Haystack Fund is pleased to acknowledge Winter Farm, a Canadian based agro-tech company for receiving outstanding media coverage in an informative report by TVA Nouvelles, the Canadian television station. 

You can watch the full TVA news report in French here. 

Winter Farm is one of Haystack Fund’s earliest and most ambitious investments — and is poised to be one of our most successful. As TVA reported, the Brossard-based farm recently received an additional CAD$5.5 million in equity investment, including CAD$2 million in funding from Investissement Québec, the provincial government-backed investor.

Haystack Fund is proud to support sustainable agriculture. We are dedicated to helping Winter Farm achieve its mission to reduce Quebec’s need for food imports and help feed the expanding global population. 

Winter Farm has so far received CAD$2.5 million from Haystack Fund, which remains the project’s biggest private investor. Haystack Fund will work closely with Winter Farm’s leadership to contribute to strategy, execution and expansion. 

“Winter Farm is a truly innovative company with a team that is more than capable of reaching their ambitious goals,” said Alexandre Panneton, chief investment officer at Haystack Fund.

“The technology works, reduces dependence on imports and is more efficient than what is currently available.”

In its report, TVA noted that Winter Farm had designed “seasonless” agriculture, meaning harvesting could be done 12 months of the year. Lettuce, strawberries, beans and herbs were among the products mentioned in the report. “It’s a process called above-ground farming, the same process that we use in greenhouses,” Yves Daoust, the founder and director of Winter Farm, told TVA.

“So, we are talking about [irrigation], potting soil and plants that come from the plant supply chain that exists in Quebec,” he added.

The idea is to produce anything that is out of season.

Yves Daoust, founder and director of Winter Farm

Winter Farm’s solution brings together the principles of vertical farming and the advanced techniques of farming 4.0, which leverages data and artificial intelligence for rapid learning and precise crop and environmental control.

The company’s objectives reach beyond Quebec. Winter Farm hopes to reduce the dependence on fruit and vegetable imports in all cold-weather countries.

“The idea is to work with the market gardeners to produce crops, like strawberries, that can be harvested from October until the beginning of June. That is to say, anything that is out of season,” Daoust told TVA.

“We import 133,000 tonnes of strawberries into Canada per year. So, let’s imagine that we are going to get 10% of that,” he said. 

“Basically, what we are aiming for is to replace 10% of imports in the next five years.” 

We congratulate Winter Farm for receiving the recognition it deserves. 

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Learn more details about Winter Farm/Ferme D’Hiver in our portfolio.

Winter Farm/Ferme D’Hiver website.