From King City to your kitchen: a gamechanger for local greens

  A family farm business in King City is helping to change that story, using cutting edge greenhouse technology to give Ontarians  fresher, more sustainable leafy greens all year long—grown just minutes from where most of us live.

  And it was an investment from the Agri-Tech Innovation Initiative (ATII) that helped Haven Greens – part of   Kinghaven Farms,     whose more than 50-year farming history is rooted in horse racing – plant the first crop in its   new facility in February 2025. 

  “My heart is in the country, and it was at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic that I made the commitment to go   back to farming and   started working with vertical farms,” says founder and CEO Jay Willmot. “I noticed a massive   economic imbalance in leafy greens as   a category; many systems were too costly, too energy-intensive, or too   small to make a real difference.”

  He began looking to Europe and the United States for ideas that could be adapted into a uniquely Canadian   solution – and found it in     a greenhouse system that combines natural sunlight and airflow with the precision of   hydroponics and the power of automation. 

At the heart of Haven Greens is a fully automated, hands-free growing process that’s the first of its kind in Canada. From planting to harvest, there are no manual steps, and everything is handled by advanced machines driven by artificial intelligence that are constantly learning to finetune production performance. 

“We saw an opportunity to be the ones to do this first in Canada, so we brought the most state-of-the-art iteration of the technology here. Our facility is one-of-a kind as Canada’s most advanced climate greenhouse,” adds Willmot. 

The system allows lettuce and herbs to grow more densely than ever before—up to 25 to 30 times more productive than traditional field farming. The greenhouse can produce more than 100 kilograms of leafy greens per square metre every year.

That means fresh greens grown locally and sustainably with a low environmental footprint. And because Haven Greens is close to the Ontario Food Terminal and major grocery distribution centres in the Greater Toronto Area, their product spends next to no time on the road before hitting store shelves.

“We are peri-urban farmers – we farm on the perimeter of urban areas. Farming is hard but we want to keep our farmland in production and keep our next generations farming – so this is a real gamechanger not just for local food production, but also for creating new opportunity in farming for young people,” Willmot says. 

Being able to access funding support through ATII helped the company bring its phase one facility from partially to fully operating much more quickly. They’ve created more than the 30 jobs they anticipated at the project’s onset and after only six months, now have consistent buyers for 17 of their 20 production lines – a goal they thought it would take them two years to reach. 

“The funding was really critical from a business standpoint and has really helped us meet the skyrocketing demand from consumers for local product,” he says. “This type of government program is critically important to helping develop this kind of infrastructure in Canada, and we are proud to showcase to Canadians what is possible right here at home.” 

Haven Greens already supplies fresh lettuce blends—including baby spring mix, baby green leaf, baby red and green leaf—to major retailers like Metro, Sobeys, Giant Tiger, and Summerhill Market. And this is just the beginning, with the company already working on expansion plans and new product ideas. 

The Agri-Tech Innovation Initiative, delivered by the Agricultural Adaptation Council, is funded in part by the Sustainable Canadian Agricultural Partnership (Sustainable CAP), a 5-year, federal-provincial-territorial initiative. 

Through ATII, the governments of Canada and Ontario are investing up to $22.6 million to expand production capacity and boost energy efficiency in the agriculture and food sector. 

This investment supports the Grow Ontario Strategy’s objectives of increasing production and consumption of food grown and prepared in the province by 30 per cent by 2032 and boosting the economic impact of Ontario’s food and beverage manufacturing sector by 10 per cent.