Orchard, Vineyard & Berry Establishment
The industry — Fruit and tree nut farming
Base industry report for 1113 →- Establishments · CanadaA
- 1,786
- Under 10 employeesA
- 69%
Of 1,786 Canadian establishments with employees, 69% have fewer than ten — mostly small operators.
Entry signal — what decides who wins here
Structure decidesThe binding constraint is not executional. Being better than the incumbent does not, by itself, get you in — this one is cleared with capital, an asset, or a permission.
Come with the asset, or buy the business that owns it. Plant, fleet, land or quota decide this market before any operating skill does. Operators here are bought, not started.
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.
This is not a probability of success, and it is not a verdict on you. No survival probability is published per market, and inventing one would be worse than saying so. What the bar reads is how much of the outcome sits inside an operator's control: green means the hurdles are ones a better operator clears, red means the binding constraint is capital, an asset or a permission rather than execution. Someone arriving with an advantage this screen did not assume can win a market shown in red.
Companies named in this market · 6
The binding constraint — capital intensity
Fruit had the best headline in Canadian horticulture last year: farm-gate value up 16.8% to $1.6B in 2025 [A]. Read one line further and the attraction thins — prices rose 18.1% while production rose 0.1% [A]. The money came from scarcity, and scarcity in fruit means somebody's crop failed. British Columbia's sweet cherry harvest more than tripled (+319%) to a record 26 million kilograms in 2025 [A], which is another way of saying that the year before it barely existed; the growers' own packing and marketing co-operative, BC Tree Fruits, closed in 2024 and applied for creditor protection, and the Province redirected an estimated $4M of programme funding as bridge financing so members would be paid for harvests already delivered [B]. That is the cut. A planting is sunk for years before its first commercial crop, on Okanagan land FCC values at $40,500 an acre [A], and the revenue it eventually earns arrives in a sequence the grower does not control — a winter kill takes a whole year's income while the debt on the trees runs on. FCC's own account of the Okanagan in 2025 is that 'producers hesitant to re-plant exited operations amid ongoing challenges related to weather variability, labour shortages and storage constraints' [A]. Those are incumbents, with paid-for trees, declining to put the capital in again. The business counts agree it is not a smallholding: 16% of the 1,786 establishments employ twenty or more [A], because a harvest is a labour event. The loss of the co-operative also removed the shared packing and storage a small grower relied on, so an entrant now finances the pack-house relationship as well as the orchard. Berries and cider-scale plantings shorten the wait but not the mechanism.
Fruit growing exists only where climate allows it, so a grower competes for land, labour and packing capacity inside one valley. British Columbia alone holds 748 of the 1,786 establishments. The fruit then sells against Washington State and offshore imports, which cap the price, but the entry decision is made in a valley land market.
Sectors joined: Agriculture · Cellular Agriculture
[UNVERIFIED] Sector-to-NAICS mapping is analyst judgment — see data/angel-sector-map.json. Counts are a per-record cross-reference and are not additive across records.
Who you would be competing with
The operators already at scale here, and whoever is buying these businesses. In most of these industries the competition an entrant meets is local, so this is who sets the terms rather than a list of everyone in the trade.
Financials & market size — sourced
Figures that came from a filing, a results release or reputable reporting, each carrying its evidence tier.
The field
Every operator named on this record, and what each one discloses. A private single-site operator discloses nothing, which is the normal case — the listed consolidators are the only window in.
Competitor set · 5 named · 0 disclose revenue
| Name | Revenue | Share | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| BC Tree Fruits Cooperative (ceased 2024)B | not disclosed | — | The grower-owned packer and marketer for the Okanagan. Closed in 2024, applied for creditor protection, and the Province redirected an estimated $4M so members were paid for fruit already delivered. Its absence is the competitive fact: the shared infrastructure an entrant would have used is gone. |
| Scotian Gold Co-operative / Nova Agri / Norfolk Fruit Growers' Association / Algoma OrchardsC | not disclosed | — | The surviving grower-owned and private packing houses in Nova Scotia and Ontario — the route a small orchard takes to a retail shelf. Named from general knowledge of the Canadian packing trade; no filing or disclosure was opened for this record. |
| Andrew Peller (TSX: ADW.A) and Arterra Wines CanadaC | not disclosed | — | The two large buyers of Canadian wine grapes, and therefore the price-setters for a new vineyard. Peller files; its results were not opened for this record, and grapes were not screened separately. |
| Washington State and offshore importersC | not disclosed | — | They cap the price a Canadian grower can get for apples, cherries and berries, and they are not weather-correlated with the Okanagan. The import share of Canadian consumption was not sourced for this record. |
| The independent majorityA | not disclosed | — | 46% of the 1,786 establishments have one to four employees; 289 employ twenty or more. These are the growers with mature, paid-for plantings who are currently choosing to exit rather than replant — which tells an entrant what the return on a new planting looks like. |
Nobody here publishes revenue. The market is not sized for that reason — an estimate built on nothing would only look like knowledge.
Evidence
Evidence. Establishment counts are Statistics Canada's business counts (December 2023). Fruit farm-gate value, the price/volume split and the cherry figure are read from Statistics Canada's Daily release on 2025 fruit and vegetable production. The Okanagan land value and the quoted sentence on growers exiting rather than replanting are read from the 2025 FCC Farmland Values Report. The BC Tree Fruits account is read from the Province of British Columbia's own news releases of 13 August and 12 September 2024, which state the closure, the creditor-protection application and the $4 million redirected so members were paid for delivered fruit. The crop volumes attributed to the co-operative in trade coverage — cherries down 85–90%, other stone fruit at zero, apples at half of 2023 — could not be opened in any document during this audit and have been removed from the record; the 2024 collapse is instead carried by Statistics Canada's 2025 rebound figures. The debt figure that circulated in other coverage was not read in a primary document and is left out. What is missing: establishment cost per acre and years to first crop — the two numbers that would turn 'capital intensity' from judgment into arithmetic — were not sourced, so the cut rests on the land price, the weather record and incumbents' own behaviour. Grapes and wine-linked vineyards were not examined separately. The cut factor is analyst judgment.
Where the industry talks
The associations, forums and events where people in this trade actually talk shop — where to listen before entering, and where the first customers are found. Each link was opened on the date shown.
Tree fruit growers' body in the Okanagan; spray schedule, industry profile and member services.
Advocacy body for Ontario fruit and vegetable growers; labour, crop protection and trade files.
National body for Canadian wineries and grape growers; policy and economic impact work.
Home page states it represents over 200 Ontario berry growers; grower directory and member login.
Annual horticulture trade show and education programme; 2027 edition 17-18 February, Niagara Falls.
Orchard-systems network with an annual conference and study tours; publishes Compact Fruit Tree.
The Canadian Horticultural Council's hortcouncil.ca could not be opened from this network (self-signed certificate), so it is not listed.
Software serving this industry
Vertical software markets filed along the same branch of NAICS — who sells to these businesses, and who an entrant would have to displace.
No vertical software market has been recorded along this branch yet. The base industry report says what the subsector typically runs on.