Growing Sustainability: Hydroponic Cultivation of Food Sovereignty in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This research aims to understand attitudes held by communities towards controlled environment agriculture (CEA) as a pathway to building resilient local food systems across Canada, particularly in northern and Indigenous communities. Local controlled environment agriculture projects such as hydroponics and aquaponics are gaining appreciation across Canada as new agriculture techniques for vegetable production, as they offer potential benefits such as reduced emissions from the transport of foods, lower food prices, creation of local jobs, and reduced vulnerabilities to changes in global food markets. Despite early research showing the validity of CEA in reducing food insecurity, there is minimal research showing the sustainability and sociocultural impacts of CEA. Many CEA units in Canada lack community support and are facing challenges in the continuity of programs, despite their potential effectiveness in building capacity and resiliency in the wake of climate change. Through a partnership with Growcer Hydroponics Inc., interviews were conducted with CEA community actors to understand patterns, behaviours, and sentiments related to the governance and culture of CEA and local food systems. A mixed methods approach was used to understand the current perceptions and values held by community members and how these correlate to the success of the farms in addressing communities’ sustainability, food security, and food sovereignty needs. Responses were analyzed through sustainability, food justice, and respectful research frameworks. This research found that the desire for more accessible fresh and healthy foods is the primary motivation for the implementation of CEA in remote communities in Canada. CEA units are well supported if the community members' values include food, nature, relationships, education, equality, culture, and self-reliance. A considerable finding of this study is that although it was previously believed that CEA may have minimal benefits as the foods grown are not socially nor culturally relevant, community members have found ways to connect CEA to cultural and traditional practices and teachings.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".