Vertical Farming: Why Are They All Going Bust Before Saving the Planet?

Back in 2018 in Berlin, I was utterly captivated by the vertical farming growth cabinets in local supermarkets — two or three metres tall, with five or six tiers each. They resembled supermarket chill cabinets, yet behind their hard, smooth glass walls there were no flashy food packets, only an eerie purple glow.

Herbs of every size poked their heads out from between the plastic panels on each shelf, standing ramrod straight in the circulating air, trembling in a faint rustle. Occasionally, a young person who looked like a staff member would climb the ladder rack, pluck the ripe plants from inside the cabinet and arrange them neatly on the shelves.

Out of plain curiosity, I began an internship at a vertical farming company.

1. “Controllable” Agriculture

During my first year, I soaked up new information and knowledge like a sponge, shuttling between the production floor, the workshop, the laboratory and my own desk, gradually coming to understand what vertical farming actually is and what an industrial designer’s role looks like within the system.

Vertical farming generally uses soilless cultivation. The two most common methods are hydroponics and aeroponics: fertilisers, oxygen and other elements essential to plant growth are injected into water according to a specified formula, and pumps then drive the nutrient solution vertically to each tier of the structure.

Vertical farming facilities come in semi-enclosed and fully enclosed varieties. The former still introduces natural sunlight into the growing environment; the latter operates in a completely sealed, non-natural space where plants carry out photosynthesis using artificial light alone, enabling precise control over every parameter of the growing environment.

The company I worked for specialised in fully enclosed, multi-tier hydroponic growth cabinets — the most technically demanding and tightly regulated type.

In traditional open-field farming, farmers rely on experience and intuition, working alongside nature to nurture their crops. In a fully enclosed hydroponic growth cabinet, however, every parameter of the growing environment is entirely quantified, and each department communicates its needs to the others purely through numbers: plant scientists specify the exact parameters they require, and engineers and designers use those as benchmarks to design lighting units, irrigation systems, ventilation systems and other hardware that meet the specifications.

For example, crops in a vertical farming growth cabinet must be embedded in a substrate. Since the substrate cannot float on the water’s surface on its own, we need to design trays and recessed holes of the right size to hold it.

The “miracle” narrative of vertical farming — producing food without occupying any land at all — is in fact built on a chain of complex and fiddly processes.

A vertical farming company supplies retailers not only with growing technology and hardware but also with the manual labour to operate the machines. So improving ease of use and cutting down the time staff spend on each task became the key to reducing costs.

To squeeze the time and labour costs of every stage to a minimum, even seemingly simple end-of-line tasks involved in maintaining a supermarket hydroponic cabinet — harvesting leafy greens, packaging, maintaining and cleaning shelves, recording the health status of the harvest, cleaning the growth cabinets, transplanting seedlings — had to be carried out according to operation manuals provided by the vertical farming company.

The writing and refinement of these manuals drew on the designers’ countless hours shadowing the “farmers” (the staff who operate and maintain the hydroponic cabinets) as they went through each task.

Our recordings of each “farmer” were used to analyse the time spent on every step, down to the minute. Based on those observations and analyses, we optimised the layout and design of hardware inside the growth cabinets, added support tools needed during the workflow, reordered steps between different procedures, and improved the usability of every human–machine interface, cutting the manual maintenance time required by the cabinets as far as possible.

Doesn’t that sound a lot like the white-collar workers David Graeber describes in Bullshit Jobs, monitoring and appraising employees’ performance?

Except instead of notebooks and forms, we carried GoPros, following the staff who operated the growth cabinets like shadows, recording every step, every movement and every slip without any interference.

3. Why Can’t Vertical Farming Solve the Global Food Crisis?

A line you hear often in the industry goes something like this: with the global population growing and climate change accelerating, arable land is dwindling, and a food crisis on a wider scale is already faintly visible on the horizon. A vertically farmed environment with perfectly controlled internal conditions might therefore become a priority option for ensuring food security.

Yet every time vertical farming is floated as a potential answer to future food crises, it has to confront an awkward reality: the range of crops actually suited to a vertical farming system is extremely limited.

First, large-scale production machinery can hardly accommodate the needs of every crop variety.

The shelf height of a vertical farming growth cabinet is typically set at the median for commonly grown crops, so anything taller or shorter than that growing range is excluded. In a large growth cabinet it is also very difficult to fine-tune growing parameters for specific unit zones, making small-batch orders of unusual varieties a genuine hot potato.

Beyond planting and harvesting, post-production is another step with high labour costs. Different produce requires different handling, sorting and packaging methods, so reducing the range of crops is often the simplest and most direct way to streamline manual workflows.

Most importantly, commercial vertical farming companies can currently profit only from salad greens, herbs, or high-water-content produce such as tomatoes, cucumbers and peppers — crops that use less energy, need less space, have shorter growing cycles, pose fewer technical challenges and command higher market value — while staple crops rich in protein, carbohydrates or fat remain unprofitable to grow.

Last year, the German vertical farming start-up infarm did announce the results of its experiment successfully growing wheat inside its vertical farming facilities at the COP27 summit in Egypt.

In a public statement the company’s founder said: “The first round of trials delivered outstanding results, with an estimated annual yield of 11.7 kilograms per square metre (equivalent to 7,800 kilograms per mu). Scaled up, that would amount to 117 tonnes per hectare per year — twenty-six times the yield of open-field cultivation.”

infarm did not publish the energy consumption figures from its experiment. But according to estimates by the public art project DISNOVATION.ORG, growing one square metre of wheat in a closed environment carries a “real cost estimate” — including energy consumption and external nutrient inputs — of €200 per kilogram of wheat (roughly RMB 1,547), more than a thousand times the then-prevailing European wheat market price.

Using such a high-cost, high-energy method to safeguard food security is plainly neither economical nor rational.

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

In vertical farming’s marketing discourse, “sustainability” is another eye-catching label.

Vertical farming claims that installing hydroponic growth cabinets can reduce food miles and help promote local food. Regrettably, the coriander, mint and sage plants locked behind glass cabinets, while barely qualifying as local, are entirely disconnected from the surrounding natural environment, climate, producers and food networks.

Vertical farming also claims to conserve water, yet turns a blind eye to the inherently energy-hungry nature of its systems: the bottleneck that vertical farming has so far been unable to overcome is the enormous energy required to power the LED artificial lighting within its systems.

A 2021 industry survey found that 64% of 336 controlled-environment agriculture companies used no green or renewable energy whatsoever.

Burning fossil fuels is not only environmentally damaging; energy is also lost at every stage of conversion during electricity generation, making the energy efficiency of indoor lighting vanishingly low compared to sunlight. Taking leafy greens — among the least energy-intensive crops — as an example, a conventional greenhouse uses just 5.4 kWh per kilogram, whereas vertical farming consumes as much as 38.8 kWh per kilogram of produce.

I also often hear colleagues say that the ultimate goal of vertical farming is to squeeze agriculture into a narrower footprint and return the vast tracts of land currently taken up by farming to the natural world, because no matter how agriculture is improved, the biodiversity it supports can never rival that of nature itself.

But given the inherently energy-intensive nature of vertical farming, calculating its true land footprint and resource consumption cannot be confined to the factory itself — the infrastructure that generates its electricity must also be taken into account. So a vertical farming company that appears eco-friendly and powered by renewable energy is, in practice, occupying the vast tracts of land needed for its solar energy and wind generation facilities.

As things stand, apart from low-energy leafy greens such as lettuce, the land area “saved” by growing other crops through vertical farming does not come close to offsetting the land occupied by the power infrastructure that feeds it electricity.

Moreover, existing data tend to cover only the energy consumed in the production process itself, excluding the energy required to manufacture infrastructure such as metal frames, artificial lighting and sensors. These components also wear in use, and once past their service life they become industrial or electronic waste.

All of which plainly runs counter to the environmentally friendly narrative that vertical farming seeks to project.

5. Afterthoughts

During the Russia–Ukraine war, the shortcomings of vertical farming were laid bare by the cascading effects of the energy crisis, and the entire industry took a severe hit.

The US robotic vertical farming company Fifth Season shut down last November; almost simultaneously, Germany’s infarm announced it was cutting more than half its staff; France-based container-farming company Agricool filed for bankruptcy this January; and industry leader AeroFarms filed for bankruptcy protection this June… This techno-centric “miracle” has undoubtedly been toppled from its pedestal.

Against the backdrop of global population growth and accelerating climate change, a vertical farming environment with perfectly controlled internal conditions may indeed become one of the options for addressing a food crisis. Yet in today’s capital-driven landscape, countless start-up tech companies, desperate to meet investors’ expectations, can only spiral into a death loop of massive expansion and mounting losses they cannot cover.

And yet, vertical farming can also flourish in a more open-source, more accessible, more decentralised form that ordinary people can practise at home — growing hydroponic vegetables. It can serve as a gardening hobby, sprouting on balconies, in kitchens and on rooftops; it can also rebuild connections between people and serve an educational purpose in the shared spaces of a community.

IT Geek Transforms into a Balcony Gardening Expert

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

Just Here for the Harvest? The Joy of Urban Farming You Might Never Imagine

Veggie Bases in Water: Spring Without Leaving Home

In this form, vertical farming no longer hides behind a mysterious veneer of technology; it becomes a slice of everyday life. It closes the distance between people and their food, and within the limited land available in cities, it offers a new option for anyone who wants to create a patch of green.

Perhaps it is precisely this “low-tech” form of vertical farming that best enables us to feel the preciousness of the land and the hardship of those who work it, to rediscover a sense of awe before the natural world, and to discern the true meaning of sustainability and environmental stewardship.

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 with a passion for delving into food.