Vertical Farming: Why the wave of bankruptcies before it could even save the planet?

While in Berlin in 2018, I was captivated by the vertical farming cabinets in a local supermarket. Standing two or three metres tall with five or six levels, they resembled chilled food displays, yet behind their sleek, hard glass walls, there was no fancy packaging—only a soft, eerie purple glow.

Herbs of all sizes peeked through the plastic panels of each layer, quivering steadily in the internal circulation of the cabinet’s airflow. Occasionally, a young person, likely a staff member, would climb a ladder to harvest the mature plants and arrange them neatly on the shelves.

Driven by simple curiosity, I began an internship at a vertical farming company.

I. ‘Controllable’ Agriculture

During my first year, I soaked up new information and knowledge like a sponge, rotating between the production workshop, the studio, the laboratory, and my own desk. Gradually, I came to understand what vertical farming truly was and the role of an industrial designer within such a system.

Vertical farming generally employs soilless cultivation, most commonly through hydroponics or aeroponics. Fertiliser, oxygen, and other essential growth elements are mixed into water according to a specific formula and then pumped vertically to reach every level of the structure.

Vertical farming facilities are categorised as either semi-closed or fully closed. The former still introduces natural sunlight into the growing environment, while the latter operates in a completely sealed, artificial space where plants rely solely on artificial light for photosynthesis, allowing for the precise calibration of every growth parameter.

My company specialised in fully closed, multi-layer hydroponic growing cabinets—the type that demands the highest technical standards and the most precise control.

In traditional open-field farming, farmers rely on experience and intuition to collaborate with nature in cultivating crops. In a fully closed hydroponic cabinet, however, the parameters of the growth environment are entirely quantified, and different departments communicate their needs solely through data: plant scientists provide the specific parameters they require, and engineers and designers use these as a benchmark to design the hardware—lighting equipment, irrigation systems, ventilation, and so on—to meet those specifications.

For example, crops in a vertical farming cabinet must be embedded in a substrate. Since the substrate cannot float on the water’s surface, we had to design trays with recesses of the correct size to hold them.

The ‘miracle’ narrative of vertical farming—producing food without occupying land—is actually built upon a series of complex and tedious processes.

Vertical farming companies do not just provide the growing technology and hardware to retailers; they also provide the labour to operate the machinery. Consequently, increasing the ease of use and reducing the man-hours required for operation became the keys to lowering costs.

To minimise time and labour costs at every stage, even seemingly simple downstream tasks for maintaining supermarket hydroponic cabinets—such as harvesting leafy greens, packaging, tidying shelves, recording crop health, cleaning the cabinets, and transplanting seedlings—must rely on manual guidelines provided by the vertical farming company.

The writing and refinement of these guidelines came from designers shadowing ‘farmers’ (the staff who operate and maintain the cabinets) through countless operational cycles.

Our records of these farmers were used to analyse the time spent on each step, down to the minute. Based on these observations and analyses, we then optimised the arrangement and design of the hardware within the cabinets, added auxiliary tools needed for the process, adjusted the sequence of steps, and improved the usability of every human-machine interface, all to reduce the required manual maintenance time as much as possible.

Doesn’t this sound exactly like the white-collar workers tracking the performance of labourers described by David Graeber in *Bullshit Jobs*?

Except in our case, we weren’t carrying notebooks and spreadsheets, but GoPros, shadowing the staff as they operated the cabinets like ghosts, recording every step, every movement, and every mistake without any interference.

III. Why can’t vertical farming solve the global food crisis?

One often hears this line of reasoning within the industry: against the backdrop of global population growth and accelerating climate change, arable land is dwindling, and a wider food crisis is already looming. Consequently, vertical farming—with its fully controllable internal environment—may become a priority for ensuring food security.

However, whenever vertical farming is proposed as a potential solution to future food crises, it must face an awkward truth: the variety of crops suitable for vertical farming systems is actually very limited.

Firstly, machines designed for large-scale production struggle to accommodate the specific needs of different plant species.

The shelf height in vertical farming growth cabinets is often set to a median value for commonly grown crops; plants that grow taller or shorter than this range are simply excluded. In large-scale cabinets, it is also difficult to pinpoint and adjust growth parameters for specific sections, meaning small-batch orders for niche varieties become a logistical burden.

Beyond planting and harvesting, post-harvest processing (post production) is another step with high labour costs. Because different produce require different handling, sorting, and packaging, reducing crop variety is often the simplest and most direct way to streamline labour processes.

Most importantly, commercial vertical farming companies can currently only turn a profit with salad greens, herbs, or high-water-content produce like tomatoes, cucumbers, and chillies. These crops require less energy, less space, have shorter growth cycles, present fewer technical challenges, and hold higher market value. In contrast, it is impossible to profit from staple crops high in protein, carbohydrates, or fats.

Last year, the German vertical farming startup infarm announced experimental results at the COP27 summit in Egypt, claiming they had successfully grown wheat in their vertical farming facilities.

The company’s founder stated in a public announcement: “The results of the first round of trials were outstanding, with an expected annual yield of 11.7 kg per square metre (equivalent to 7,800 kg per mu). If scaled up, this would equal 117 tonnes per hectare per year—26 times the yield of open-field farming.”

infarm did not disclose the energy consumption data from their experiments. However, according to calculations by the public art project DISNOVATION.ORG, the “estimated real cost”—including energy and external nutrients—for growing one square metre of wheat in a closed environment is as high as €200 per kilogram of wheat (approximately 1,547 RMB). This is over a thousand times the market price of wheat in Europe at the time.

Ensuring food security through such high-cost, energy-intensive methods is clearly neither economical nor rational.

3. Energy Consumption and Land Use: The True Cost of Vertical Farming

In the marketing rhetoric surrounding vertical farming, ‘sustainable’ is another seductive label.

Proponents of vertical farming claim that hydroponic cabinets can reduce food miles and help promote local produce. Unfortunately, the coriander, mint, and sage locked away in these glass cases may technically be ‘local’, but they are entirely severed from the local environment, climate, growers, and food networks.

While vertical farming also claims to conserve water, it ignores the energy-intensive nature of the systems. The current insurmountable bottleneck is the massive amount of energy required to power the LED artificial lighting.

A 2021 industry survey revealed that 64% of 336 Controlled-Environment Agriculture (CEA) companies used no green or renewable energy whatsoever.

Relying on fossil fuels is not only environmentally damaging, but energy is lost at every stage of power generation and conversion, making indoor lighting vastly less efficient than natural sunlight. For low-energy leafy greens, for instance, a conventional greenhouse uses just 5.4kWh per kilogram, whereas vertical farming consumes as much as 38.8kWh per kilogram.

I often hear colleagues argue that the ultimate goal of vertical farming is to condense agriculture into a smaller footprint, thereby returning vast tracts of farmland to the wild. The reasoning is that no matter how land-based farming is improved, the biodiversity it provides can never compare with that of nature.

However, given the energy-intensive nature of vertical farming, calculating its true footprint and resource consumption must extend beyond the facility itself to include the infrastructure required to power it. Consequently, vertical farming companies that appear ‘green’ by using renewable energy are, in effect, occupying the vast swathes of land required for the solar and wind farms that supply their electricity.

At present, with the exception of low-energy leafy greens such as lettuce, the land ‘saved’ by growing other crops via vertical farming is insufficient to offset the land required for its power supply.

Furthermore, existing data tends to focus solely on the energy used during the production process, ignoring the embodied energy required to manufacture the infrastructure—such as the metal frameworks, artificial lighting, and sensors. This equipment also degrades over time and, once it reaches the end of its operational life, becomes industrial or electronic waste.

All of this directly contradicts the eco-friendly narrative that vertical farming seeks to project.

5. Final Reflections

During the Russia-Ukraine war, the limitations of vertical farming were laid bare by the ripple effects of the energy crisis, leaving the entire industry reeling.

The US robotic vertical farming firm Fifth Season shut down last November; around the same time, Germany’s Infarm announced redundancies for over half its workforce; France’s container farming company Agricool declared bankruptcy in January this year; and the industry leader, AeroFarms, filed for bankruptcy protection in June… this technocentric ‘miracle’ has undoubtedly fallen from grace.

Against the backdrop of global population growth and accelerating climate change, creating vertically farmed environments with total internal control may indeed be a viable option for tackling food crises. However, in today’s profit-driven venture capital climate, many tech startups have fallen into a vicious cycle of aggressive expansion and unsustainable losses simply to meet the expectations of their investors.

Yet, vertical farming could also evolve into something more open-source, accessible, and decentralised—a practice for ordinary people in their own homes via hydroponic gardening. It could become a hobby for the balcony, kitchen, or rooftop; or a way to rebuild social bonds and provide education within community spaces.

IT Professional Turns into Balcony Gardening Expert

The Closer to the Fields, the Further from Anxiety: Young People Venturing into the Countryside

Just to Harvest Vegetables? The Joy of Urban Farming is Beyond Your Imagination

Hydroponics at Home: Bringing Spring Indoors

In this light, vertical farming sheds its mysterious technical facade and becomes a lifestyle choice: it closes the gap between people and their food, offering a new alternative for those wishing to create green spaces within the constraints of urban land.

Perhaps it is precisely this ‘low-tech’ approach to vertical farming that can best inspire us to appreciate the preciousness of the land and the hardships faced by producers—allowing us to rediscover our awe of nature and discern the true meaning of sustainability and environmentalism.

References

https://engage.farmroad.io/hubfs/2021%2520Global%2520CEA%2520Census%2520Report.pdf

https://disnovation.org/lss.php

https://www.infarm.com/news/Infarm-demonstrates-potential-of-indoor-grown-wheat

https://www.infarm.com/news/infarm-has-successfully-produced-wheat-in-an-indoor-farm-video

https://computingwithinlimits.org/2021/papers/limits21-streed.pdf

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0959652622040793

Foodthink Author

A Liang

An industrial designer passionate about the study of food.