The ongoing trade war is creating a unique opportunity for a new, high-tech farm in Canada. Haven Greens is a five-acre farm located in King City, Ontario, about an hour-and-a-half north of Toronto.

“We are a state-of-the-art, fully automated greenhouse for the cultivation of cut baby leaf greens,” said Eric Highfield, the company’s Chief Agricultural Officer. He’s responsible for managing the complex irrigation systems, lighting and machinery. The facility is a “perpetual motion” greenhouse, with conveyors that slowly move troughs full of peat moss the lettuce grows in from the germination side of the greenhouse to the harvest side over the course of 25 days.

“Every day we sow the same number of gutters, which at 50% capacity is around 560 gutters, and then we harvest 560 gutters,” Highfield explains. “That's at 50% of our capacity. And that comes out to between 5,000 and 6,000 pounds of cut baby leaf lettuce a day.”

Haven CEO Jay Willmot said he started the company because he didn’t like the quality of lettuce available in Canadian supermarkets.

“We import well over 90% of the leafy greens that we eat, and they're old.” he said, “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.”

Getting Haven Greens up and running was also expensive. Willmot estimates it will probably end up costing tens of millions of Canadian dollars all in. But the technology is cheaper than it used to be, and more efficient.

Haven Greens only has about 35 full-time employees, and growing this way means human hands never have to touch the vegetables, which Chief Agriculture Officer Eric Highfield said drastically reduces the risk of pathogens and contamination, in addition to saving money.

“If we were to look at the cost of labor, the cost of labor is always going up,” he added. “The availability of labor is going down. I think automation is a necessary piece.”

This all means taking on the risk of an investment like this is a little less risky than it might be in a different economic environment. Even so, this facility is the first of its kind in Canada, according to CEO Jay Willmot.

He figured it would take a while for the product to catch on, and that he would likely need to focus on wholesale before being picked up in retail supermarkets. But that all changed once U.S. President Donald Trump announced his new tariffs.

“The trade war has accelerated our adoption in the Canadian market, for sure,” Willmot said. “People want to support Canadian food right now.”

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.

“We've seen pretty fast uptake into our local retail network here in Canada,” said Willmot, who estimated pickup has been about four times as fast as he expected. “It’s been a bit staggering, actually, how fast it’s gone.”

Now, packages of Haven lettuce are replacing greens from California and elsewhere in the U.S., in hundreds of grocery stores all over Ontario. For example, in Summerhill Market in the city of Aurora.

“It was almost coincidental that the whole tariff thing and the U.S. products was happening at the same time,” said Brad McMullen, CEO of the company, which has six stores in the province.

The Haven Greens 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.

“It's actually been a tremendous success for us on the retail floor,” said McMullen. “Timing is everything, but it's it 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.