Vertical Harvest Wall produces larger plants, less roots
William Aitken was working in construction when he started trying to figure out the next business opportunity to pursue. He grew up on a family farm in Stonewall, surrounded by a family of entrepreneurs. Aitken approached his uncle, Rick Langille, a retired business owner and former CEO, with an idea.
“You can’t really tie my uncle down. He’s one of those guys who constantly has to be doing something,” said Aitken. “So, I said, ‘hey, why don’t we get into vertical farming and design and create a piece of equipment?’”
Langille, who has a background in manufacturing and a degree in agriculture from the University of Manitoba, immediately saw the potential. They started prototyping in 2020. Now, the Harvest Wall is sold around the world to growers who are passionate about fresh food.
“When we got into the science of it, we realized we could do a better job,” Langille said.
The pair consulted with Dr. Jill Clapperton, a soil scientist, to create a design with the densest plant spacing possible.
“We started analyzing systems, lighting components and all the different pain points that growers experience, and we came up with the Harvest Wall,” Aitken said. “It’s easy to ship, scalable to your location and easy to service and clean. We can do residential or full commercial applications anywhere.”
They named the company Harvest Today. Langille is the CEO, and Aitken is the director of operations for Canada. Every wall is completely customized and made of modular pieces, so it assembles easily.
Once it gets running, it doesn’t need much water because the media keeps the soil moist. They use the patent-pending word “vertigation” to describe how the wall’s vertical irrigation works. The water drips down from the top of the wall, and whatever is left at the bottom gets sent back to the top to complete the cycle.
Aitken said what sets the Harvest Wall apart from all the other systems is that the plant ports are filled with organic growing media to inoculate the root system. The other common vertical farming methods — aeroponics, hydroponics and aquaponics — don’t use soil.
Aitken said they chose this method because the beneficial bacteria in the soil lead to bigger plants, not bigger roots.
“On social media, people are pulling out these plants with huge long roots. And it’s like, I don’t know dude, that looks like a lot of plant energy being expelled into the root system because you’re starving your plant.”
Aitken says their roots only extend about half an inch to an inch off the cup because the soil is saturated with nutrients.
“I believe we’re going to be very successful I believe in providing people with the opportunity to be self-sufficient and make sure that they’re not reliant on truck bed lettuce anymore,” Aitken said. “A lot of people don’t understand how much nutritional depletion happens after the time of harvest.”
Aitken explained that within the first 48 hours, many greens actually lose up to half of their nutritional value. In the case of spinach specifically, it can lose up to 90 percent within the first 48 hours after harvest.
“We should be eating salad as soon as it’s picked. Nature didn’t intend for lettuce to sit in the fridge for three weeks before we get to it — it was designed to be grazed.”
They called the company Harvest Today as a nod to how immediately you could eat a variety of different greens off the wall. Langille says that without a doubt, the Harvest Wall is the best solution for helping communities that struggle with access to fresh food, especially clients with space restrictions.
“It’s the people who are challenged by something in the supply chain other than the food itself… the transportation, the cost, the timing,” Langille said. “When lettuce gets trucked up to Whitehorse, it’s pretty much wilted or brown by the time it arrives. It’s not really super yummy, so it makes it less motivating to get your greens in.”
Langille saw the impact of food insecurity when he was sailing across the Pacific Ocean from 2007 to 2013. He quickly learned that there was no such thing as fresh food on many of the islands he stopped at throughout his journey. Most of what was available was processed and brought in by truck or boat.
“We mostly ate canned food or bagged food filled with preservatives. We lived that way for five years,” Langille said. “When we came back, it was like, ‘give me a salad for crying out loud.’”
In addition to using the Harvest Wall to grow greens, Harvest Today recently developed larger plant ports to accommodate flowering plants like strawberries, peppers and tomatoes. The next step is developing smaller varieties that give the fruit the proper space to grow on the wall while still yielding an impactful amount of produce.
Langille said he would love to eventually set up a Harvest Today vertical farm in Stonewall, where he was raised, to provide the community with fresh food year-round.
