The Center of Excellence for Indoor Agriculture’s Executive Director, Dr. Eric W. Stein, recently moderated a panel at Indoor Ag-Con in Las Vegas, NV on March 11, 2025. Here are the highlights of that session.
Panel Members
- Eric W. Stein, Ph.D., Executive Director of the Center of Excellence for Indoor Agriculture and Associate Professor of Business at Penn State
- Dane Almassy, SVP Sales & Marketing, AeroFarms
- Laura Van De Kreeke, Farmer, Growy
- Tyler Baras, Chief Science Officer & Founder, Area 2 Farms
Overview
Vertical farming has faced its share of challenges, from scaling inefficiencies to economic hurdles. Yet, these struggles offer valuable insights for building a more sustainable and impactful future. This panel brought together industry leaders, innovators, and visionaries to explore how the lessons learned from past mistakes can guide vertical farming toward a brighter horizon. We discussed what worked, what didn’t, and how the industry can pivot to unlock new opportunities for profitability, scalability, and food security.
Highlights
Following introductions, Dr. Stein framed the state of the industry and the key issues for the panel. He began by examining the status of the top nine vertical farm companies by venture capital investment and reported revenues as of March 2023. The total estimated investment in the top vertical farming companies was approximately $3.8 BB at that time according to Stein. See Figure 1.
Figure 1: Status of Top Vertical Farm Companies March 2023
Credit: Image courtesy of Dr. Eric W. Stein. Copyright 2025. All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
Note: These data were compiled by Dr. Eric Stein using specialized financial databases including Mergent Intellect, Crunchbase and CB Insights.
The next slide provided an update on the status of each of the top nine vertical farms in terms of whether they had experienced plant closings, bankruptcy reorganization or were out of business by March 2025. Seven of the nine were either under reorganization or were out of business just two years later according to public news sources. See Figure 2.
Figure 2: Status of Top Vertical Farm Companies March 2025
Credit: Image courtesy of Dr. Eric W. Stein. Copyright 2025 All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
These data set the stage for the focus of the panel: what went wrong and what did the industry get right? The discussion was organized according to seven key critical success areas as indicated in Figure 3.
Figure 3: Critical Success Areas for Indoor Farm Companies
Credit: Image courtesy of Dr. Eric W. Stein. Copyright 2025. All rights Reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
Lessons Learned
- Business Model: Make sure you get the business right right from the start. Know who are your target customers and what your value proposition is.
- Profitability: It is important to control costs at both the unit level as well as general & administrative (GS&A) overhead costs. Know your price points for each customer channel.
- Technology: Don’t overspend on technology to the exclusion of branding, sales, marketing, and core business capabilities. Watch capital costs.
- Operations: Operations need to benefit from facility and production design. Training is essential. Develop key metrics and KPI’s to ensure success.
- Scaling: Start small and learn from your mistakes.
- Capital Access: Capital markets have become wary of indoor farm investments for several reasons. VC’s had unrealistic expectations of ROI from the start. History has demonstrated that indoor farms are governed by the economics of farms not technology companies; i.e., these are not tech plays. Bad design, lack of transparency, complex technology, high capital costs and mis-management also contributed to the current state. The lesson here is to scale slowly, learn as quickly as possible and grow the company organically.
- Knowledge Gaps: Make sure that farmers play a key role in the company. Too many indoor farms are run by people with no farm experience. Leadership training is critical.
The final lesson learned is to invest in the organization so that it attracts, and retains, quality people. Make it a great place to work.
