Why vertical farms fail and what food abundance needs

Why So Many Vertical Farms Failed and What Food Abundance Actually Requires

Vertical farms promised lettuce grown in stacked towers inside cities, with little water, no pesticides, and no dependence on weather. Between 2023 and 2024 several of the best funded companies in the field went bankrupt or closed. This page argues that the main lesson is not that indoor farming does not work. The plants grow very well. The lesson is that a vertical farm swaps free sunlight for purchased electricity, so its future depends on energy becoming abundant. The page serves the futurism and abundance goals of this wiki. It asks what it would take for fresh food to stop being scarce in cities, deserts, polar towns, and space, and it treats energy price as the hidden variable behind that question.

The crash of 2023 and 2024

The collapse was fast and public:

• AeroFarms, a Newark, New Jersey company that sold greens through large grocery chains, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on 8 June 2023. Bloomberg reported liabilities of 50 to 100 million dollars and noted that the filing followed the April bankruptcy of another lettuce grower, Kalera. Its assets were later sold to a new owner, New AeroFarms, Inc.
• AppHarvest, a Kentucky company that ran large high technology greenhouses for tomatoes, cucumbers, strawberries, and salad greens, filed for Chapter 11 on 23 July 2023.
• Bowery Farming, once valued at 2.3 billion dollars after raising more than 700 million dollars in venture capital, told employees on 1 November 2024 that it was ceasing all operations after it failed to find new financing or a buyer. State layoff notices covered 104 workers at its farm in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and 83 at a site in Maryland.

AppHarvest is a useful contrast because it used sunlight in glass greenhouses rather than stacked shelves under lamps. Its failure shows that high interest rates, construction debt, and labor costs can sink any capital heavy farm. The fully indoor farms, however, carried one additional burden that greenhouses do not carry, and that burden explains why the model struggles even when everything else goes right.

Sunlight is free and electricity is not

A plant needs light to grow. In a field or greenhouse, the sun supplies that light at no charge. In a vertical farm, every photon comes from an LED fixture paid for by the kilowatt hour, and the heat from those lamps must then be removed by air conditioning, which uses more electricity.

Researchers have measured how large this burden is. A 2018 study compared plant factories, meaning fully enclosed farms with artificial light, against greenhouses in the Netherlands, the United Arab Emirates, and northern Sweden. The plant factories used water, carbon dioxide, land, and total energy more efficiently than every greenhouse. Yet they needed more purchased energy in every location: about 247 kilowatt hours of electricity per kilogram of dry lettuce, against 70 to 211 kilowatt hours for the greenhouses. The authors noted that this held even in the desert heat of Abu Dhabi and the Arctic cold of Kiruna, because free sunlight outweighs the cost of heating or cooling a glass house.

A 2024 review of real and modeled facilities found that current vertical farms use about 10 to 18 kilowatt hours of electricity per kilogram of fresh lettuce. With better lamps and climate control, the authors estimated a technical benchmark of about 3.1 to 7.4 kilowatt hours per kilogram, and they warned that present electricity costs remain a significant challenge.

To see what these numbers mean, take an example electricity price of 15 cents per kilowatt hour. At 10 to 18 kilowatt hours per kilogram, the electricity alone costs 1.50 to 2.70 dollars for each kilogram of lettuce, before rent, labor, seeds, packaging, or loan payments. A field farmer pays nothing for the light. At the improved benchmark and the same example price, the figure falls to roughly 0.47 to 1.11 dollars. The gap narrows, but it closes fully only if electricity itself becomes far less expensive.

Food abundance sits downstream of energy abundance

This is the central claim of the page. Vertical farming is best understood as a way to convert electricity into food. When electricity is scarce and costly, the conversion makes sense only for high value, fast spoiling crops such as leafy greens, herbs, and microgreens. Grain, beans, and potatoes, which supply most human calories, are far outside its reach.

If energy becomes abundant through solar power, advanced geothermal, nuclear fission, or eventually fusion, the arithmetic changes. A city with very low cost power at midday could grow greens near every neighborhood, independent of drought, floods, or trade disruptions. This links food abundance directly to the arguments on the Energy costs page. It also matches a pattern seen in desalination, where fresh water is limited mainly by the price of energy, and in microbial protein, where food is made from electricity and gases rather than sunlight and soil.

Where indoor farming already makes sense

Some places already face scarcity severe enough that indoor farming is worth its energy bill.

Polar and remote communities. The Naurvik project in Gjoa Haven, Nunavut, about 250 kilometers north of the Arctic Circle, began growing produce in October 2019 inside three recycled shipping containers powered mostly by wind and solar energy. Winter temperatures there fall to minus 40 degrees Celsius, and fresh, affordable produce is often unavailable. The project is led with the community, trains local technicians, and is supported by the Canadian Space Agency, which links it to research on growing food in space.

Space. On the International Space Station, the NASA Veggie unit grows plants under LEDs. On 10 August 2015 crew members ate red romaine lettuce grown in it, the first time a station grown crop was officially on the menu for the crew. In space there is no field to compare against, so the question is only whether the system works.

Small, import dependent states. Singapore imports over 90 percent of its food. In 2019 it set a goal of producing 30 percent of its nutritional needs locally by 2030. In November 2025 the government replaced that goal with narrower 2035 targets, including 20 percent of fibre foods such as leafy vegetables. Officials cited supply chain disruptions, inflationary pressure on energy and labor costs, and a harder financing environment, and reported that some indoor farming firms had closed. Singapore now treats local growing as one of four pillars, alongside diverse imports, stockpiles, and trade partnerships, which is a realistic picture of how indoor farms fit into food security today.

Lessons for abundance builders

• Count the free inputs. Sunlight, rain, and soil microbes do work that a closed system must buy. Any abundance technology that replaces a free input with a paid one must beat the old system by a wide margin elsewhere.
• Watch the cost of money, not only the technology. Several failures arrived when interest rates rose and investors pulled back. Capital heavy infrastructure is fragile when credit tightens.
• Start where scarcity is already extreme. Arctic towns, islands, disaster zones, and spacecraft pay a high price for fresh food today, so they are where the first real value appears.
• Pair food with energy. Projects that own their power supply, as Naurvik does with wind and solar, are testing the future model in which food and energy abundance arrive together.

Honest limits

The energy figures above come from studies of lettuce, and other crops can behave very differently. Electricity prices vary greatly by place and hour, and the example price on this page is only for illustration. Some vertical farm companies are still operating, and the industry may recover as LEDs and automation improve. Energy is a major cost, but bankruptcies also reflect management decisions, rapid expansion, and financing conditions that this page does not fully separate.

Discussion questions, essay ideas, and learning related AI prompt ideas

• Discuss whether the vertical farming crash was a failure of technology, of finance, or of energy prices, and support your answer with evidence.
• Write an essay on which other abundance technologies replace a free natural input with a paid one, and what that means for their future.
• Compare the purchased energy needs of a greenhouse and a plant factory in a cold climate and a hot desert climate.
• Ask an AI assistant to estimate the electricity cost per kilogram of lettuce at several electricity prices, and to show each step of the calculation.
• Ask an AI assistant to list the ways Arctic communities currently get fresh produce, and to compare the cost and reliability of each one.
• Research what electricity price would make indoor greens competitive with field greens in your region, and explain which assumptions matter most.

See also

• Vertical farming
• Energy costs and abundance
• Microbial protein
• Desalination
• Asteroid mining
• Time prices
• Backing up civilization
• Agriculture