Vertical Farming: Why the Wave of Bankruptcies Before It Could Save the Planet?

In 2018, while in Berlin, I found myself utterly captivated by the vertical farming growth chambers in local supermarkets—units two or three metres high, rising to five or six tiers. They resembled standard refrigerated display cabinets, yet inside their hard, smooth glass enclosures there were no brightly coloured food wrappers, only a soft, ethereal purple glow.

Herbs of all sizes pushed through the plastic panels on each tier, standing upright and trembling slightly in the cabinet’s circulating air. Now and then, young staff members would climb a ladder, harvest the mature plants from inside, and arrange them neatly on the shelves.

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

I. “Controlled” Agriculture

During my first year at the company, I soaked up new information and knowledge like a sponge, shuttling between the production floor, workshop, laboratory and my own desk. Gradually, I came to understand what vertical farming entails and the responsibilities of an industrial designer within this ecosystem.

Vertical farming typically employs soilless cultivation, most commonly through hydroponics and aeroponics. Fertilisers, oxygen, and other essential elements for plant growth are blended into water according to precise formulations, then pumped vertically to distribute the nutrient solution across every tier of the structure.

Vertical farming facilities are broadly divided into semi-enclosed and fully enclosed systems. The former still draws natural sunlight into the growing environment, whereas the latter operates in a completely sealed, artificial space where plants rely exclusively on artificial lighting for photosynthesis, enabling precise control over every environmental parameter.

My company specialises in fully enclosed, multi-tier hydroponic growth cabinets, which represent the most technically demanding and precisely regulated category in the sector.

In traditional open-field cultivation, farmers rely on experience and intuition to cultivate crops in partnership with nature. Conversely, within fully enclosed hydroponic growth cabinets, every parameter of the growing environment is strictly quantified, with departments communicating their requirements purely through figures: plant scientists specify the exact conditions required, while engineers and designers use these metrics as a baseline to develop the supporting infrastructure—lighting, irrigation, ventilation systems, and so forth—to meet those precise specifications.

Take, for example, the crops grown inside vertical farming cabinets. They must be anchored in a substrate, which cannot float on water on its own, meaning we must design trays with appropriately sized recessed holes to hold it.

The “miracle” narrative that vertical farming can produce food without occupying land is, in reality, built upon a series of complex and cumbersome procedures.

Vertical farming companies supply retailers not only with cultivation technology and hardware, but also with the labour to operate the machinery. As such, enhancing machine usability and reducing operational labour time have become essential to cutting costs.

To drive time and labour costs at every stage to the absolute minimum, even seemingly simple end-stage tasks for maintaining supermarket hydroponic cabinets—such as harvesting leafy greens, packaging produce, maintaining and cleaning shelves, recording crop health, sanitising grow cabinets, and transplanting seedlings—must all be performed strictly according to the manuals and guidelines provided by the vertical farming firms.

This guide was drafted and refined through the designers’ repeated tracking of the ‘farmers’ (the personnel tasked with operating and maintaining the hydroponic cabinets, industry shorthand for ‘farmer’) during countless hands-on sessions.

Our logs of the farmers are used to analyse the time spent on each step, right down to the minute. Drawing on these observations, we optimise the hardware layout and design within the grow cabinets, introduce auxiliary tools to support operational workflows, adjust the sequence of steps across different procedures, and enhance the usability of every human-machine interface. The aim is to minimise the manual maintenance required for the grow cabinets as much as possible.

Doesn’t this sound rather like the white-collar supervisors David Graeber describes in *Bullshit Jobs*, tasked with tracking workers to measure performance?

Instead of clipboards and spreadsheets, we carried GoPros. We shadowed the staff operating the growth cabinets, recording every step, movement, and misstep in their work without interference.

III. Why Vertical Farming Cannot Solve the Global Food Crisis?

A familiar refrain in the industry goes like this: with global populations swelling and climate change accelerating, arable land is steadily shrinking, and the outlines of a wider food crisis are already emerging. Consequently, developing vertical farms with fully controlled internal environments may well become a top priority for safeguarding food security.

Yet, whenever vertical farming is put forward as a potential solution to future food crises, it inevitably confronts an awkward reality: the range of crops suited to these systems is actually very limited.

To begin with, large-scale production machinery struggles to cater to the differing needs of various plant varieties.

The rack heights in growth cabinets are typically set to the mid-range for commonly cultivated crops, automatically ruling out varieties that grow significantly taller or shorter. Within these large units, it is also difficult to precisely adjust growth parameters for specific zones, meaning small-batch orders for specialist varieties often become an operational headache.

Beyond planting and harvesting, post-production handling is another stage that carries significant labour costs. Because different crops require distinct processing, sorting, and packaging methods, reducing the variety of crops grown is often the most straightforward way to streamline manual workflows.

Most importantly, commercial vertical farming companies currently only turn a profit from salad leaves, herbs, or high-moisture produce such as tomatoes, cucumbers, and peppers. These crops consume less energy, require less space, have shorter growing cycles, present fewer technical challenges, and carry higher market value; meanwhile, cultivating staple crops rich in protein, carbohydrates, or fats remains financially unviable.

Last year, however, German vertical farming startup infarm announced experimental results at the COP27 summit in Egypt, demonstrating successful wheat cultivation in their vertical facilities.

The company’s founder remarked in a public statement: “The initial trial results were highly promising, projecting an annual yield of 11.7 kg per square metre (equivalent to 7,800 kg per mu). If scaled up, this would amount to 117 tonnes per hectare annually—twenty-six times the yield of traditional open-field farming.”

infarm has not disclosed the energy consumption data from its trials. However, calculations by the public art initiative DISNOVATION.ORG estimate that the “true cost” of cultivating one square metre of wheat in a sealed environment—factoring in energy use and external nutrients—reaches €200 per kilogram (approximately ¥1,547 RMB). This is more than a thousand times the prevailing market price for wheat in Europe at the time.

Relying on such a costly and energy-intensive method to ensure food security is clearly neither economical nor rational.

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

In the promotional rhetoric surrounding vertical farming, “sustainability” is another highly touted claim.

Vertical farming advocates argue that installing hydroponic growing cabinets can slash food miles and help champion locally sourced produce. Yet, the coriander, mint, and sage locked inside these glass enclosures may stretch the definition of “local”, but they remain entirely divorced from the area’s natural environment, climate, producers, and wider food networks.

Vertical farming also touts its water-saving credentials, yet willfully ignores the inherently energy-intensive nature of the technology. The current, insurmountable bottleneck for the sector lies in its reliance on vast amounts of power to run the artificial LED lighting within the systems.

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

Not only is reliance on fossil fuels environmentally damaging, but energy losses occur at every stage of the conversion process during power generation. Consequently, indoor lighting is drastically less energy-efficient than using sunlight directly. Take relatively low-energy crops like leafy greens, for instance: conventional greenhouses use just 5.4 kWh per kilogram, while vertical farming demands up to 38.8 kWh per kilogram produced.

I also frequently hear colleagues argue that the ultimate aim of vertical farming is to concentrate agricultural production into a smaller footprint, thereby returning swathes of land previously used for farming back to the wild. After all, no matter how much traditional field agriculture is optimised, the biodiversity it supports can never rival that of a natural ecosystem.

However, given the inherently energy-intensive nature of vertical farming, calculating its true land footprint and resource consumption cannot focus solely on the growing facilities themselves; the infrastructure that powers them must also be factored in. Consequently, vertical farming companies that appear environmentally friendly and utilise renewable energy are, in effect, indirectly claiming the vast tracts of land required for the solar and wind energy infrastructure that supplies their power.

At present, aside from low-energy leafy greens such as lettuce, the land area supposedly “saved” by growing other crops via vertical farming is insufficient to offset the land occupied by the power generation infrastructure.

Furthermore, existing data typically focuses only on the energy consumption of the vertical farming process itself, omitting the energy required to manufacture the supporting infrastructure, such as metal frameworks, artificial lighting, and sensors. These components also degrade with use and, once their lifespan expires, end up as industrial or electronic waste.

All of this clearly runs counter to the eco-friendly narrative that vertical farming aims to project.

Five: Final Thoughts

During the war in Ukraine, the limitations of vertical farming were laid bare by the cascading effects of the energy crisis, dealing a severe blow to the entire sector.

Last November, US robotic vertical farming company Fifth Season ceased operations; almost simultaneously, German firm infarm announced it would lay off more than half its workforce; French container farming company Agricool went bankrupt in January this year; and industry leader AeroFarms filed for bankruptcy protection in June… This technology-centred “miracle” has undoubtedly fallen off its pedestal.

Against the backdrop of a growing global population and accelerating climate change, creating vertical farming systems with fully controlled internal environments may indeed emerge as one viable option for addressing the food crisis. However, in today’s profit-driven landscape, numerous tech startups, keen to meet investor expectations, have found themselves trapped in a vicious cycle of aggressive expansion and chronic overspending.

Yet, vertical farming could also be championed as a more open-source, accessible, and decentralised approach that everyday people can practise at home, primarily through hydroponic vegetables. It can flourish as a gardening hobby on domestic balconies, in kitchens, and on rooftops; it can also be integrated into community shared spaces to rebuild social connections and provide educational value.

IT professional transforms into a balcony gardening expert

Closer to the fields, further from anxiety: young people venturing into rural life

Just to harvest vegetables? The joys of urban farming may surprise you

Soaking vegetable ends in water: bringing spring indoors without leaving home

In this context, vertical farming has shed its cloak of mysterious technology to become an everyday reality: it brings people and their food closer together, offering a fresh option for those keen to carve out green spaces within the constraints of urban land scarcity.

It may well be precisely this “low-tech” approach to vertical farming that best reminds us of the value of the soil and the rigours of food production, renewing our reverence for the natural world and helping us discern the true meaning of environmental stewardship and sustainability.

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 Contributor

A Liang

Industrial designer with a passion for exploring food.