Ferme d’hiver

About Ferme d’hiver

Ferme d’hiver, established in 2018 by founder Yves Daoust, is an agricultural technology firm focused on enhancing local food supply chains. The company provides controlled environment agriculture (CEA) solutions designed to coexist with current agri-food ecosystems. Yves Daoust, who serves as CTO, hails from a farming family and possesses a deep background in communications and artificial intelligence technologies, which he now applies to agriculture. His journey represents a return to his roots, aiming to merge advanced technology with farming to address modern agricultural challenges.

The company's core business involves designing, deploying, and operating vertical farms that utilize precision agriculture, advanced engineering, and artificial intelligence. This approach creates fully controlled indoor ecosystems, managing elements like light, water, and temperature to enable year-round crop production without chemical pesticides. Ferme d'hiver's business model is centered on partnering with local producers to integrate this technology into their facilities and then distributing the produce through retail partners. A key feature is a guaranteed purchase agreement for all produce grown using their system, which offers financial predictability to their farmer partners. The company's initial and primary crop is strawberries, aiming to significantly reduce Canada's reliance on imports.

One of the system's principal advantages is its efficiency; it can be up to 13 to 15 times more productive per square meter than traditional greenhouses and uses 20 to 25 times less space than open-field production. The technology includes a proprietary water-cooled LED lighting system that is highly energy-efficient. A significant benefit of this system is its ability to recover waste heat from the lighting and use it to warm adjacent traditional greenhouses, thereby reducing fossil fuel consumption and decreasing the carbon footprint of partner operations. The company has secured substantial funding, including a $46 million round in late 2022, to expand its operations, with a stated goal of replacing 10% of Canada's strawberry imports.