This Solar Greenhouse Can Grow Veggies All Year Round Without Fossil Fuels

This farm in Alberta, Canada, might look like your typical greenhouse from a distance. But up close, it’s nowhere near conventional: It can grow crops year-round, even in the harsh winter, without any fossil fuel-related heating. 

Instead of using any of the conventional sources, FreshPal Farms takes on a sunny new approach to keep the vegetables warm and thriving in every season. 

Measuring 300 feet long and 30 feet wide, the greenhouse covers a growing area of roughly 8,073 square feet. An electric motor extends and retracts an insulating blanket, trapping heat during the day, which keeps the environment around 28ºC (82ºF) all year round. 

Passive solar greenhouses, as this operation is an example of, are commonplace in founder Dong Jianyi’s native China, but not so much in Canada, where he moved to in 2014. 

“In north China, it also gets really cold and pretty dark in winter, but people can grow year-round,” he explains in an interview with CBC. “Where I lived in China, there were so many passive solar greenhouses. But in Canada, I didn’t see any on the commercial scale.” 

He’d wanted to see if this could be replicated. So, with a CA$250,000 (US$196,110) greenhouse kit shipped from China in two containers, put together by Dong and his wife after taking a four-day welding course, the farm was born. 

Fast forward to 2020, and it had managed to yield more than 13,000 kilograms (28,660 pounds) of just tomatoes alone in that one year.

“It feels like you are not in Olds, and you are somewhere tropical,” shares Sarah Singer, a FreshPal volunteer. “You can feel kind of a wave of heat, a little bit of humidity, the smell.”

According to Dong, to heat a greenhouse of this size and operation with natural gas would cost him around CA$30,000 (US$23,530) every month. 

There are plans to construct more passive solar greenhouses after the success of the first one, with a Facebook post sharing that there will be two in production this year. 

[via CBC and the Good News Network, cover image via FreshPal Farms]