Scaling the Potential of Vertical Farming Going into 2025 and Beyond

 Matthew P Kearney

Scaling the Potential of Vertical Farming Going into 2025 and Beyond

    Vertical farming may seem like something out of a futuristic movie, but they are very real in today’s agricultural industry. Vertical farming may promote a stronger relationship between urbanization and sustainable crop production. Based on recent innovations across agriculture and technology, vertical farming has the potential to revolutionize our current farming system. Through the development of vertical farming-based production lines, cities and otherwise unfarmable areas can be provided with fresh, local, and pesticide-free produce. Vertical farming and other adaptations of agriculture are not new ideas, but instead a historic and human process.     These technologies are ready to meaningfully address global food security through the technological and computational advancements in agriculture. Vertical farming has a promising future, which becomes a case more on perspective, investment, and alignment when considering the essential questions: Indoors or outdoors? Technology or no technology? Where’s the middle ground?     From 600 BCE, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon are understood as the first recorded instance of vertical farming and are one of the world's ancient wonders in today’s Iraq. Based upon a cascading concrete garden-palace hybrid, its innovators hydroponically grew luscious gardens - as they functioned as leisure for the elites of Babylonian society. Fast forward to the 1600s in France, ‘fruit walls’ were large fruit farms that relied on maze-like stone structures to trap and release up to 10℃, producing a necessary microclimate geared at extending the growing season.     We have always modified traditional farming, and we should focus on these improvements leading to social benefits. We should strive to advance production lines that are geared toward better food security outcomes for urban communities and food deserts, rather than using the vast capacity of the industry to only promote the upper class and meritocratic industry production.     In the documentary “Urban Agriculture : The Rise of Vertical Farms”, Dickson Despommier, a professor at Columbia University lays out a strong theoretical framework for the urbanization of vertical farming. Despommier follows, “““ You’re looking at the evolution of an idea. We should grow food in the city, let’s use a rooftop because it’s convenient and easy. Well, that’s not enough – let’s cover it over and make it a greenhouse. And that’s not enough. Okay, let’s make it two stories… that’s a vertical farm. Who knows how tall you could build them? ”””     Despommier highlights some key technological transitions that can help us bridge outdoor and indoor farming, and reevaluate the scale at which production should take place for sustainable outcomes.     Vertical farming and other deviations from traditional methods are not modern ideas, and we should explore ways to make productive and sustainable agriculture work with our moving needs for the future. By 2050, 70% of our global population is expected to live in urban areas, compared to just over half right now. We are somewhere between the modern idea of vertical farming and its realistic implementation under rising global and urban food insecurity. Different societies, regions, and stakeholders take vertical farming in different directions. How do we evaluate vertical farming's potential to bridge active and impending agricultural needs?     According to a Q&A session from the USDA Agricultural Research Services, research horticulturist Dr. James Altland and research plant pathologist Dr. Kai-Shu Ling, define ‘traditional farming’ as largely summarized by “planting crops in the soil in open fields with natural sunlight and irrigation”, whereas vertical farming means to “grow crops indoors in stacked layers, and use artificial growing systems”. In vertical farming, we have no geographical or seasonal restrictions on production, but outdoor growth is subject to inclement seasons and extreme weather that can devastate agricultural production lines, affecting food security greatly.     Vertical farming uses much less land, where farmers can grow 10-20 times (or more) produce in the same space, as well as use 1-5% of the water when relying on hydroponic watering systems. Hydroponics include growing plant roots submerged in water without soil, and usually feeding particular nutrients to a crop to meet its needs. Vertical farming is promising to promote food security in urban areas where farmlands are typically far away, populated desert areas, and other places where outdoor growing is not practical. Vertical farming promotes fresh and local produce, by turning farm-to-table supply routes for perishable goods from weeks into hours, and thousands of miles to a few miles.     Dr. James Altland expects vertical farming to produce up to half of the leafy green market in 10 years. He continues, “The most successful [crops for vertical farming] today would be those that can be grown hydroponically, have relatively short compact growth forms, and can be harvested in their entirety”. For this reason, lettuce has been the main crop used in indoor production. Dr. Kai-Shu Ling suggests that other crops at the USDA ARS such as tomatoes, peppers, strawberries, and small but abundant fruit trees such as apple, peach, and citrus, are having positive results in ongoing trials.     In 2011, Philips Lighting developed LEDs that were 4x more energy efficient than they were previously, promoting the onset of the vertical farming industry. greatly expanded the industry application of vertical farming with lower electric costs. The industry gained massive traction over the past decade with hundreds of vertical farming companies and start-ups worldwide. The first vertical farming company, Sky Greens Farms out of Singapore in 2012, has sparked vast entrepreneurial and innovative inspiration. In 2015, AeroFarms was the first US vertical farming corporation out of Newark, New Jersey.     We have millennia of development into today’s outdoor agriculture but are currently reliant on limited growth seasons and global supply routes. With vast experience and accumulated knowledge, and in our new era of personalization, technology, and data, large companies across the globe from Singapore, Japan, and the US are directing toward niche production lines to find their place in the market.     With so much potential in vertical farming and the rising industry, many fields are coming together to further necessary research goals. The Grand Challenge Synergy Project is a multi-agency national coordinated research project starting in 2018 to generate knowledge for greenhouse, vertical farming, and controlled environment agriculture. Various institutions in the US are seeking out the benefits of vertical farming and other controlled environment methods, like the University of Toledo, Princeton University, and even NASA which is interested in the field to develop sustainable food production in space.     Through research efforts, we seek to bridge the gap between the idea and the application. As managed by the AgTech (agricultural technology) global investment lead at Citigroup, Bloomberg reports that in 2022, a peak of $1 billion was raised for investment in vertical farming. But in 2023 valuations dropped over 90% to less than a sum of $100 million raising the question, what happened to vertical farming? Some analyses such as by Molly Glick at Scientific American suggest that the cost of electricity leaves the industry unattainable for now, noting Russia’s invasion of Ukraine driving the demand and price of electricity. However, there may be a deeper story to be told about the recent fall of vertical farming.     One cost analysis on the vertical farming industry by Ricky Roy, an aerospace engineer and tech-industry thought leader, suggests the cost of electricity as only the fourth highest cost in the greater picture of vertical farming. Otherwise, energy assumes less than 10% of outdoor farming costs, mostly for transportation. From this analysis, blue-collar labor and capital expenses in the vertical farming industry take up over 70% of the cost, but add up to less than 10% of their cost in outdoor farming. Outdoor production costs far less than vertical farming at the moment.     Roy takes an example of a head of lettuce. Roy expects lettuce grown in a vertical farm to cost around $5 grown indoors and grown outdoors for only $1. For venture capitalists and under the vertical farming market valuation, it does not make financial sense to invest in an unsustainable implementation of vertical farming at this moment, as outdoor agriculture is much more affordable. This trend has also led to criticisms wherein vertical farming could address issues related to food insecurity, where people who need affordable produce most are consistently priced out, leaving vertical farms in the West for the bourgeois urban elite. This is not just a criticism in the West – there is vertical farming across the world that is available only for expensive restaurants and other wealthy clients that can afford their specialty products.     Gerry Song was working as a data scientist at the vertical farming at Bowery Farming in Brooklyn, NY before its closing in November 2024. Data science at a vertical farm helps to optimize and automate the feeding systems for different plants and production lines. Specifically, Gerry worked on Bowery’s unified scheduling system which determines how to place roots from seedlings to crops within specific water and hydroponic systems. Gerry also speaks to technology’s role in the company, as powered by their BoweryOS, and to the nuanced future of vertical farms.     Gerry suggests that many of the ML operations at Bowery were based on yield prediction, demand forecasting, and computer vision to detect problems that need human intervention. Other models at Bowery helped to distribute and set proportions of different greens for salad mixes based on a specific yield. These tasks are all known use cases of machine learning, where the aim is to facilitate crop production. While this data integration is productive and intentional, Gerry notes that Bowery’s high-tech model pushed ownership to ‘scale fast and build more farms’, alluding to Bowery’s tricky navigation of the new and unknowns of vertical farming, as faced by other companies, as well as pressures to scale fast by stakeholders.     Gerry informed me, “In general, there was more data than we had the resources to do anything with! … [though] data was core to the daily, hourly operations of the farm”. Similar to any other industry, more data, and the right processes to aggregate it effectively, can lead to major competitive advantages. In the vertical farmer’s case, upfront costs into the industry and constant maintenance costs seem to keep the industry further from realizing profits.     Rigid initial setup engineering of large-scale vertical farms leaves little room to explore adjacent and new productive tasks as this process is timely and handles reoptimizing millions of dollars of machinery – making their unsustainable transitions to scale before finding a truly profitable model. In addition, many vertical farming companies have had issues with pathogens that decimate crops, another factor leading to Bowery’s closing. While vertical farming still looks forward, this story of Bowery Farms seems to be a trend in the greater Western industry of large-scale, high-tech vertical farming. However, there are smaller movements to align vertical farming’s capacity with individual and societal needs, and there is an interesting difference between the Eastern and Western approaches of vertical farming and controlled environment agriculture. To communicate the idea of vertical farming, East Asian languages denote ‘plant factories’, a more industrialized but perhaps more realistic way to communicate the values of vertical farming for societal benefits.     According to Bloomberg, AeroFarms is focusing company resources on building out its microgreens business for profit. While we should be skeptical of financial markets, US government commissary file documentation suggests AeroFarms is expected to make $330 million in 2025 after only making $4 million in 2024. It could be that vertical farming is truly about to take off, and I certainly hope it can drive affordable produce for underserved demographics.     It’s hard to blindly expect phenomenal outcomes when the industry is actively drained, but large-scale and high-tech vertical farming is likely here to stay. Still, in the West, outside of institutional research and development and small-scale vertical farming, we may be focused on a search for profitability at the capital level over societal benefit, which is holding us back from truly reaching a perspective and environment suitable for vertical farming’s agricultural revision.     Brooklyn, NY is one city in particular that has a growing number of rooftop gardens, ranging from basic vegetable gardens to full greenhouses providing communities with local produce. Similar community-scaled vertical farms are operational across Singapore, Japan, and Saudi Arabia. While large-scale high-tech vertical farming industry is also seen in these countries, there is a complementary focus on community farms that integrate ideas of outdoor farming and indoor farming, like greenhouses, artificial lighting, and hydroponics where necessary to reach improved yields while not forcing an unattainable and unsustainable scale on production. In addition, a growing number of companies, such as Gardyn, invented and released a suite of hydroponic indoor growing systems that could be used in household, community, and industrial settings to bridge food insecurity needs in a dynamic and scalable way. While we wait to find the efficiencies available from tech-powered vertical farms, personal and community farming may be an important tool for bridging urban agricultural needs.     Gerry leaves us with some light, “A lot of the first computer and internet companies failed for us to have the laptops and smartphones of today, and I think of Bowery's closing as just that.”. Research and development into the possibilities of vertical farming is still on the rise. Gerry’s last statement in the interview concludes that she just hopes there is still enough investment, policy, and support in the US to productively move the needle on the industry to become a bigger player in urban and local produce markets. We may look away from large-scale automation and production of vertical farming for now, and instead towards community-scale agricultural production that can more easily manage local produce needs. Investment into trials of vertical farming technologies should be placed higher in today’s world of priorities and investments if we want to develop realistic and sustainable food systems for later industry roll-out. We should invest in efficient and intentional production, and not rely on dated systems out of comfort. While we’re far from sustaining agricultural needs smoothly under ideal indoor conditions, the global community is evaluating what is working, what is not working, and the greater worldly impact of investing in and advancing these new frontiers of agriculture.

A look inside one of Bowery Farming’s warehouse facilities.

Sources

“AeroFarms Serves Up High-Growth Greens Investors Shouldn’t Miss.” Sec.Gov, www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1822966/000110465921054015/tm2110955d15_425.htm#:~:text=The%20company%20expects%20revenue%20to,new%20categories%20beyond%20leafy%20greens. 

“The EPIC Failure of Vertical Farms - What Happened?” YouTube, YouTube, www.youtube.com/watch?v=8BXHu_yXVQk&t=638s. 

Glick, Molly. “Robotic Bees Could Support Vertical Farms Today and Astronauts Tomorrow.” Scientific American, Scientific American, 20 Feb. 2024, www.scientificamerican.com/article/robotic-bees-could-support-vertical-farms-today-and-astronauts-tomorrow/.

Kearney, Matthew, and Song, Gerry. “Interview on Vertical Farming Futures, Applications, and Shortcomings | Gerry Song, Data Science at Bowery Farming.” 3 Dec. 2024.

Pollard, Amelia. “From AppHarvest to AeroFarms, Funding Is Drying up for Ai-Run Vertical Farms.” Bloomberg.Com, Bloomberg, 16 June 2023, www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-06-16/from-appharvest-to-aerofarms-funding-is-drying-up-for-ai-run-vertical-farms.

“Urban Agriculture : The Rise of Vertical Farms | Slice Experts | Full Documentary.” YouTube, YouTube, 23 Aug. 2023, www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBaKv76LQ_Q.

“Vertical Farming – No Longer a Futuristic Concept.” USDA ARS,   www.ars.usda.gov/oc/utm/vertical-farming-no-longer-a-futuristic-concept/.