Less Tech Theater, More Farming: Why Vertical Ag Needed a Faceplant

How a parade of overpriced lettuce factories gave vertical farming a bad name, and why smarter, leaner models can finally set it right

Vertical farming is not dead but the business model many have followed? That model absolutely should be. The term 'vertical farming' has picked up so much baggage that I’ll twist myself into knots to avoid using it because every time one of the big guys like Plenty or AeroFarms crashes and burns, people assume that’s what vertical farming is. It’s really important to understand that these collapses didn’t occur because of vertical farming, they transpired because of a bad business model. The term 'vertical farming' got hijacked by hype, and now it’s carrying the weight of other people’s mistakes.

The news of Plenty's bankruptcy might read like a cautionary tale of failure. In reality, it's an opportunity for a hard reset—one the industry desperately needs. It proves what many of us have warned about for years: vertical farming isn’t a technology company disguised as a farm, it’s a farm that happens to use technology to grow food.

The collapse of Plenty wasn't an isolated event. It follows a pattern of venture-backed startups over-engineering solutions to basic agricultural challenges, burning through billions in the process. AeroFarms, Bowery, Infarm, etc. are all variations of the same script: raise enormous rounds, focus on proprietary tech and prioritize investor optics over sustainable operations. The result? High burn, low margins, and very few leafy greens worth writing home about.

The Real Opportunity: Food Security, Not Valuation Hype

Today, we need vertical farming more than ever. Supply chains are brittle—COVID didn't just reveal the cracks, it blew the whole thing wide open. It's a Rube Goldberg machine of logistical excess wrapped in centuries of incremental supply chain bloat. In it’s present form, it results in absurdities like a spear of asparagus traveling 10,000 km from a desert in Peru, through Dutch warehouses, only to land on a plate in Berlin; yes this is a real example. Like any over-engineered machine, the more layers you add, the more chances it has to fall apart. Every new node, every added checkpoint, is another opportunity for delay, error, or failure and each one comes with a cost.

Water resources are tightening. California, once the breadbasket of America, has seen year after year of historic drought, forcing the state to fallow hundreds of thousands of acres of farmland. Climate instability isn’t slowing down, and it's not just about temperature; it’s about the increasing volatility in rainfall, growing seasons, and extreme weather events that compound existing supply chain issues and agricultural fragility.

The more globalized our food network becomes, the more brittle it gets. That’s why onshoring food production isn’t just a smart idea, it’s a strategic imperative. But what we don’t need are more lettuce factories with sexy branding and unprofitable operations dressed up in neon. We need smart, regionalized production systems that actually solve the problem of food security. The failure of these lettuce kingdoms to make a buck needs to warn others off from mimicking this incarnation of vertical farming.

Iraq, for example, is only just beginning to embrace vertical farming but instead of learning from the failures from the likes of Plenty and AeroFarms, many of these new initiatives appear to be repeating the same mistakes. This flawed business model, centered on overengineered tech, inflated promises, and a race for investor capital instead of operational sustainability, are still being exported abroad under the banner of food security. It's a dangerous game of innovation cosplay. If the model doesn’t grow up, we're not scaling a solution, just increasing the scale of future failures.

Food security isn't about growing trendy microgreens or offering pesticide-free basil to upper-middle-class consumers. It's about building decentralized, climate-resilient infrastructure that can feed cities under pressure, sustainably; and yes, "sustainably" doesn’t just mean green, It must also mean profitable. If a farm isn’t profitable, it won’t sustain anyone. It's about closing the loop between grower and buyer, minimizing transportation waste, and delivering nutrient-dense food, imagine that, where it's needed most.

The Cult of IP and the Rise of the "Investrepreneur"

Over the last decade, vertical farming was hijacked by Silicon Valley logic. In pitch decks and TED Talks, farms turned into IP platforms, lights into proprietary ecosystems, and hydroponic trays into "data-rich growth environments." The goal wasn’t to grow food it was to grow valuations. If you had patents and automation, you had investors lining up; Not because you were feeding anyone, but because you looked like the next Nvidia of lettuce.

If you've never built a new company from the ground up and scraped together payroll while building something from nothing, you might not realize how tempting venture capital becomes. When you’re in the grind and a room full of investors dangles money in exchange for bending your model to fit their expectations, most founders bend. Eventually, this bending evolves and turns many vertical farms into tech companies on paper.

To be clear, I’m not placing blame on venture capital or the farm. Capital seeks opportunities but requires them to fit within a specific risk profile, while the farm simply needs the funding to operate. This is the life of start-ups, but the confluence of needs over the last few years has had unintended consequences.

Capital arrived and came wrapped with layers of focus on tech development, proprietary systems, and endless engineering that promised to reduce risk but delivered bloated, rigid operations. Systems became complex, costly, and incapable of growing much beyond what was originally designed. There was no room to pivot, and no margin for error.

Meanwhile, the money kept flowing. Over $4 billion between 2015 and 2022. Plenty raised $400 million in a single round, AeroFarms pulled in over $238 million, and the capital surge bankrolled operations, not sustainability. The story sounded good: data-rich farms, scalable production, IP moats, but under the hood? It was mostly red ink.

Welcome to the creation of a new actor to our play, the investrepreneur. Operators adapted to be fluent in pitch theater, not super focused on plant science or farming. They mastered the optics: open flashy new facilities, post filtered photos of glowing greens, and sell scale. Just don’t mention the balance sheet. These weren’t profitable farms. They were expensive illusions.

Food isn’t tech. There’s no user base to monetize later. Raising prices just raises the cost of dinner, and consumers feel it. They should. This isn’t a lifestyle brand it’s sustenance.

Yet the expansion continued, feeding the illusion. Each new round of capital didn’t fund innovation, it plugged holes. Eventually, the whole thing blurred the line between start-up and Ponzi scheme. Show me the incentives, and I’ll show you the outcome. The past five years prove it: the incentives were hype over harvest, scale over substance, valuation over viability; its what the world got.

Back to the Basics: What Actually Works

The good news? There's a better way. A more honest, grounded path forward for those who choose to take it. The beauty of large scale failures is that they can serve as industry wide inflection points to drive change.

We’ve seen what doesn’t work, now we all have a chance to build something that does. If we learn from the wreckage, not ignore it, we can come out on the other side with vertical farms that are smarter, more resilient, and actually sustainable in a real sense of the word: rooted in profitability, regional food security, and operational discipline.

Here’s where I usually tell operators to cut through the noise and focus on what actually works:

First, treat profit like light—non-negotiable and essential. Vertical farms must be built on business fundamentals that prioritize consistent, repeatable profitability. No amount of branding, AI, or Series D financing will save a model that can’t operate in the black.

This means streamlining operations, not just for efficiency, but for flexibility. Markets change, inputs shift, consumer behavior evolves. The farms that survive won’t be the most automated, they’ll be the most adaptable. Flexibility beats optimization in a world where assumptions break quickly. The ability to adjust course without burning your margins is what separates real farms from PowerPoint farms.

Second, diversification matters. Leafy greens are easy to grow but hard to profit from because the margins can be thin and the market is typically saturated. Smart operators are exploring higher margin crops, culinary herbs, berries, nutraceutical plants, mushrooms, even medicinal botanicals. These aren’t gimmicks. They’re opportunities to meet real demand with better economics. Sure, this kind of operational innovation is tough but it's table stakes now.

Commodity markets are fickle. Given enough time, every crop's pricing will collapse or swing wildly, that’s just how the game is played. The farms that survive will be the ones built to bend without breaking. They’ll maintain profitability by streamlining operations, staying lean, and building the flexibility to pivot when the market shifts. Diversity of output isn’t a nice-to-have it’s the hedge that keeps you alive when the bottom drops out. Build for adaptability, not just efficiency. That’s the playbook going forward.

Third, Technology should support the farm, not dictate it. The focus needs to shift away from over-complicated automation systems with a million fail points that require a PhD to operate. Farms shouldn’t be tech showcases for investors, they should be as simple as possible with streamlined operations built to grow what people actually eat. Farms that let the margins do the talking. Vertical farming, when done right, offers huge advantages but when the tech takes center stage, those benefits cancel out.

If your automation suite requires a small army of engineers to run, or your margins are buried under maintenance contracts and software licenses, congratulations you’ve built an expensive science project, not a farm. Keep the tech that fits, ditch the rest. Use tools that work for your operation, not against it. The goal should not be to impress investors with complexity, it’s to run a farm that makes money.

Let the Dust Settle, Then Build Smarter

Plenty’s bankruptcy is painful, but it’s also clarifying. The vertical farming industry has now been handed a mirror and what it reflects is an uncomfortable but necessary truth.

Let me say this as clearly as possible: capital follows profit, not potential, not press releases. If you're out there trying to raise money for your vertical farm and you don’t have a credible plan to generate consistent income—or worse, you're parroting the same model that crashed Plenty and Aerofarms—you’re already behind.

Investors have finally seen the movie, and they know how it ends. So if farms are serious about investment and financing, be ready to be asked about Plenty, Aerofarms, Bowery and the rest of these large CEA farms and why you are different. The appetite and the need for vertical farming isn't gone but the tolerance for BS is.

The future of vertical farming isn’t in chasing billion-dollar valuations, although I do think that will be coming in the future, it’s in building farms that solve real-world problems under real-market conditions. The next generation of leaders in this space won’t be the loudest, flashiest founders. They’ll be the quiet ones. The growers who understand crop cycles, manage input costs, listen to their customers, and design systems that work simply.

This moment, however frustrating, is a gift. It offers the clearest opportunity to the industry in over a decade to stop performing and to start building real things. Something sustainable in the truest sense: economically viable, operationally sound, and regionally relevant. The world doesn’t need more hype. It needs systems that feed people and balance their books while doing it.

The good news? We know what doesn't work. We’ve lived it. Plenty’s collapse, and others like it, are painful but necessary catalysts. If the industry has the courage to face its failures honestly, we can rebuild a version of vertical farming that is stronger, smarter, and far more relevant than what came before. Let the rest of the world chase unicorns—we’ll be chasing harvests.

In other words: less tech theater. More farming.

The time for hype is over. The reset has begun.