Canada may be rich in canola, potash and oil, but when it comes to lettuce, we’re in a bit of a crunch. Despite our vast farmland, we rely heavily on the United States—especially California—for our salad supply. Roughly 90 per cent of our leafy greens are imported, leaving grocery chains vulnerable to fallout from Donald Trump’s on-and-off-and-on-again tariffs.

Amid growing concerns about food security, a new greenhouse in King City, just north of Toronto, offers a glimpse of a more self-sufficient future. Haven Greens, a five-acre facility that harvested its first crop of leafy greens this spring, operates the first fully automated greenhouse in Canada. Its founder and CEO, Jay Willmot, is a third-generation farmer who’s parlayed his fixation on food sovereignty into a super-advanced agri-tech venture, capable of producing up to 10,000 pounds of lettuce every single day. Willmot spoke to Maclean’s about automated farming, the withering effects of U.S. trade tensions and why this crisis is a wake-up call for Canada to get growing.

Vertical farming is already taking off across Canada, but your new facility represents another major leap forward. What’s the significance of having the country’s first fully automated greenhouse?

Other greenhouses in Canada automate their climate or irrigation systems, but what sets this one apart is that it’s completely hands-free. No one touches the crops from seeding to harvest—the only human contact is when our greens are packed into boxes. Everything else is handled by machinery, controlled by a central computer system. That system, first developed in the Netherlands, automates nearly every part of the operation: irrigation, climate control and lighting. It even syncs with live weather data to adjust our shade curtains in anticipation of cloud cover or sunlight. The entire facility runs on a network of conveyor belts and swing arms that buzz, whirr and shuffle plants through each stage of production. And because there are no harvesters, the facility requires far fewer workers than a traditional greenhouse—fewer hands, but higher-skilled roles. Many of our employees are scientists with master’s degrees.

That sounds like a complex operation. How is all that tech actually helping your crops?

I started developing the greenhouse in 2021, and I’ve basically been moonlighting as a systems engineer ever since.

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