The founders of Red Leaf Pulp say they’ve figured out how to make high-quality pulp from agricultural by-products rather than wood from trees, and they’re ready to start producing at scale. The company’s first-of-a-kind pulp mill, slated to begin construction in Regina, Saskatchewan, in the first quarter of 2026, will manufacture what it calls “climate-positive, non-wood pulp” using a process that consumes 95% less water and 70% less energy than traditional mills – all while running on electricity generated by burning biomass from its own waste stream.

“We think there’s nothing in Canada that’s as sustainable as this project, in terms of what we bring in upstream and downstream benefits,” says William Walls, vice president of strategy and development, in a phone interview. He claims that the carbon footprint of Red Leaf’s wheat straw pulp is a third that of regular wood pulp.

Red Leaf has earned the confidence of investors, raising $42 million in five years, most of it from the container company Dart, as well as about $8 million in government funding and a $1-million angel investment. Walls calls it “probably one of the best-funded cleantechs in Canada.” The company used the funding to build a demonstration plant in Alberta, where it has been testing its process and selling its products for different applications. Once operational in 2028, the facility is expected to convert 400,000 tonnes of straw into 200,000 tonnes of market pulp annually.

There’s a lot for investors to like. For example, Red Leaf doesn’t need to develop any equipment to run its patented process for “making the straw act like a wood chip,” Walls says. They use conventional equipment for wood pulp mills made by Valmet, one of the biggest pulp and paper equipment manufacturers on the planet.

Red Leaf sources directly from farmers and accepts all varieties of leftover wheat straw, as well as oats, barley and flax, much of which would often otherwise be burned or left to lie on the field. This creates a new revenue stream for farmers and positions them in a circular economy, while ensuring a reliable supply of pulp for Red Leaf’s new mill.

An opening in the pulp market

The introduction of wheat straw pulp comes amid an ongoing decline in the supply of “economically viable timber,” which has been devastating for Canada’s forestry industry and prompted one B.C. lumber mill to close in November. The main culprits are wildfires, which consumed 17 million hectares in 2022, and invasive insect infestations, which killed 13 million hectares worth of trees the same year. Those disruptions, plus a reduction in the allowable cuts, caused the whole forestry sector to contract by 22% in 2023 and have shrunk the available wood fibre for products like pulp and pellets by more than 40% in British Columbia since 2018. To make matters worse, the United States raised its duties on softwood lumber to 20.6% last July.

The constrained fibre supply in Canada’s forestry sector creates an opening for Red Leaf, but the company sees its role as complementary rather than competitive, spokesperson Elle Kreitz says in an email: “Red Leaf introduces new, non-wood fibre into an already integrated system, helping to relieve supply demand pressures without competing for forest resources.”

The company believes its wheat pulp should telegraph its authentic sustainability, so they’re not going to dye it bright white, which has long been an industry norm. Red Leaf advertises its pulp as possessing a “natural golden tone” – one that doesn’t require a harmful bleaching process to achieve.

A starring role for lignin

Red Leaf also plans to sell the lignin – a component of plant cell walls that gives them their structure – separately as a stand-alone product. Straw has less lignin, so it’s easier to separate out, Walls says. Lignin comes out of the pulp process as a sludgy brown by-product that’s already a popular binder in animal feed and is considered eco-friendly because it diverts waste that would otherwise contaminate waterways.

But Walls sees much more potential for the sticky residue. Non-toxic but also not directly digestible, there is evidence that lignin has some health benefits as a food additive, and it can also be used in other industries as a natural bonding agent for materials manufacturing and pharmaceuticals. There are also emerging applications in batteries and bioplastics.

“It’s like a unicorn. We’re selling it for more than twice as much money as the pulp,” Walls says. “But someday down the road it may be that this thing is called Red Leaf Lignin and the pulp is the by-product.”

Mark Mann is the managing editor of Corporate Knights.

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Nitrogen – which is usually combined with two other fertilizer macronutrients, phosphorous and potassium, and then sold as NPK – also exacerbates climate change. The world’s most widely used chemical fertilizer, at 100 million tonnes per year globally, synthetic nitrogen leaches into ground water as nitrates, which enter the atmosphere as the greenhouse gas nitrous oxide. N2O has 300 times the warming effect of carbon dioxide. To mitigate such effects, Ottawa has proposed a target of reducing agricultural nitrogen emissions by 30%, while new technologies and biofertilizers are germinating multibillion-dollar markets.

One of the bright new sprouts is Lucent Biosciences, a biotechnology start-up in Coquitlam, B.C. Five years ago, it began experimenting with solutions to mitigate soil degradation and nutritional decline caused by NPK. With $5 million in development funding, Lucent created Soileos, a biofertilizer that binds zinc, iron, boron and manganese to cellulose derived from waste pea, lentil, rice, coconut and corn husks, thereby preventing these micronutrients from leaching into the soil.

A patented technology makes the micronutrients bioavailable, meaning that plants’ needs determine the rate of release, says Lucent CEO Michael Riedijk. Adding cellulose also enriches dirt by enhancing the microbial biomass, similar to regenerative agriculture practices, says Lucent co-founder and vice-president Jose Godoy Toku. “Soileos is unique because it improves soil health.”

Soileos isn’t a replacement for macronutrient NPK  chemical fertilizers but a complement that reduces nitrogen use, says Riedijk. It can also be applied alone or used with manure on regenerative farms, Godoy Toku says. Godoy Toku expects the product will be approved for use on certified organic farms by next year.

Indiscriminate use of NPK has caused soil infertility and led to higher soil salinity and alkalinity (when the pH rises above the optimum 6.0 to 7.0 to levels as high as 10). In Sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia, a lack of micronutrients is linked to growth and learning-development problems in children, Riedijk says. “Crops today don’t have the same nutrient content they had 30 or 40 years ago. Generally, the iron content of crops has dropped 20% in the past few decades.”

Soileos is undergoing testing in 40 field trials of eight hectares each across Canada and the United States. Lucent, which works with Simon Fraser University’s 4D LABS, a materials science research institute, has already undertaken two years of field testing, growing 150,000 plants in 32 trials and analyzing 5,000 tissue samples. The data are striking. Corn fertilized with Soileos showed an average yield increase of 12%, tomatoes 26% and lettuce 30%. One trial, conducted with Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, boosted cabbage yield by 50%.

Soileos is available commercially, with one tonne a day produced at the Coquitlam plant. The company aims to produce 10 tonnes a day within the next 12 to 18 months, eventually reaching 100 tonnes. Lucent hopes to test Soileos in Africa in 2022 to assess its effect on alkaline soils.

The climate crisis is exacerbated by decades of excessive nitrogen use. It is imperative that alternatives be developed to reduce environmental impacts and enhance crop yields to feed a growing number of hungry people around the globe.

Roberta Staley is a Vancouver-based author, magazine editor and writer, and documentary filmmaker.

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But in March, Ontario’s farmers’ markets were closed to slow the spread of COVID-19. With traditional outlets shut down, farmers had to adapt, and quickly. Instead of passing bags across crowded stalls and trading stories with customers, they went online, boxing orders and delivering them by truck to homes at an accelerated pace, conducting what’s typically a hands-on business with the addition of gloves, masks and six feet of distance.

This shift to e-commerce has created new pressure, and a renewed focus, on regional food systems. In April, markets in many provinces began to reopen but with new safety protocols in place that limit how and when people shop. On April 24, in a move that underscored the importance of direct sales channels, the Ontario government said it would invest $2.5 million to help food producers and farmers’ markets make the transition to e-commerce.

For some farmers, it’s meant rushing to get inventory online and sales started overnight, highlighting the precariousness created by the closure of markets and restaurants. A third of the 500 vendors in the Greenbelt Markets network, which supports Ontario farmers, also supply to restaurants and wholesale businesses. Quebec’s farmers’ union says the sector has seen more than 30% of its market disappear with the closure of hotels, restaurants and institutions. Online sales can mean the difference between survival and unemployment.

The pandemic is also turning what was a burgeoning trend for the farm-to-table movement, home delivery, into an essential part of food sales. Services that were requested infrequently before March are now commonplace. Sarah Bakker of Field Sparrow Farms in Bobcaygeon, Ontario, used to receive a few orders a month for home delivery. Right now, it’s 40 a week.

“We were already thinking of 2020 as the year of home delivery,” said Simon Huntley, who runs Harvie, a Pittsburgh-based technology platform that helps farmers sell directly to customers. But he didn’t anticipate how quickly the pandemic would alter demand. One hundred and eighty farms in the U.S. and Canada are currently using Harvie, and most have seen their sales increase by 200%. “It’s accelerated in two weeks what was going to happen in 10 years,” Huntley said.

Farmers have had to turn to neighbours and local partners when the inventory they planned for a regular week sells out. “You can’t just magically make more stuff appear,” said Cooper. She increased orders from other sources to fulfill her sales, which doubled this season. But, she said, “It’s not easy being a small farm and then having to rely on other small farms.”

“[The pandemic] accelerated in two weeks what was going to happen [on farms] in 10 years.”
—Simon Huntley, Harvie

Platforms like Harvie, Local Line and Open Food Network offer product features specific to farmers’ needs, like virtual markets for multiple farms and customizable orders. These will be essential as the demand for local food increases.

Stress on supply chains caused by the pandemic created long waits for home delivery by large retailers. Going to grocery stores has become more fraught. And while new containment measures for food delivery, such as low-contact and drive-through pick-up, require physical distancing, people still want proximity to the source of their food: to know where it comes from, that it’s reliable, and to support local businesses.

And with restaurants closed, buying farm-direct produce is also a way to eat well at home. Farmers are reaching new customers as a result. “I knew this was big when my ex-mother-in-law texted me to ask where to get home-delivered food,” said Huntley.

Orit Sarfaty, the chief program officer at Evergreen, a national organization focused on the health of urban environments, agreed. In March, her team signed up 10 farmers in 24 hours to fill 150 boxes with fresh produce for Evergreen’s Farm in a Box program. Now, she said, “I’m getting messages from people who’d never been to our farmers’ market. This was the first time they’d experienced fresh produce from a farm.” Evergreen’s boxes were sold out through May.

The loss of markets comes at a critical time for the agricultural sector. About 55,000 temporary foreign workers travel to Canada each year to work on large farms during the peak growing season. Most of them work in Quebec and Ontario.

Because of the pandemic, fewer workers are expected to arrive. When they do, they have to undergo a two-week quarantine period. In April, the federal government said it would provide $1,500 per person to offset the cost of housing and feeding workers during isolation, but that hasn’t prevented a number of deadly COVID-19 outbreaks on southwestern Ontario farms. About 350 workers in the Windsor-Essex region have tested positive and two have died.

As people continue to shelter in place, it’s not clear what business will look like in the long-term. Many farmers hope the current demand is a sign that the confluence of agriculture and technology will turn local food into a mainstream habit.

Will that habit last? “That’s the million-dollar question. It’s the conversation I’m having with every single one of my farming friends,” said Bakker. But, she added, “We’re going to keep delivering as long as the demand is there.”

Jordan MacInnis is a writer based in Toronto.

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