LEAD GROWER AND AGRONOMIST
Surrey, BC | On-site, with travel to customer farms | Full-time contract, 3 to 6 months, with a permanent seat on the table after
$60,000 to $75,000 annualized
ABOUT SKYACRES
SkyAcres is an agriculture technology company. We build a complete growing system, hardware plus software, that lets a farmer grow food inside a building they already own. A cold storage room between harvests, a packhouse, a barn. No plumbing, no pumps, no HVAC retrofit. The farmer runs the facility and keeps the crop. We supply the system and the agronomy behind it.
The hardware is a 3-level growing module on wheels. It runs on ultrasonic misting instead of pumps and nozzles, which is the subject of an international patent pending. Every module holds its own microclimate, so one room can carry several crops at different stages at once. A grow computer we designed in house runs lighting, misting and dosing, and feeds a grower app that carries the SOPs, the sensor history, and computer vision on each module for pest scouting.
We grow leafy greens, herbs, and fruits and vegetables including strawberries and tomatoes. We have never sprayed a chemical pesticide in our farms. Pest pressure is managed biologically, with releases triggered off camera counts rather than off a calendar. Grow-NY and Google for Startups named SkyAcres one of the top 20 agtech startups globally.
THE ROLE
The hardware question is settled. The crop question is not, and that is what this role owns.
You will own agronomy across the company, reporting to the CEO and setting the direction the rest of the crop team executes against. You will read every SOP and every trial we have, tell us where they are wrong, design the work that proves the fix, and write the result back into the procedures our team and our customers both run off.
This is a hands-on seat. You will be in the grow hall with a refractometer and a PAR meter, not writing memos about one.
FIRST-TERM MANDATE
Three crops, with a specific target on each. We expect you to sharpen these numbers in your first two weeks once you have seen the systems, and then hold yourself to them.
Romaine lettuce. Ours is sizing short and failing to form a proper head. We want a dense, marketable romaine head at a repeatable harvest weight and cycle time, with the cultivar, DLI, photoperiod, day and night temperature differential, EC, root zone temperature, airflow, VPD and lid density that produce it written down as a spec anyone can follow. Calcium transport, night temperature, light integral and plant spacing are all on the table. We want the actual cause isolated, not a guess.
Strawberries. The biggest single opportunity in the company and the most technical.
- Indoor IPM. Own the biological program end to end: scouting cadence, action thresholds, release timing, and a receiving protocol for incoming planting stock. Two-spotted spider mite, thrips and aphid pressure managed to a threshold you set and defend, inside a chemical-free operation.
- Powdery mildew. Build us a real UV-C treatment protocol. Dose, timing, frequency and distance, and how it pairs with cultivar selection, airflow, leaf wetness and VPD control. Mildew held below a defined incidence threshold without a spray program.
- Brix and eating quality. Take fruit sweetness up and make it consistent, through EC steering, light integral, day and night temperature differential, harvest maturity and cultivar. Document the relationship well enough to predict brix from the set points.
- Pollination. Our current procedure is not delivering the fruit set or fruit shape it should. Design and validate a better one, measured on fruit weight, deformity rate and set percentage.
- Yield. Raise volume per module per cycle, through crown grade and chill on incoming stock, runner and flower truss management, plant density and cycle planning.
Cherry tomatoes. Cultivar selection, truss and pruning strategy, pollination method, leaf removal, EC steering for flavour, and a documented yield per module per cycle we can put in front of a customer without hedging.
WHAT WE ARE LOOKING FOR
- Commercial growing experience on strawberries, tomatoes or leafy greens, in a greenhouse, an indoor facility, or a high-value field operation. This matters to us more than anything else on this list.
- A degree or diploma in agronomy, horticulture, plant science or a related field, or the equivalent earned on a commercial operation.
- Crop physiology depth. You can explain why a crop is doing what it is doing, and you reach for plant physiology and the literature before you reach for a product catalogue.
- Integrated pest management: biological control agents, scouting methodology, action thresholds. Experience running IPM without a chemical fallback is a strong asset.
- DLI, VPD, EC, pH, root zone temperature and dissolved oxygen as things you set on purpose and measure, not things you read off a screen.
- Trial design that isolates one variable, sized so the result means something, written up including when it shows nothing.
- Writing. The core deliverable of this role is documentation other people follow.
- A valid Class 5 driver's licence, legally able to work in Canada, and able to travel to the United States.
- Comfort in a 7-person company where priorities move and there is nobody to hand the unglamorous parts to.
TRAVEL
Most customer sites are in and around Surrey and the Fraser Valley. Occasional trips to Kelowna, Calgary, Alaska and various US cities.
WHAT WE OFFER
- Full ownership of the agronomy function in a company where crop performance is the product, not a support cost.
- Three crops with real, named problems, and the budget and systems to run proper trials on them.
- Work that reaches actual farms. What you write gets followed by growers on customer sites.
- A permanent position at the end of the contract term for the right person.
A team that measures things and will argue with you about the data, which is the point.
