N.S. farmers want to process surplus vegetables. So why is this production line idle?

In a cavernous new facility on Greg Gerrits's farm in Nova Scotia's Annapolis Valley, gleaming stainless steel production lines sit silent.

The facility is meant to process imperfect and surplus produce that Gerrits would not otherwise be able to sell for human consumption, and turn it into powdered vegetables, dehydrated soup mixes and dog treats.

But Gerrits says the facility, which has cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to construct, is months — if not years — away from being certified to operate.

"This plant alone, if I had known three years ago what kind of foolishness was gonna be, there's no way we would have done it," says Gerritts, who owns Elmridge Farm.

As the pandemic and rising cost of groceries have forced a reckoning with Canada's food system, farmers say reversing the decline in local food processing is part of the puzzle.

But some say more work needs to be done to raise awareness of the importance of local processing and reduce the barriers to processing for small producers, to allow local farmers to play a greater role in the food supply.

"We're all trying to fill a fresh market," Gerritts says. "Well, the fresh market only takes so much and in Nova Scotia if we have surplus, there's nowhere [else] for it to go."

Local food processing has disappeared, consolidated

In Atlantic Canada, regional and small-scale food processing has shrunk over the last 30 years, as imports increased and food processing consolidated into a smaller number of companies.

This echoes the trend nationwide, which is most noticeable in meat-packing — two companies are responsible for the slaughter of more than 90 percent of Canadian cattle — but which researchers say is also happening in fruit and vegetable processing.

This creates barriers both for growers and for those looking to process their own food.

Gerrits says he first started thinking about the issues posed by lack of processing a number of years ago.

"We need the processing and we don't have it," he says. "So every time there's surplus it becomes waste, which is a loss, and you know, every penny counts."

Gerrits says this means a loss of revenue for Nova Scotia farmers and more food waste, but it wasn't always this way; until the 1990s, farmers in the area allocated some of their crops to local processors. This gave farmers a reliable income stream.

But in trying to process his own produce, Gerrits says he's faced delays, from the safety inspection of processing equipment to the creation of a food-safe building. These barriers are much harder for a business his size to navigate than a large processor, he says.

"[The system] is designed in such a way that's very hard for a small operation like this," he said. "All the overhead is just about as big as the overhead for a big plant that's doing 10 truckloads a day of one product."

Farmers union says this is a national problem

Jenn Pfenning, president of the National Farmers' Union, says the regulatory barriers for small processors, as well as the concentration of food processing in a small number of companies, limit farmers' bargaining power.

"If you say, 'I can't afford to sell at what you're willing to pay me,' they say, 'OK, I'll go buy it somewhere else,'" she said. "Whether that 'somewhere else' is your neighbour or across the ocean, to them, it doesn't really matter."

Pfenning says this means farmers are often selling to companies that are not necessarily responsive to farmers' circumstances, such as local conditions or labour costs.

"The more that there's concentration, the bigger that power imbalance becomes in the relationship," she said. "The messaging that we get, especially from the large chains, is that we can't increase our prices to them because they will not accept it."

This also means that farmers are not benefiting from the increase in food prices,

"The return on our product is not increasing substantially, even though the price at the till for consumers is increasing substantially," she said.

Local business aims to bring back processing

In Nova Scotia, a Windsor-based business is hoping to help create more revenue streams for farmers by increasing local processing capacity.

Rebecca Tran and Heather Lunan are co-founders of the Station Food Hub, which aims to boost consumption of local produce — often "seconds," which don't meet standards to be sold in stores — through food processing.

Tran and Lunan, who met by chance at a dinner party, quickly realized they shared a vision for boosting consumption of local food while reducing the burden on local farmers whose food was going to waste.

"We were talking to lots and lots of people and they were talking [about] the missing piece as being the processing infrastructure," she said.

The Station Food Hub now operates out of a former elementary school, turning surplus produce like potatoes, sweet potatoes and turnips into purees and other processed products.

The business addresses two challenges. Lunan says they've heard from growers who are facing significant hurdles when looking through the regulations to process their own product, including one farmer who'd invested in the lines to process their own vegetables but was unable to use them.

They've also spoken with the people responsible for procuring food for large institutions.

"They needed to have a consistent, safe product year-round in Nova Scotia, and unfortunately we don't grow year-round here. So we need to be able to build a facility that's able to process when stuff is in season and then have it for storage."

The Station Food Hub aims to overcome these barriers by serving as a hub to link farmers with large institutions. Currently, the business provides processed vegetables to the Nova Scotia Health Authority, sending mashed potatoes made from a local grower's undersized spuds to hospitals and long-term care facilities across the province.

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Still, Tran and Lunan say challenges remain, including in encouraging people to realize that safe local food can be available all year — if the processing capacity exists.

"The facilities haven't been available and therefore there hasn't been access," says Lunan. "So we are having to rebuild not just the physical access to food, but that whole educational piece where there's an understanding that we in fact can pull this off, and we can supply our own province."

The Station Food Hub is also working with the Department of Agriculture on a pilot project to help institutions meet the provincial target to spend 20 percent of the food budget on local food, which Tran says could be achieved by increasing local processing.

As for farmer Greg Gerrits, he says governments also need to consider ways they can help farmers navigate the system so that local processing is both economically viable and safe.

"The regulations aren't the problem — the system is a problem," he says. "The regulations can be met. We just have to know what they are and we have to know how to get from point A to point B."

Ultimately, Gerrits says this could benefit all Nova Scotians, by ensuring more of the province's food supply is produced here.

"There has to be processing or you only have what comes out of the field when you have it."

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