Growing Pains for Indoor Agriculture
A row of Basil growing at the Eden Green facility in Cleburne, Texas.
Excerpt from the IFT article below. Click here to read the full article.
If Jonathan Webb, founder of failed indoor growing operation AppHarvest, is the sad face of controlled environment agriculture (CEA), Eddy Badrina, CEO of Eden Green Technology, may be a hopeful new poster child of an industry that’s still trying to find its way.
AppHarvest was supposed to revolutionize CEA after raising $800 million and opening a sprawling greenhouse in Morehead, Ky., in 2020. But three years later, ignominiously, AppHarvest declared bankruptcy.
Key Takeaways
Numerous early entrants in the controlled environment agriculture category have gone bankrupt and/or ceased operation.
Lack of capital, high interest rates, and operational inefficiencies are among the factors contributing to company failures.
New lighting options and tech-enabled growing strategies may help companies flourish.
Badrina’s approach with Eden Green is to go up rather than out in a space- and energy-saving, vertical farming model that focuses not just on lettuce and spinach but on higher-profit herbs. Eden Green has broken ground on a $40 million expansion project near Dallas. “In five years, we plan to have 20 of these facilities up and running, in multiple states,” Badrina says.
Welcome to the era of awkward adolescence for CEA, a time when an industry with plenty of promise confronts the mistakes it already has made, and looks for ways to avoid future debacles on the way to fulfilling its purported destiny as a major bulwark against climate change and global hunger.
“The bubble has burst because of hyped-up companies that took advantage of technology and oversold it,” says Henry Gordon-Smith, founder and CEO of agriculture consultancy Agritecture. “So we’re in a fresh period that’s taking a while to recover out of.”
“Physical technology takes more time,” says Omar Asali, a board member and investor in CEA pioneer Plenty Unlimited. “People need to have a longer time horizon. I actually think a bunch of companies in the space got ahead of themselves, overpromised, were overoptimistic.”