Samuel Gilbert
At a greenhouse in Mesa, Arizona, nine-foot towers of tomatoes and cucumbers and other assorted vegetables reach skyward, bathed in diffused natural light.
“We can grow 10 times the food using 90 to 98 percent less water,” True Garden founder Troy Albright says as he walks past rows of butter lettuce, basil and softball-size fennel bulbs grown in a vertical aeroponic environment that recirculates nutrient-filled water from a reservoir to seedlings above. In one month, his farm produces almost 7 000kg of leafy greens.
“Even when it’s 46ºC outside, we can still grow food,” Albright says.
Vertical farms have emerged as a potential solution for problems as diverse as food insecurity, changing climates and urban renewal. Their economic viability, however, is in question. During the past five years, almost $4 billion of venture capital funding has poured into large energy-intensive and tech-dependent indoor vertical farms, yet many of these companies such as the Jeff Bezos-backed Plenty, have declared bankruptcy. Only a handful of vertical farming companies remain operating in the United States.
“We’re now in vertical farming 2.0,” says Nona Yehia, co-founder of Vertical Harvest, the first hydroponic vertical greenhouse in the US, based in Jackson, Wyoming, with plans to open a new farm in Maine this year.
Food deserts and urban renewal
An estimated 53 million people live in food deserts with limited access to healthy affordable food, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Precinct 2 in Houston is one of those deserts – one of the largest in Texas.
Eden Grow Systems, a company with nine employees, sold two of its vertical grow systems to two community centers in the precinct. They are part of a revitalization plan, according to Precinct 2 Commissioner Adrian Garcia, to mitigate the rising cost of fresh fruits and vegetables in Harris County.
The company’s CEO, Bart Womack, sees himself as more of an inventor and futurist than a farmer. For him, vertical farming is a way to tackle growing food system vulnerabilities by creating pockets of food security and resilience worldwide. “I’m trying to bring this technology to the public in the hopes that as we go through these chaotic times, there will be little islands where people have adapted,” says Womack, whose small vertical towers sell for $5,000 each.
In 2022, Eden Grow Systems began working with the U.S. Space Force to provide reliable high-quality produce on Ascension Island, a remote air force base located in the Atlantic Ocean. The Space Force is testing the systems to provide food in an area where shipments come only every three months. One of the foods most in demand on the island is berries.
The technology is based on research conducted by NASA during the 1980s to feed astronauts in space. “NASA discovered when you hit the roots with this 50-parts-per-million mist solution, the roots start acting like lungs,” Womack says. “The plants grow 30 percent faster than plants absorbing water through soil.”
Empty office buildings can be an option for these farms because Eden Grow Systems towers are modular and mobile and can be set up anywhere with an adequate supply of water and energy. At the end of 2024, office vacancies in the US passed 20 percent, 3.6 percent higher than five years ago, according to the Moody’s year-end report.
Houston’s famed Niels Esperson building is one of these empty structures. Womack is in the process of trying to establish an independent vertical farm in the basement, once home to a day-care center, as an entrepreneurial community. He hopes to expand to upper floors in the future. “With our kind of systems, we can roll into buildings, and without having to majorly structurally change the building or add new features to it, we can start growing,” Womack says.
Not everyone sees the promise of the empty-office-space-to-farm system: Eric Stein, executive director for the Center of Excellence for Indoor Agriculture, notes that Eden Grow Systems manufactures very small-scale production systems. He is dubious about utilizing office space on a large scale due to the high cost of rent and converting commercial real estate to meet the needs of a farm. “Commercial spaces are for people, not plants,” he says.
Conserving water while growing food
In Phoenix, 72 percent of freshwater is used for agriculture, and farmers face the worst water crisis in Arizona’s history due to a continuing megadrought that has diminished the Colorado River’s reservoir supply.
Homer Farms is looking to farm at a larger scale on a fraction of the water used in conventional farming. Co-founder Zhihao Chen built a vertical farm inside a vacant auto body shop that sits in a mixed residential and industrial neighborhood – one of 43 food deserts in Phoenix.
“Can we find a solution that is able to maintain a certain level of food production and at the same time not create a significant burden on our water supply?” Chen asks as he walks past rows of vegetables cast in a purple neon glow from the multicolored LED grow lights.
Unlike the small mobile grow towers made by Womack, Chen and Chad Geelhood are in the business of building urban farms with the capacity to provide produce at a much larger scale. The warehouse farm contains four-foot-wide racks of plants stacked 12 feet high and 56 feet long. It’s a modular design, Chen says, that can expand to much larger spaces.
“Our major focus is to set up industrial-scale operations,” Chen says.
Chen relies on revenue from farm sales to local food distributors, food service companies, restaurants, food co-ops and grants instead of venture capital. Homer Farms has received grants from the state of Arizona and the city of Phoenix.
Homer Farms is set to break ground on a second vertical farm in another food desert, in North Phoenix, a collaboration with Arizona State University, the city of Phoenix and the Saltwater River Project, a utility and power company. It will consist of four container farms producing 23,000 pounds of leafy greens annually, 20 percent of which will be provided free of charge to the community as part of the agreement with city partners. The company also collects and processes food waste from its customers, using an anaerobic digester that uses microbes to turn food waste into biogas and a nutrient-rich digestate that can be used as fertilizer.
“Let’s figure out a way to do a pilot project that could be replicated in Phoenix and countywide in other cities,” says Rosanne Albright, the environmental programs manager for food systems and brownfields redevelopment for the city of Phoenix.
Vertical farming operations can be more sustainable than traditional farming, in regards to reduced carbon emissions, water usage, pesticide use and higher water savings. However, vertical farms are energy intensive due to the use of grow lights and heating and cooling systems. A study of 12 indoor farms by the nonprofit Resource Innovation Institute found that five of them used as much energy per square foot as a hospital.
But more extensive data is hard to come by as few vertical farming companies shared information industry-wide. Stein explains that many vertical farming companies were protective of their technology and trademarks and lacked transparency about profitability. The result was that the industry failed to learn from its mistakes.
Rural areas benefit from vertical farms
On the East Coast – in Westbrook, Maine – Vertical Harvest is opening a 50 000-square-foot hydroponic vertical farm in a six-story steel-and-glass building. Residents of Maine have to manage each year with a short growing season by importing much of their food; a 2024 report found that just 3.4 percent of state spending was on local and regional food and beverage.
“The typical head of lettuce travels 2,000 miles to get to a plate,” Yehia says. “We’re farm-to-fork in 24 hours at the peak of its nutritional value.”
Yehia sees vertical farming as a vehicle for not only food security but also job creation. In the U.S., the numbers of farms and farmers continue to decline. The new location in Maine will employ a new generation of urban farmers, including historically underemployed people with developmental disabilities.
“We’re building a movement. We’re building a local food system,” Yehia says. “And so we hope that this model of what we’re building in Maine will be in cities across the United States.”
True Garden in Mesa is looking to do the same through a scalable and inexpensive farming model. The company does not rely on automation or expensive lights, using natural light instead from one of the sunniest cities in America. The towers cost $600 and can be placed in schools, community centers and abandoned office buildings.
“Cities across the U.S.A. have empty buildings that could turn into food condominiums,” Albright says. “I envision that every metropolitan city has a little urban farm like this.”
For Stein, the growth of vertical farming is not only possible but a necessity.
“I think we can’t afford not to get it to work,” Stein says. “I think building resilience and building good hubs around the urban centers is critical. We almost have to do it at some level.”
“When you collectively share data, you have benchmarks and the industry learns,” Stein says. “That lack of data sharing is impeding organizational and industry learning.”
Yet Stein says he believes vertical farms are still crucial in building food security in cities. “In areas with water scarcity, limited arable land, and extremely hot and dry weather, indoor farms have a real place,” Stein says.
