By next Feb­ru­ary T&T is ex­pect­ed to start pro­duc­ing tens of thou­sands of pounds of as­sort­ed berries and or­gan­ic greens an­nu­al­ly, as a project to grow tem­per­ate crops in an ad­vanced green­house farm starts at the Cove In­dus­tri­al Es­tate, To­ba­go.

The project will ini­tial­ly utilise two acres of land but will be even­tu­al­ly ex­pand to 12 acres as the pro­duc­tion is an­tic­i­pat­ed to ex­pand sig­nif­i­cant­ly.

At the heart of the project is a new com­pa­ny called Berrycove Ltd, a joint ven­ture be­tween An­tho­ny N Sab­ga Ltd, Is­land Grow­ers Caribbean and Alqui­mi Re­new­ables LLC.

“The project will go un­der con­struc­tion im­me­di­ate­ly, and we are sched­uled to have first berries out by late Jan­u­ary or ear­ly Feb­ru­ary” said Ralph Birk­hoff, co-founder and chief com­mer­cial of­fi­cer of Is­land Grow­ers Caribbean, who will al­so take on the role of GM at Berrycove.

He told the Busi­ness Guardian that T&T alone im­ports close to 70,000 pounds of straw­ber­ries a month with the con­comi­tant loss of for­eign ex­change.

Birk­hoff said Berrycove will even­tu­al­ly eas­i­ly meet this de­mand and then start pro­duc­ing larg­er vol­umes for frozen re­gion­al ex­port - in the process sav­ing for­eign ex­change and then trad­ing in US$ ex­ports.

 “And what is very in­ter­est­ing is the frozen berry ex­port. With 12 acres of land, we can pro­duce hun­dreds of thou­sands of pounds of berries a month. We will freeze them and ex­port them re­gion­al­ly. Right now all frozen berries com­ing in­to the Caribbean, the en­tire re­gion, is im­port­ed from the US, Mex­i­co or South Amer­i­ca. Just like our fresh berries, 100 per cent. We es­ti­mate the to­tal re­gion­al frozen berry mar­ket de­mand at about 40 to 50 mil­lion pounds a year so it’s a mas­sive mar­ket op­por­tu­ni­ty,” Birk­hoff said.

He ex­pect­ed that Berrycove will be able to pro­duce a pound of or­gan­ic berries at un­der US $1.50.

“The fresh berries sup­ply is our first ob­jec­tive. The frozen berries sup­ply is Phase 2, but we will be mov­ing in­to Phase 2 with­in months of Phase1 go­ing in­to op­er­a­tion. Now, we may not do a hun­dred per­cent of the frozen dai­ly pro­duc­tion in T&T be­cause ba­si­cal­ly it would make sense at some point for Berrycove to de­cen­tralise that mod­el and per­haps build a large farm in Ja­maica or else­where up the is­lands so that we don’t have to trans­port them as far. But for now, we are tak­ing this one step at a time and this is the big first step,” he said.

Ralph Birkhoff, co founder and chief commercial officer of Island Growers Caribbean.

Ac­cord­ing to Birk­hoff, T&T has a large food im­port bill and a ma­jor part of that is fresh pro­duce.

“Our com­pa­ny is very cog­nizant of that. We have been work­ing on build­ing Is­land Grow­ers Caribbean for three years now and you know a big part of the prob­lem Cur­tis, is that while lo­cal agri­cul­ture is quite pro­duc­tive here in Trinidad and farm­ers grow a num­ber of in­dige­nous crops, it boils down to hor­ti­cul­tur­al sci­ence, and the spe­cif­ic types of crops farm­ers can and can­not grow in this sub-trop­i­cal cli­mate.”

At US $6 a pound land­ed price and 70,000 pounds a month that works out to over US $400,000 in forex spent month­ly and US$5 mil­lion a year in straw­ber­ries alone.

Birk­hoff added that in­dige­nous crops, fruit and root crops do very well in this cli­mate but the coun­try still has to im­port a tremen­dous amount of fresh pro­duce, es­pe­cial­ly those cat­e­gorised as ‘cold weath­er crops’ with  berries as a prime ex­am­ple.

There’s on­ly one place in the Caribbean where straw­ber­ries are grown in any vol­ume and that’s in the moun­tains of Ja­maica which pro­duce close to 70,000 pounds a year that is sold main­ly in­to that is­land’s tourism sec­tor.

But how is this go­ing to be done? How is T&T go­ing to pro­duce not just straw­ber­ries but oth­er crops like Ro­maine let­tuce and ba­by spinach?

Birk­hoff re­vealed that the so­lu­tion lies in the use of tech­nol­o­gy that will not on­ly en­sure the abil­i­ty to grow the fresh crops suc­cess­ful­ly but that they are or­gan­ic and dis­ease free.  

He ex­plained that the com­pa­ny has de­vel­oped pro­pri­ety green­house and hy­dro­pon­ic tech­nol­o­gy that is de­signed specif­i­cal­ly for the Caribbean. The in­te­grat­ed green­house sys­tem is 100% hur­ri­cane, flood, earth­quake and pesti­lent re­sis­tant, and is de­signed to house an ad­vanced hy­dro­pon­ic sys­tem that is both en­er­gy and wa­ter ef­fi­cient.

Birk­hoff said, “We’re mov­ing very quick­ly now. So the ac­tu­al farm in­fra­struc­ture will be built be­fore the end of the year. We have to bring the plants in from Eu­rope and the US. They’re spe­cial va­ri­eties of straw­ber­ries and blue­ber­ries and rasp­ber­ries and black­ber­ries, that are what we call sea­son neu­tral. So they grow very well all year round and we have to bring in all of those plants. And that on­ly hap­pens in Jan­u­ary. So they’ll be plant­ed in Jan­u­ary and take about 30 to 40 days be­fore we get to first har­vest”

He added, “We’re al­so in­tro­duc­ing some di­ver­si­fied greens. So what this tech­nol­o­gy al­lows us to do is grow a wide va­ri­ety of let­tuces,fresh greens and herbs and we’re go­ing to be grow­ing mi­cro­greens which are ex­treme­ly pop­u­lar with chefs and restau­rant own­ers. And you know, they’re grown here in rel­a­tive­ly small quan­ti­ties at the mo­ment. We’re go­ing to be grow­ing them in larg­er quan­ti­ties so we could sup­ply com­mer­cial busi­ness de­mand, so I want­ed to stress the point that not on­ly is the qual­i­ty go­ing up con­sid­er­ably but we’re go­ing to ex­pand the types of fresh pro­duce over what’s cur­rent­ly avail­able.”

Birk­hoff said the use of green­hous­es to grow pro­duce from oth­er parts of the world is not unique to this project.

5Ksf Barbados Angle

“Quite frankly that’s what every coun­try around the world is do­ing now—mov­ing to green­house food pro­duc­tion to off­set im­ports. They are grow­ing ba­nanas in Ice­land and pa­payas in Turkey. They don’t im­port ba­nanas to Ice­land any­more—they grow them lo­cal­ly in green­hous­es,” he ex­plained.

The first phase will be about 42,000 square feet of green­house area. That’s go­ing to be di­vid­ed be­tween green pro­duce with var­i­ous let­tuce, wa­ter­cress, kale and spinach and the ma­jor­i­ty will be berry pro­duc­tion.

 “It’s ba­si­cal­ly four large green­hous­es. Each one of them is just over 10,000 square feet. One of those green­hous­es will do mixed berries, the black­ber­ries blue­ber­ries and rasp­ber­ries. They have to be grown in their own en­vi­ron­ment and a dif­fer­ent type of sys­tem. So in to­tal we’re go­ing to be do­ing ap­prox­i­mate­ly 45,000 pounds of berries a month, just out of this first phase, and it is in­tend­ed for fresh lo­cal sup­ply. We are look­ing at the po­ten­tial of ex­port­ing some of the fresh berries to places like Guyana or the  is­lands close by, but ul­ti­mate­ly this farm is go­ing to grow,” Birk­hoff said.

He said there are sev­er­al ben­e­fits to this project  in­clud­ing the use of in­dus­tri­al land and not arable land, it is high tech with agri-pro­cess­ing and man­u­fac­tur­ing en­vi­sioned, lim­it­ed use of wa­ter, no dan­ger­ous chem­i­cals, the cre­ation of hun­dreds of jobs even­tu­al­ly and, im­por­tant­ly, the fi­nan­cial back­ing of the ANSA Group.

“A lot of farm­ers through­out the re­gion re­al­ly don’t have ac­cess to the kind of fi­nanc­ing or in­vest­ment they need to ex­pand their pro­duc­tion be­cause agri­cul­ture is an ex­treme­ly risky busi­ness.

“By elim­i­nat­ing these pro­duc­tion risks through the use of pro­tect­ed agri­cul­ture, we think the most ex­cit­ing as­pect of this part­ner­ship is the fact that a com­pa­ny like the ANSA Group recog­nised  the op­por­tu­ni­ty to grow more food lo­cal­ly, to cre­ate an food ex­port op­por­tu­ni­ty, to build na­tion­al food se­cu­ri­ty, to im­prove the qual­i­ty of food that, in the long run can help im­prove the health of peo­ple here. With this part­ner­ship now in place our strat­e­gy over the next few years will be to ex­pand and es­tab­lish new farms on a num­ber of Caribbean is­lands,” he end­ed.