With a mission to inform, empower, celebrate and advocate for British Columbia's current and aspiring business leaders, BCBusiness go behind the headlines and bring readers face to face with the key issues and people driving business in B.C.
Issue link: http://digital.canadawide.com/i/325830
bCbusiness.CA July 2014 BCBusiness 125 land, says that to compete in today's market, the urban farmer has to have a product that is "high value and high story." Urban consumers out for an expensive dinner are searching for meaning as well as nutrition, he says, "and meaning comes from stories. You can charge a buck more for a salad that comes with a story." Aaron Quesnel, the son of two schoolteachers, came to urban agri- culture in a somewhat circuitous search for sustainability. A geography grad from his hometown university, Guelph, he had first wandered off to Korea to teach English for a year and then to Vancouver to work on environmental policy questions for the sustainability- based consulting group Globe Advi- sors. His curiosity piqued, he then went to Sweden, to the Blenkinge Institute of Technology in Karlskrona, to do a Mas- ter of Strategic Leadership towards Sus- tainability. There, he wrote a thesis on this very topic: Solutions from Above: Using Rooftop Agriculture to Move Cit- ies Towards Sustainability. But when Quesnel returned to Can- ada, he ran into two problems. The first, notwithstanding his thesis work: he still had a lack of topical knowledge. For example, when I asked if he started Sky Harvest with strength in agriculture or in business, he said, "A bit of neither." He was a recreational gardener, but no botanist. And for business training, he wound up taking an entry-level course at the local YMCA: something called Youth Mean Business—a great primer, but no Harvard MBA. The second problem was one of tim- ing. Despite his thesis-based ambition to launch a rooftop garden in Vancouver, he was stepping into a difficult mar- ket—especially as there were already rumours that the would-be rooftop gardeners at Alterrus Systems were get- ting ready to consign their subsidiary, Local Garden Vancouver, into bank- ruptcy. Local Garden had been work- ing to launch a commercial garden on the roof of an underused parkade at 535 Richards Street. With all manner of cheerleading from "Greenest City" Mayor Gregor Robertson, Alterrus/ Local Garden had promised 70,000 MICRO GREEN Aaron Quesnel grows 13 varieties of salad ingredients in his 13-square-metre operation on Powell Street. p122-131-UrbanAgri_july.indd 125 2014-05-29 10:08 AM