November 6, 2016 – Paul Morden, The Observer – The recent expansion of a three-year-old greenhouse business near Forest will allow it to sell 12 million plants a year, and capture an 18 per cent share of the plant propagation market on the Eastern Seaboard.
Jodi Roelands, who owns Roelands Plant Farms with her husband Adrian Roelands, spoke about the young business during a bi-annual community meeting the Sarnia-Lambton Economic Partnership held Tuesday at the Lambton College Event Centre.
Along with an update of the partnership’s efforts to attract jobs and residents to Sarnia-Lambton, the meeting featured presentations by three entrepreneurial leaders from the community.
“It’s incredible what you’ve done in three years,” George Mallay, the partnership’s general manager, told Roelands.
The family opened the first four-acre phase of its greenhouse operation in 2013 on Douglas Line near Forest, added another four acres a year later, and recently brought another four acres into production.
“Which is a little quicker than we thought,” Roelands said.
“We’re really excited about how things are going.”
Earlier this year, the couple was named Ontario’s Outstanding Young Farmers for 2016.
The operation currently employees approximately 160 full and part-time staff during its busy season, custom-growing cucumber, tomato and pepper seedlings for vegetable production greenhouses.
“It’s a high-tech operation, but it’s also a family farm,” Roelands said, and she began her presentation Tuesday showing a photo of the couple and their five young children in the greenhouse.
The farm has been investing in automation to reduce the amount of work that must be done manually in the greenhouse, and has been able to hire the staff it needs locally, so far, without having to bring in workers from overseas, Roelands said.
When the couple began work on the operation near Forest, the farm’s warehouse and infrastructure was designed to allow it to expand to 12 acres of greenhouse production space, a level reached with this year’s expansion.
Ontario has approximately 220 greenhouse vegetable growers, using 2,500 acres of production space, and those numbers have been increasing, Roelands said.
Greenhouse operations have also been starting up in nearby Michigan and Ohio, but Roelands Farms is one of only seven propagation operations in North America, and four in Ontario, she said.
Lambton County is currently home to a small number of greenhouse operations, but officials at the county-funded economic partnership believe the sector has potential.
“We’re seeing more and more interest on the greenhouse side,” Mallay said.
Diana Wright, with the East Lambton Arts Council, and Constantine Aviantis, of Sarnia’s Under Wraps Cafe, also spoke at Tuesday’s update.
As part of his presentation on the partnership’s efforts, Mallay said there is a “strong pipeline” of prospects for new industrial investment.
“Presently, there’s several billions of dollars of investment on the books for our community.”
That includes potential expansions by Nova Chemicals, BioAmber, and others, Mallay said.
“All these projects have the potential to have significant job creation within our community,” he said.
“But, a lot of what happens with these projects is out of our hands.”
Whether or not they move ahead will depend on what Ontario does with cap and trade, energy policies and incentives, Mallay said.
“We hope we can land at least some of these projects.”
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