Upward Farms Throws in Towel Ten Years After Founding Vertical-Farming Business
28th April 2023
The company started out in 2013 as Edenworks before transitioning to Seed & Roe and then Upward Farms. Employing aquaponics technology to cultivate microgreens such as kale and mustard, the controlled-environment agriculture business was supplying Whole Foods Market in the New York City area.
Getting off the ground with a farm in Brooklyn, in 2020 Upward Farms revealed a new growing facility in the same borough. At the time, the company said it had just received $15m in fresh funding, including from Wyoming-based venture-capital investor Prime Movers Lab, taking financing to $20m.
“It is with a heavy heart that we are announcing that Upward Farms is closing its Brooklyn headquarters farm and will cease to operate in the vertical-farming sector,” founders Jason Green, Ben Silverman and Matthew La Rosa wrote on the opening page of their website.
“We found that vertical farming is almost infinitely complex – as we tackled challenges, new ones emerged.”
As with most groovy-granola save-the-climate schemes, vertical farming just isn’t sufficiently cost-effective yet. I believe that it will be, eventually, when the technology advances far enough; even steam engines had to wait for the practical end of things to catch up.