Can Vertical Farmers Rise to the Challenge?
April 3, 2025 I recently toured 80 Acres Farms’ Florence, Ky. facility, a 200,000-square-foot vertical farm designed to grow 40 million servings of produce per year. It’s one of three production farms for the Hamilton, Ohio-based company, which recently landed $115 million in capital funding and acquired a biotechnology firm in Israel to boost its in-house plant breeding efforts. Most impressive? 80 Acres is profitable. And it’s still growing, having just acquired three additional vertical farms in the U.S.
Stories like these are, shall we say, uncommon. So many high-profile, large-scale vertical operations have faltered and/or died on the vine, and the struggles continue. Some industry watchers seem to enjoy the bad news, pointing out the hubris of tech billionaires pretending to be farmers (OK, that’s fair) and enumerating arguments for why vertical farming as a viable business is simply DOA.
And yet…
Other CEA leaders are taking a more practical, forward-looking stance. Recent failures are a course correction, they say, not a death sentence. While the expectations around building and scaling a vertical farm look very different these days, success stories still exist and business models are evolving.
The tantalizing promise of global vertical farming remains: Enlisting technology to bring fresh, healthy food—quickly, and in large quantities—to places that can’t otherwise grow it themselves. So how do we get this industry to the next stage?
In putting together our CEAg World Industry Report: Vertical Farming, my colleague Dana Shugrue and I heard again and again that the time has come for more openness and collaboration. The roundtable discussion I led for “Reality Check: Where Do We Go from Here?” (page 12) included a fantastic balance of candor, counterpoints, cheerleading, and commiseration. Everyone on the call agreed it was a breath of fresh air.
“I hope as an industry we can become a bit less cagey,” said Rodrigo Pereyra, former vice president of agricultural science for Bowery Farming, which had been the largest vertical farming operation in the U.S. until it shuttered in November 2024. “You don’t have to give away everything, but I think being more open, being able to learn from our experiences, will go a long way.”
This industry report is a step in that direction. It’s CEAg World’s mission to facilitate these kinds of honest, informed conversations across all sectors of controlled environment agriculture, from vertical farming to greenhouses to outdoor protected cropping. We look forward to bringing you the insights, research, and perspectives you need to grow your business.