Microgreens farm Fresh Forage goes dark

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.

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.

Weber called the industry a niche market with tough margins. “There’s a lot of vertical farms that have gone bankrupt or have gone under, there’s a lot of different realities that people just don’t understand, unfortunately.”

Weber said he had been working more than 80 hours a week when he decided to shutter Fresh Forage.

“A grocery store has variable demand, but an indoor farm has to sell out 100 per cent every week, based on the business models,” he said.

“It is just not sustainable, purchasing container farms or setting up big, massive indoor grows. The business model itself quickly falls apart when you apply practical realities of the business and sales culture to it.”

Weber will sell the company’s materials, but plans to hold on to the Fresh Forage brand.

If you’ve had a dish peppered with microgreens at Passero, Oxbow, Nola or a number of casual fine-dining restaurants in Winnipeg, there’s a good chance they came from Alex Kohut at Winnipeg-based vertical farm Cal’s Crops.

Kohut said Weber’s experience running a vertical farm rung true, and the growing interest in organic local produce is outpacing the few vertical farms in Manitoba.

“Even if we were to fill the gap that Joel was providing, there’s still so much more room for other businesses and other providers, home-based or otherwise,” he said.

Kohut said all of Cal’s Crops seed lots come from Canada-based farms. Interest in vertical farming could grow as tariffs imposed by the U.S. contribute to the rising cost of groceries and a renewed interest in local produce.

“This industry has a lot of potential to fill the need, especially with growing tensions in U.S.-Canadian trade relations,” he said. “I do think that a lot of folks are looking for different opportunities to build more Canadian independence in the market.”

Vertical farming has been the subject of several projects at the University of Manitoba.

A research team working with Opaskwayak Cree Nation built “smart vertical farming” in the community some 600 kilometres by highway northwest of Winnipeg, which uses computer-monitored light and climate controls to grow fruits and vegetables year-round.

A test farm at the U of M’s Fort Garry campus is testing an artificial intelligence system that could adjust growing conditions to optimize growth yield and reflect market prices.

malak.abas@freepress.mb.ca