How a high-tech farm in Canada is winning in the trade war
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Hey there, and thanks for listening. We want to know more about our audience. So stick around at the end of the episode to hear about how you can provide feedback and potentially walk away with a $75 gift card. High-tech agriculture gets a tariff boost. From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech. I'm Novosafo.

We've been looking at how technology is changing agriculture. Last month, we visited central California, where there's new investment in everything from electric tractors and leaf sensors to upskilling farm workers. Today, Marketplace's Kimberly Adams visits our neighbor to the north, specifically Canada's first fully automated greenhouse. It's cost millions to set up, and it's just in time for a trade war.

About an hour and a half north of Toronto, in King City, Ontario, there's a greenhouse the size of four football fields. We are in Haven Greens, which is a state-of-the-art, fully automated greenhouse for the cultivation of cut baby leaf greens. Eric Highfield is the chief agricultural officer, and he's responsible for managing the complex irrigation systems, lighting, and machinery. It slowly moves troughs full of peat moss that the lettuce grows in, they're called gutters,

from the germination side of the greenhouse to the harvest side over the course of 25 days. Every day we sow around 560 gutters and then we harvest 560 gutters and that comes out to between 5 and 6,000 pounds of cut baby leaf lettuce a day. Oh it's very quiet in here.

Yeah. I mean, we've got a couple guys just doing a little bit of maintenance in here right now, but usually there's nobody walking around. I joined Haven's CEO, Jay Wilmot, in the humid, brightly lit facility with big sections of lettuce and varying shades of green and red.

He says he started the company because he didn't like what was available in Canadian supermarkets. We import well over 90% of the leafy greens that we eat, and they're old. They come from the west coast of the U.S. and Mexico, and they're old and slimy, and they don't smell good, they don't taste good, and they're expensive.

That's Haven Green CEO Jay Wilmot speaking with Marketplace's Kimberly Adams. In a moment, we'll tell you how avoiding old leafy greens will end up bringing in lots of green of another kind. I'm talking dollars. We'll be right back. What makes Hawaiian Bros so different? We have no freezers, no fryers, and no microwaves.

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Starting Haven Greens wasn't cheap. It will probably end up costing tens of millions of Canadian dollars all in, he says. But the technology is cheaper than it used to be and more efficient. And it means human hands never touch the lettuce.

Plus, says Chief Agriculture Officer Eric Highfield. If we were to look at the cost of labor, the cost of labor is always going up. The availability of labor is going down. I think automation is a necessary piece. And that makes taking the risk a little less risky than in the past. This facility is the first of its kind in Canada, according to CEO Jay Wilmot. He figured it would take a while for the product to catch on.

But then... The trade war has accelerated our adoption in the Canadian market for sure. The U.S. exports more than $2 billion a year worth of fresh vegetables to Canada. But once the trade war started, grocery stores there began dropping American products and Canadian consumers started going out of their way to buy local. And so we've seen

pretty fast uptake into our local retail network here in Canada. And it's been a bit staggering, actually, how fast it's gone. About four times as fast as he expected. Now packages of Haven lettuce are replacing greens from California and elsewhere in the U.S. all over Ontario. ♪

Like at Summerhill Market in the city of Aurora, Brad McMullen is CEO of the company, which has six stores in the province. It was almost coincidental that the whole tariff thing and the U.S. products was happening at the same time. The Haven lettuce is priced similar to what the imported packages from the U.S. used to retail, so McMullen said he was happy to make the switch.

And it's actually been a tremendous success for us on the retail floor. Timing is everything, but it's worked out really well for everyone in this case. Thanks to the trade war, Haven Greens anticipates they'll be all over Canada much sooner than planned. Our senior Washington correspondent, Kimberly Adams. Kimberly mentioned the greenhouse she visited was four football fields in size. But this is Canada we're talking about, so that translates to six ice hockey rinks, if you'd care to know.

We have Kimberly's story and links to others in our ACTEC series. Find them on our website, marketplacetech.org. I'm Nova Sapo, and that's Marketplace Tech.

This is APM. Real quick before you go. We'd love it if you'd please complete a short anonymous survey by going to marketplace.org slash survey. It would only take about 10 minutes. And as a token of our appreciation, you can enter your name to win a $75 gift card once you've completed the survey. You do all of us at Marketplace a huge favor by filling it out.