Mohamed Hage paces through a seemingly endless row of cucumber plants nearly ready to be plucked from their vines.
But Hage is not in a rural farm field miles from Montreal. He is walking through Lufa Farms’ vast warehouse in Montreal’s Saint-Laurent neighbourhood.
Formerly a Sears outlet, the nearly 164,000-square-foot space is the largest urban farm in the world. The farm is one reason Montreal has been billed the “world capital” of urban agriculture.
Lufa’s six Montreal farms grow cucumbers, tomatoes, eggplant, peppers and a variety of leafy greens. Each day, it harvests around 10,000 pounds of cucumbers alone.
“What we’ve shown at Lufa is you can grow food where people live and you can do it sustainably and without losing money,” said Hage, Lufa’s founder and CEO. “It’s not easy, but it’s feasible.”
Now, with the federal government prioritizing national food security, some are wondering whether Montreal’s successful urban farm model can be replicated in other cities across the country.
“We don’t expect ourselves to be the only ones doing this,” said Hage.
New funding
In June, Ottawa announced a National Food Security Strategy that aims to make Canada more self-sufficient in food production.
Currently, 88 per cent of fresh fruit and nuts and 72 per cent of vegetables come from abroad, and about 40 per cent of these imports come from the United States.
The strategy promises $3.2 billion in funding over 10 years, some of which will go towards boosting local agricultural production and innovation.
Urban farms — which range from large-scale vertical farms to community gardens — can have several advantages, sources say. They can operate during Canada’s harsh winters, produce more nutritional foods, and bring food prices down due to lower transport costs.
The vastness of Canada’s geography makes localized food production appealing, says Sylvain Charlebois, a researcher of food distribution and policy at Dalhousie University.
“You want to reduce transportation costs as much as possible,” he said, adding that produce shipped over vast distances can also lose many of its nutrients.
“If you produce your products closer to your point of sale, you are likely to increase the level of quality and freshness.”
Charlebois says the weak Canadian dollar also means local food can make sense economically.
“Because the Canadian dollar is getting weaker and weaker by the day, the buying power to actually import is costing more, and a lot of contracts are negotiated in American dollars. So proximity certainly will mitigate some of that effect.”
Striving for food autonomy
As Canada looks to boost its local food production, Montreal may serve as a blueprint.
The city boasts 57 urban farms and 270 urban agriculture organizations, according to Tourism Montreal.
Much of the city’s success as an urban agriculture hub can be attributed to the support of the province. In 2025, Quebec earmarked $1 billion over five years for its Bio-Food Policy Program, which aims to improve provincial food autonomy by improving the efficiency of its farms.
Charlebois says other provinces should be looking at Quebec’s ambitious investments, noting the province is interested not simply in feeding local populations but also exporting its food.
“[Quebec] understood that with nine million people to feed, you can’t really build economies of scale unless you recognize the value of export markets.”
Quebec’s bio-food program also prioritizes reducing pesticides.
Hage, of Lufa Farms, says that offering pesticide-free vegetables is one of the farm’s biggest draws with customers. And the company has learned to farm without them.
“We’re 16 years old now … we’ve had every kind of [crop] issue,” he said. “But we’ve been able to solve every problem without using pesticides.”
Lufa monitors insects through an app the company developed internally. And it introduced “good” insects to hunt pests that threaten crops.
“We replicate what mother nature does naturally,” he said.
Upfront costs
Large-scale urban farms have only become viable in the past few decades due to improvements in technology and growing techniques. But the upfront costs can be a significant barrier to getting them off the ground.
“These projects are incredibly capital intensive,” said Charlebois. “It takes years before you make any money.”
Charlebois points to GoodLeaf Farms as an example of an urban farm that was able to go mainstream thanks to a major capital investment. The company, which today operates farms in Montreal, Guelph and Calgary, received over $65 million in investment from french fries behemoth McCain Foods in 2021.
For Lufa, which launched in 2009, high operating and building costs initially made it a challenge to get the business off the ground.
In its early days, Lufa’s customers were primarily upper-middle class Montrealers who were willing to pay a little more for their products. But now, Lufa is in many cases cheaper than large grocers, Hage says.
According to Hage, the price of Lufa’s Lebanese cucumbers has declined from $1.43 per 100 grams in 2020 to $1 per 100 grams today. The National Food Security Strategy also notes that 50 Lufa items cost less than they do at major retailers.
“Lufa’s path since day one has been [to] improve the tech to get to the point where it’s costing us less to build, less to operate, we produce more food, and our food’s becoming more and more affordable,” said Hage.
For Charlebois, this is key. Investing in technology to improve soil and plant science is what eventually leads to cost reductions for consumers, he says.
“What we need as a country is a more efficient agricultural sector,” he said. “That’s the only way you can actually bring down prices.”
Looking to the future
For new urban farms, talent acquisition would — in theory — seem like a challenge.
Hage was told he would have a tough time recruiting staff when Lufa was in its infancy. But today, the company has 700 employees — people who enjoy the benefits of city life while tending to vegetables, he says.
“Canadians do want to work on farms, they just don’t want to leave cities,” he said.
“So offer them a farm in the city. All of a sudden, they’re biking to their farm. They’re going rock climbing … just across from the farm.”
Eric Duchemin, scientific director at the Urban Agriculture Lab, a Montreal-based research organization, says its mission is to prove that urban life and agriculture can co-exist.
“We wanted to blur the line of what is agricultural and what is urban,” he said.
The lab has a rooftop garden at the Montréal Convention Centre that produces vegetables, honey and even wine. It gives away half of its annual five-tonne harvest to local food banks and sells the rest to local restaurants.
Duchemin notes that cheap hydro power, lower rents and plentiful industrial space are factors that make Montreal a great location for urban agriculture.
Hage, of Lufa, agrees. “We’re spoiled,” he said, about Quebec’s abundant hydro power.
Montreal’s average electricity price for industrial customers is considerably lower than in other major Canadian cities.
Hydro-Québec also provides a special discount for greenhouse farms. Its special rate for eligible greenhouse growers offers electricity savings of about 40 per cent, the organization’s website says.
However, Hage does not see higher electricity rates in other provinces as a barrier to expansion. Lufa Farms has set its sights on setting up shops in Toronto, Vancouver and Boston.
“It will be more expensive for us to be outside of Quebec from an electricity perspective, but it’s not going to be enough to actually show up in the cost of the food.”
Charlebois says urban farms that aim to be major producers need to target entire regions, rather than just one city. GoodLeaf started in Halifax, but expanded to access a larger consumer base, he notes.
“[The Maritimes] is 2.4 million people in a vast area with all four provinces. It’s hard to really build economies of scale that are interesting for any investor,” he said.
He believes the market dynamics of modern supply chains are forcing urban agriculture projects to rethink traditional models.
“Agriculture has been fascinated by a ‘build it they will come’ mantra for many decades,” he said.
“But more and more, because of the complexities of food supply chains now, you kind of have to reverse things. It’s more about demand chain management than supply chain management.”
Really found the article on urban farming interesting informative and encouraging. I hope that one can be built in places like Thunder Bay to access the far north with fresh food. The Arctic is growing and one of its biggest challenges is food supply and its outrageous costs.
I enjoyed this artcle very much. Urban farming is probably the wave of the future. The question it raises for me is whether the produce grown hydroponically have the same nutritional value as produce grown in traditional soil gardens. Has any research been done done on that score?