The Rural Voice, 1993-01, Page 22utside, under leaden
December skies, farmers
are busy plowing down
their corn crop after a
record year of cold and
rain. Inside Allan Holroyd's
"farm", bumble bees flit from
blossom to blossom, pollinating
tomato Rlants. But though
Holroyd escapes the vagaries
that weather presents to other
farmers in Bruce County, he
sounds just like neighbouring
farmers as he complains about
the twin frustrations of rising
costs and bureaucracy.
Holroyd's "farm" takes up
eight acres under glass in the
Bruce Energy Centre, next to the
Bruce Nuclear Power
Development (BNPD). He
manages Bruce Tropical Produce
that stocks the produce sections
of supermarkets in Canada and
the Boston area with firm,
naturally ripened tomatoes even
in the dead of winter.
The greenhouse is part of the
dream of Kincardine developer
and visionary Sam MacGregor
who saw the amount of energy
being flushed into Lake Huron
from the spent steam used in the
electrical generating process and
thought of it as a potential
resource instead of a problem. "If
you only produce electricity with
the steam that's produced
through the fissioning of
uranium, the lake gets three-
quarters of the heat and there's
really no reason why a lake has
to be the condenser for an
electrical generating station," he
said several years ago. "Industry
can be the condenser. And after
the industry has condensed the
steam that is too low quality to
produce electricity, then you can
pass the hot water on to
greenhouses, and after you've
warmed the air in greenhouses,
you can pass it on to fish farms."
MacGregor's ideas of
recycling the waste energy from
the BNPD have partly been
realized in the Energy Centre.
Industries such as the
Commercial Alcohols and the
Canadian Agra alfalfa cubing
plant arc making use of the waste
steam but the full vision
18 THE RURAL VOICE
Tomatoes
under glass
The weather is no problem at
Bruce Tropical Produce but other
farm complaints have a familiar
ring even when farming inside.
By Keith Roulston
MacGregor had in mind is still
not in place.
oreover, some of the
advantages of locating
next to BNPD, at least
for the greenhouse
operation have been
lost, Holroyd says. It's one of his
frustrations that he can now
afford to supply supplemental
lighting to only one half of his
greenhouse complex. Despite
sitting a few hundred yards from
the generating plant, the
greenhouse and other industrial
customers pay the same electrical
rates as customers hundreds of
miles down the very expensive
Ontario Hydro transmission lines.
There are off-peak rates that can
reduce costs during the hours
when demand on the Ontario
Hydro system isn't high (3.5
cents per kilowatt hour compared
to 10 cents in peak hours) but
there is also a demand charge that
means that if the lights in the one
half of the greenhouse were
turned on for even 20 minutes a
month, the minimum $300 -a -day
charge would have to be paid for
the entire month. Faced with that
kind of electricity bill, the lights
have gone off for half the 80,000
tomato plants. It means fall and
spring crops are grown in that
four acres because in the depth of
winter, there isn't enough light to
keep the tomatoes producing
blossoms and accepting
pollination. It means that when
there is a huge demand for fresh
hothouse tomatoes, Bruce
Tropical can't fill the need.
In early December, the workers
at Bruce Tropical were busy
setting out the seedlings for the
spring crop. The plants have been
grown in another area of the
greenhouse from seed imported
from Holland. Early in December
the plants are transferred to a
larger area to give them more
space and light to fill out. Just
prior to Christmas, as the light
shortens and production drops,
the fall crop is pulled out and the
spring crop is set out. It will grow
for eight weeks before production
starts. Production hits a peak in
May, and continues until field