What Vertical Farming Got Wrong — and What Comes Next

For years, vertical farming has been framed as a breakthrough: climate-proof, efficient, local, and endlessly scalable. And to a point, that optimism was justified. Controlled-environment agriculture has delivered consistent crops in places where traditional agriculture struggles. It has shown what’s possible when growing conditions can be engineered rather than left to weather patterns and seasons.

But before diving in, it’s worth clarifying what we mean by vertical farming. It’s easy to picture the iconic examples: vast multi-storey mega farms lit by thousands of LEDs. In reality, vertical farming is a much broader ecosystem. It includes A-frame systems inside greenhouses, stacked benches in small hybrid farms, modular container farms, research facilities, and simple tiered hydroponic setups used by growers who are far from industrial scale. Any system that grows plants in vertically organised or layered space — whether in a greenhouse, warehouse, or anything between — sits inside this definition.

And the challenges explored in this blog affect all of those systems, not just the highly engineered ones.

As the industry has matured, many early assumptions have proven incomplete. Certain technologies were not as sustainable as first imagined, and some business models didn’t reflect the realities of agriculture over multiple years. The idea of vertical farming was strong — but many of its foundational decisions were not.

This blog explores what vertical farming misunderstood, and how the sector can evolve into something more resilient, flexible, and genuinely sustainable.

The Early Promise Didn’t Match the Practical Reality

The first wave of vertical farms optimised for speed and control: precision lighting, nutrient-rich hydroponics, finely tuned climates, and rapid plant turnover. The ambition was to grow anything, anywhere, at any time.

But this vision quietly depended on an overlooked part of the system: the substrate beneath each plant.

Hydroponic substrates — peat, coir, rockwool, phenolic foams — were treated like a simple input. Cheap, familiar, and designed for one-time use. Over time, these materials created a pattern of unnecessary waste, rising disposal and transport costs, supply-chain fragility, and limits on the types of crops that farms could grow. They shaped the entire system more rigidly than many realised.

A System Built on Disposable Materials Cannot Be Truly Sustainable

Vertical farming promised a cleaner agricultural model, yet most farms have relied heavily on single-use substrates that travel across the world before being discarded. This undermines both environmental goals and long-term economics.

As substrate prices rose and supply chains fluctuated, many farms found themselves tied to inputs they could not replace or re-engineer easily. Their equipment, workflows, and crop choices were dictated by disposable materials rather than by agronomic potential.

The core idea of indoor farming wasn’t the issue — the fragility of the inputs was.

Crop Diversity Was Treated as Optional, Not Fundamental

Early vertical farms built their systems around fast, shallow-rooted crops: lettuce, basil, micro-greens. These species made sense for early commercialisation, but the choice locked farms into narrow technical constraints. Tray spacing, irrigation hardware, root-zone geometries, and substrate formats all became optimised for plants that grow small and soft.

As markets evolved and growers sought to expand into strawberries, herbs with stronger stems, fruiting crops, tree propagation, or medicinal species, many farms discovered their systems couldn’t adapt.

Crop diversity isn’t a bonus — it’s essential for resilience and long-term viability.

Energy Use Was Treated as a Challenge to “Fix Later”

Lighting, climate control, pumps, and environmental conditioning form a complex, interdependent energy system. Many farms underestimated how sensitive their economic models were to changes in electricity pricing.

The farms performing well today are those that treated energy as a design constraint from the start — using modular layouts, efficient irrigation strategies, hybrid greenhouse models, or lower-intensity systems that avoid energy traps.

Energy challenges aren’t going away, but smarter system design makes them manageable.

A More Resilient Future: Reusable, Circular, and Crop-Diverse

The next phase of vertical farming will not be defined by futuristic architecture or headline-grabbing facilities. It will be shaped by quieter, more fundamental changes to materials, system flexibility, and operational design.

Reusable propagation systems are becoming central to that shift. They cut waste dramatically, reduce operating costs, stabilise supply chains, and allow farms to adapt to new crops without redesigning entire systems. They also unlock circularity — something the early era of CEA largely lacked.

At GyroPlant, we’ve seen this evolution across the growers we work with. Their questions are no longer about hype or futuristic promises. They’re about practicality:

How do we reduce waste? How do we make our systems more adaptable?How do we avoid being tied to imported substrates?How do we build systems that still work in five years?

These are the questions driving real innovation in CEA today.

Reusability Is Not Just a Sustainability Story — It’s an Economics Story

Replacing disposable substrates with durable, washable components creates immediate and compounding gains. Farms reduce their operational expenditure, simplify logistics, eliminate thousands of kilos of waste, and achieve greater consistency from cycle to cycle. They also become more automation-ready, because reusable components have predictable geometry and behaviour.

Circular systems don’t just reduce environmental impact — they make farms more financially stable.

Automation: Not a Binary Decision, but a Practical Balance

Automation is often presented as an all-or-nothing proposition: either a farm is fully automated, or it isn’t automated at all. In reality, farming has always adopted automation gradually and selectively. Most successful operations don’t aim to remove labour entirely; instead, they focus on removing the tasks that are repetitive, ergonomically difficult, or prone to inconsistency.

Reusable components with consistent geometry give farms the option to automate where it adds value, not everywhere at once. The future of CEA will be defined by this balanced approach — one that combines human expertise with targeted automation rather than choosing one extreme or the other.

A More Realistic, More Adaptable Model for Vertical Farming

Vertical farming is moving into a more mature phase, characterised by grounded expectations and better system design. The future will emphasise durable materials, broader crop capability, circular processes, and operational flexibility — not just technological spectacle.

It will belong to systems built for longevity, not disposability.

Conclusion:

The opportunity ahead is enormous — not because vertical farming was perfect, but because now we can finally redesign it properly. That redesign is already underway, and we’re proud to be working alongside growers who are putting these principles into practice and building systems that truly thrive.