NEF Meets IFAJ

New Energy Farms was fortunate enough to be a stop on the 2011 IFAJ Congress tour.

 ( @ the Miscanthus Field )

We had a fantastic morning speaking with IFAJ about miscanthus and our farming operations. It is always nice spending time with other agriculture enthusiasts.

We took IFAJ to our miscanthus farming operations, bioprocessing facility and greenhouses. Explained to them  our future directions and how we are engaged into the local bio economy.

(Bioprocessing facility - Inside)

  (Bioprocessing facility - Outside- the facility with its unique structure features a  roof top 280 KW  PV Solar   system delivering renewable power into the Ontario marketplace)

Thank you to all the wonderful people at IFAJ for giving us the opportunity to speak to you and allowing us to be a part of your 2011 tour. You are the voices of agriculture and the worlds eyes to what we do.

Dean Tiessen
New Energy Farms



Newly built 30 thousand ft2 facility that will process over 100 thousand tonnes of locally grown dedicated biomass crops into energy and  consumer products.

Policy Policy Policy!

Does new policy help or hurt a new industry??

In many cases for every reaction there is a reaction. In the case of the Province of Ontario and their PV solar incentives the reaction was very positive, too positive. For a small scale producer of solar power getting 80 cents a KW will cause a positive reaction. This reaction was countered by the Ontario Power Authority to change the incentives.
If there were no incentives in PV solar in Ontario there would be no projects, Ontario is not the best spot in the world for PV solar and our power rates are too cheap.
With this said the field that I am invested in is Biomass. Biomass does not have strong incentives, in fact none in some energy sources like heat. How will the Province of Ontario react in the future, will other systems in place that are competitive get a opportunity or will this solar play have a hangover affect that will hurt other industries?
Biomass today can compete with natural gas, propane and heating oil as it relates to heat. Why would not a government help develop long term economic solutions? A small insentive would go

Growing Your Own Energy

Pyramid Farms is a greenhouse vegetable farm in Ontario Canada. After two generations of chasing the cheapest fuel to heat our greenhouse (coal to oil to nat gas to wood biomass) we are now growing our own fuel. We use 7000 Gj of energy per acre per year which equates to 35-40 acres of land needed to heat one acre of greenhouse. This may sound crazy but there were years that we paid as much as 14$ per Gj for natural gas equaling $100,000.00 /acre/year. I do not know of may crops on 35 acres gross 100 thousand dollars.
Today our heating costs (excluding land opportunity costs) are appox 15 to 20 thousand dollars per acre/year. With the land opporunity cost factored in we are still heating our greenhouses for less than the current cheap natural gas price (at a 10 year low). If a strong carbon policy is put into place we could be getting paid to heat our greenhouses. But for now we made a green solution economical. This is not just a one year solution, what is more important than the current savings is that this crop grows for decades with little to no inputs. We now have a multidecade line of site on our energy needs. In the greenhouse veg industry in Canada heating represents as much as 30-40% of our operating costs. We are now more profitable and stronger for the future.

We have since created New Energy Farms (www.newenergyfarms.com) that facilitates the development of dedicated feedstock crops like miscanthus for end users like myself or others that may have need for long term feedstock supplies