Roughly three-quarters of the lettuce Canadians eat is grown somewhere else.
On a family horse farm north of Toronto, a five-acre automated greenhouse is testing how much of that can change.
For decades, the Willmot family’s farm in King City, north of Toronto, bred and raced thoroughbreds. Today, on the ground where its horses trained, long white gutters of lettuce inch through a five-acre glasshouse with almost no one watching them.
“This is where the racetrack was,” says Jay Willmot, founder and chief executive of Haven Greens, whose family has farmed here since 1967. “Now it’s a different type of racetrack.”
Nothing of the old track is visible. The greenhouse is light, airy and calm, with rows of green and red leaf running to a vanishing point under a steel-and-glass roof. The gutters move on their own. Rotating rakes pull them forward and space them further apart as the plants grow, until they reach the end of the line and deliver their crop onto a conveyor bound for the packing hall. The company calls it Canada’s first fully automated lettuce greenhouse.
It exists because of a question most Canadians never ask at the salad counter: why do so many green leafy vegetables come from California, Arizona or Mexico?
Willmot’s answer starts with the weather. “Canada has a very short growing season to begin with,” he says. Leafy greens are fragile in the field, where frost, hail or heavy rain can wipe out a crop, and Canadian growers have drifted towards hardier vegetables that keep in cold storage. Lettuce is still grown outdoors here, mostly in Quebec and mostly in summer.
The rest of the answer is economics. For a long time, Willmot says, “the cost of trucking stuff up from either the United States or Mexico … was less than the cost of trying to extend the growing season in Canada.” A greenhouse doesn’t automatically change that sum. “Lettuce takes up a lot of room,” he says. In a lower-tech greenhouse, a grower struggles to compete with “a great big field out on the West Coast” that has a near-perfect climate and grows all year round.
The result is that most of Canada’s lettuce supply is imported.
He points to Finland, where the automation system in his greenhouse was developed and where most supermarket lettuce is grown under glass. Could Canada, with its size and population, follow? “Probably not” in the near future, he says.
Willmot didn’t set out to grow lettuce. He began working on the family farm more intensively after finishing a commerce degree in 2007, around the time the financial crisis hit and the family was taking a hard look at its horse business. The conclusion, he recalls, was that “we need to find another way forward or else we’re not going to be a farm.”
The way forward was long. He went to law school and spent a decade as a lawyer in renewable energy development. Then came “a brief stint in vertical farming where I learned everything not to do.”
The lesson that shaped Haven Greens was about light. Vertical farms grow crops indoors under artificial lighting, and Willmot came away convinced that was the wrong bet for a crop that has to compete on price. “It’s just inconceivable in my view, having had that experience, to think that we would grow any kind of a crop with any kind of quality at a good price without using the sun,” he says. Whatever came next would have a glass roof.
In 2021 he began touring automated greenhouses in the United States and settled on a mobile-gutter system from Green Automation, a Finnish-founded company. Proposing to turn the family’s race-training operation into a lettuce factory raised eyebrows. “I definitely had some explaining to do,” he says. “I think some people may still say that I’m crazy.”
The system is designed to keep hands off the crop. Each gutter is shaped like an eavestrough, with a groove underneath to carry irrigation water. The gutters are filled with peat moss and seeded by machine. Each carries a tag that lets the system track where it travels in the greenhouse and match that against the conditions it met along the way. The growers can later compare that record with the gutter’s yield.
Seeded gutters spend two days in a dark germination box before moving out into the light. At the end of the line, a conveyor carries the crop into the packing hall, where a harvesting machine moves the leaves onto a belt that shuttles back and forth to blend green, red and spring mixes. Metal chutes drop them into clear plastic clamshells on a blue conveyor. Boxes go to supermarkets and bags go to restaurants. From seed to harvest takes less than a month, and the company aims to get the lettuce to the supermarket in as little as two days. Tasted at the farm, the leaves are crisp.
On a typical day the greenhouse produces around 12,000 pounds of greens. Packed entirely in small trays, Willmot says, that would fill about 80 pallets.
Getting there was not smooth. “Everything in here moves, right? So that means that everything breaks,” he says. In the early months the team was “understaffed perpetually, and didn’t know how to work half the stuff in the building.” Construction exposed layouts they wished they had designed differently. Those lessons are going into a second five-acre block, which he expects to open in 2027.
The family and its bank paid for most of the build. Government support, Willmot says, was “a fairly small proportion of the overall phase one build out.” In September 2026, Ottawa announced $5 million for Kinghaven Farms through AgriInnovate, a federal program of repayable contributions, to support the greenhouse’s automation technology.
Even if his company kept adding ten acres a year into the early 2030s, Willmot estimates, it would meet less than a tenth of the country’s demand for leafy greens. “So that’s a start,” he says. “But we need much more than that to get to 50.”
He means 50 per cent, and he’s clear the greenhouse is meant to support the field farms around it, not replace them. Getting even halfway, he reckons, might take several companies building at that pace for about a decade.
“I don’t think we need to get to 90%,” he says, “but I’d sure love to get to 50%.” For now, the answer to the question at the top of this page lies in fields far away. One former training ground in King City is chipping at it, one crop at a time.