Cannabis grown under cover
This Canadian industry comprises establishments primarily engaged in growing cannabis under glass or protective cover. — Statistics Canada, NAICS 2022A
- Establishments · CanadaA
- 370
- Under 10 employeesA
- 48%
Size and shape
How many businesses there are and how small they are. Fragmentation is the first thing an entrant — or anyone selling software into this industry — needs to know, and it is one of the few things that is actually measured.
Canadian establishments by number of employeesA
Of 370 Canadian establishments with employees, 48% have fewer than ten — weighted toward mid-sized establishments.
Where they areA
Largest four provinces by establishment count. Establishments with employees only — sole operators with no payroll are not in this table, so in trades and personal services the true number of businesses is higher.
Measured, not forecast: the share of US establishments opening in one year that were still active later. It counts good operators and bad ones together, which is exactly why it is the honest answer to “what are the odds”. It is for the whole sector rather than this market, and the ten-year figure comes from an older cohort because no younger one has reached ten years.
No US figure is shown. County Business Patterns is coded to the 2017 US edition of NAICS; this code either does not exist there, names a different industry, or is outside the programme's coverage (most of agriculture, rail, postal and public administration are). A figure is attached only where both the code and the title agree.
How businesses here compete
The structural profile of subsector 111, which every industry beneath it inherits. This is analyst judgment from how the subsector is organised — not research into this industry, and not a measurement.
Land and machinery are the entry ticket and the crop sells at a price set elsewhere. The reachable niches are the ones that escape the commodity — controlled environment, direct-to-consumer, specialty crops.
- Who sets the price
- Commodity exchanges and a handful of processors; the grower is a price taker.
- The software it runs on
- Farm management, agronomy and precision-ag platforms, increasingly bundled by equipment makers and input suppliers.
Market screens and studies
Market-entry records filed along this branch of the hierarchy. A record at or beneath this code is about this industry; one above it is about something wider that contains it.
Screened one level up. Nothing is filed at this exact code; the screen for 1114 Greenhouse, nursery and floriculture production covers it.
Controlled-environment growing converts capital and energy into produce, and both inputs are priced against a wholesale price the grower does not set. The vertical-farming cohort that raised heavily on this thesis has largely failed on it — energy per kilogram was the number that mattered and it did not fall fast enough. Greenhouse vegetable production works at scale in specific gas-price geographies, which is a siting decision more than an operating one.
The control layer of a greenhouse is a Dutch hardware oligopoly, and the software that grows on top of it is already funded and consolidating — an entrant would sit between a climate computer it cannot replace and AI vendors with $60m+ behind them. Every commercial glasshouse runs a climate/irrigation computer that is wired into its boilers, vents, screens, lights and fertigation units: Priva (De Lier; 560+ employees, 10K horticulture projects, a family business) [C], Ridder (Maasdijk; greenhouse technology since 1953, HortOS cloud) [C] and Hoogendoorn (Vlaardingen; IIVO, sold in North America through AdeptAg since December 2023) [B/C] supply most of it, with Argus Control Systems (Langley, BC — a Conviron/Controlled Environments Limited company since April 2013) [B] the Canadian exception. Replacing that computer is a capital project, not a subscription decision. The software opportunity above it has been taken by funded entrants. Source.ag (Amsterdam) raised a $23M Series A led by Astanor in 2023 ($35M total then) [B], says it runs in 500+ greenhouses in 25 countries and works with 13 of the 25 largest high-tech growers [C], and on 9 October 2026 bought Optimal, a London autonomous-climate start-up [C]. Blue Radix (Rotterdam) raised €5M in October 2024 from Navus Ventures and Horticoop for its autonomous Crop Controller, on nearly 100 greenhouses [B]. IUNU (Seattle) bought Artemis — the cultivation-management, labour and food-safety platform formerly Agrilyst — in September 2021, raised a $24M Series B led by Lewis & Clark in March 2022 (claiming over 25% of the North American CEA market) and $20M led by S2G in April 2025 [B]; about $64.5M disclosed in all. LetsGrow.com (2,000+ growers, 45+ countries; founded 2001 from a Wageningen initiative; visiting address the same Vlaardingen building as Hoogendoorn) [C] and 30MHz (Rotterdam, 250+ growers; €3.5M Series A 2019 and €6.5M in 2021 led by Rubio Impact Ventures) [B/C] hold the data-platform layer; Grodan's e-Gro app ties ROCKWOOL's stone-wool substrate to the same data [C]. In vertical farming the operating software comes bundled with the hardware: Intelligent Growth Solutions (Edinburgh) raised £5.4M (2019), £42.2M (2021) and £22.5M (2024) for its growth towers and software suite [B], while Agrify's US cultivation business (cannabis-led) is not reachable online and is left out. Koidra, which won the Autonomous Greenhouse Challenge twice, now markets itself as an agentic system for industrial processes in general [C] — one of the few autonomous-greenhouse start-ups that widened rather than deepened. The buyer pool is real but narrow. Canada had 974 commercial greenhouse vegetable operations in 2024 (Ontario 382) [A]; greenhouse area was 35.9 million m² in 2025, 64.9% in Ontario, and the whole greenhouse, nursery and sod sector sold $6.5B, of which nursery $852.7M [A]. The high-tech vegetable growers already buy from the Dutch suppliers; the flower, potted-plant and nursery growers buy order-and-inventory ERP from small long-lived vendors — CompuPlants (since 1988) [C] or ERP add-ons such as Velosio's SilverLeaf on Microsoft Dynamics [C] — a fragmented niche (nursery operations were not counted for this record) with no funded leader found. How this differs from its neighbours: 1114 Greenhouse & Controlled-Environment Production is the growing business itself (capital, energy and wholesale price); this record is the software that business buys. 1151 Farm Management & Precision Agriculture is open-field — tractors, agronomy and field irrigation (Hortau sits there, not here). 3123 Cannabis Seed-to-Sale is a compliance-reporting market that shares some greenhouse vendors (Argus, Agrify, Artemis's cannabis tools) but sells against a government tracking mandate. Incumbent vulnerability decides it: the hardware incumbents are not vulnerable, and the AI layer that could have been the wedge is already held by Source.ag, Blue Radix and IUNU.
Filed above — wider than this industry
Software serving this industry
The vertical software markets filed along the same branch — who sells to these businesses and who they would have to displace — and then the generic categories every business buys whatever it does.
Sold across the wider branch
And what every business buys · 33 generic categories
Sold to every industry rather than this one, so they are filed against the software industry's own code. The same few vendors recur across most of them.
Who works here
The occupations employed in Agriculture, forestry, fishing and hunting, most concentrated in it first. The share is measured against the whole sector, not this industry — the published cross-tabulation stops there.
Concentrated in this sectorA
These jobs are mostly done here. An operator in this industry is competing for them against others in the same industry, not against the whole economy.
And the jobs every business has
Found across at least fourteen of the twenty sectors. In a small establishment several of these are usually one person, or an outside provider.
Alongside this industry
This is the most specific level NAICS defines. The other industries under 11141 are its nearest neighbours.
| Code | Industry | Establishments · CA | What is known |
|---|---|---|---|
| 111411 | Mushroom production | 96 | screened at 1114 |
| 111419 | Other food crops grown under cover | 473 | screened at 1114 |