levels caused by agricultural and urban run-off can create toxic algae blooms. "It's a major, major problem, and as you scale up, a lot of the existing technologies do not scale," he said.
Weber acknowledges closing his farm is going to leave a gap in the local microgreens market. He said Fresh Forage is the largest microgreen grower in the province, with as many as 700 shelves in circulation and stock in multiple grocery stores.
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