One of the U.S.’s largest cable providers is buying up Canada’s greenhouses

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Cox Enterprises Inc., a family-owned corporation and owner of one of the largest U.S. cable providers, is in the midst of an ambitious strategy to establish a North American supply and distribution network for greenhouse cucumbers, peppers and other produce.

The plan for Cox Farms is well under way.

Seven years after its first investment, the company has become North America’s largest greenhouse operator. Its business includes one substantial investment and two acquisitions in the southwest corner of Ontario, a three-to-four-hour drive from downtown Toronto.

And the president of Cox Farms says he has no plans to divest, regardless of what U.S. President Donald Trump has to say about tariffs and trade.

Cox’s business strategy – which aims to provide accessible and affordable vegetables to consumers – benefits from scale and diversification both inside and outside the United States.

“We will continue to build in both Canada and the U.S. because it just makes sense strategically,” Cox Farms president Steve Bradley said.

While the expansion from cable to cucumbers might be surprising, it made perfect sense for Cox Enterprises, Mr. Bradley said, as the company has always been about innovation and disruption.

Founded in 1898 when James Middleton Cox bought his first newspaper, the company has been at the forefront of a media evolution, from owning radio and television stations and cable systems to e-commerce.

Today, the corporation, headquartered in Atlanta, employs around 50,000 people across 300 businesses and has annual revenue of US$23-billion. Three of its major divisions are communications, automotive and agriculture.

The move is therefore natural. As climate change makes growing vegetables outside increasingly challenging, greenhouses are “an evolution of farming,” Mr. Bradley said.

Cox Farms has more than 700 acres of greenhouses spread across North America.

The company moved into Southwestern Ontario for two reasons: climate and expertise.

While greenhouses are less vulnerable to weather conditions than traditional outdoor agriculture because of controlled growing conditions – humidity, light, temperature – this control comes at a cost. Profitability demands a favourable environment.

Southwestern Ontario scores high in that regard: It receives a hefty amount of sunlight, is home to the warmest county in the province – without being as hot as the Southern U.S. – and it has an abundance of flat land surrounded by freshwater.

The region is also a stone’s throw from the Windsor-Detroit border crossing, beyond which lies a metro area with more than four million people. Proximity to consumers is key in the vegetable-growing game. Produce has a short shelf life and needs to move quickly from farm to plate.

“The closer you are to the market, the better,” said Lisa Ashton, agriculture policy lead at Royal Bank of Canada’s Climate Action Institute. RBC has released a number of reports on Ontario’s greenhouse sector.

These factors have turned the region into a global greenhouse supercluster. Essex County – where most operations are located – has the second-largest concentration of greenhouses on the planet, and is home to 4,000 acres of tomatoes, cucumbers and peppers often grown in huge, high-tech warehouses where AI software optimizes yields and self-driving carts deliver produce to automated packing lines.

Greenhouses in Essex County deliver $1.4-billion in farmgate value annually, while the sector contributes $6-billion to Ontario’s economy, according to Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce.

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In June, 2022, Cox Farms announced a significant strategic investment in Mucci Farms, one of the region’s largest and most established greenhouse companies. In May, 2024, it acquired Hacienda North Farms, and in November it acquired Greenhill Produce.

The Canadian Competition Bureau considered both acquisitions and has taken no actions to block them. Mr. Bradley said this indicates the bureau understands that scale is essential to providing affordable food.

The company wants to expand further in Ontario, Mr. Bradley said, calling it a matter of climate resiliency.

Under Mucci Farms and through its significant investment in the U.S. brand BrightFarms, Cox now has locations spanning the subcontinent. This diversification means it can consistently deliver crops; should one region experience less than ideal weather, such as back-to-back dark winters, the costs can be absorbed by other operations.

“The plan is to roll up and leverage that scale because, at the end of the day, we have to offer approachable products for everybody,” Mr. Bradley said.

For the Ontario greenhouse sector at large, Mr. Trump’s proposed tariffs would be bad news, said Richard Lee, executive director of Ontario Greenhouse Vegetable Growers. Mr. Lee does not think any of his members could survive the costs of lasting tariffs.

He is also concerned that Mr. Trump’s tariffs would work, and investment previously bound for Canada would flee south of the border, where the President says he is going to double down on U.S. manufacturing.

“If Trump is going to make it so appetizing for that investment in the U.S., are we going to see more acreage lost?”

But Mr. Bradley is not planning to pull out of Canada based on Mr. Trump’s threats. His proposed tariffs would limit access to U.S. consumers, but Ontario also offers other key advantages.

For example, because of the sector-specific services that have evolved in the cluster, it takes significantly less time to build a greenhouse in Ontario compared with the U.S., where workers with that skillset aren’t readily available.

Tariffs would also make business south of the border more difficult. Greenhouses need steel, and they need crop inputs, Mr. Bradley said. Both are often imported.

Divesting from Canada “just doesn’t make logical sense,” he said. The business is built on diversification and harnessing the strengths of each region.

“It makes a lot of sense to invest in Canada.”

With reports from David Milstead