The Best Vertical Farms in the World Right Now (2026)

Last updated: March 28, 2026 · 13 min read

Table of contents

1. Nordic Harvest — Taastrup, Denmark
2. Plenty Unlimited — Compton, California
3. Spread — Kameoka and Keihanna, Japan
4. AeroFarms — Danville, Virginia
5. Jones Food Company — Lydney, Gloucestershire, UK
6. Sky Greens — Lim Chu Kang, Singapore
7. 80 Acres Farms — Hamilton, Ohio
8. Bowery Farming — multiple locations, USA
9. How these farms actually compare
10. The honest downsides nobody talks about
11. Why this matters beyond just cool buildings
12. FAQ
13. These farms are just the beginning

A single building in Taastrup, Denmark produces over 1,000 tons of greens per year — with no soil, no sunlight, and almost no human workers. That is more lettuce than some entire European countries grow outdoors. It’s called Nordic Harvest, it sits about 20 minutes outside Copenhagen, and it stacks 14 floors of leafy greens under rows of LED lights powered almost entirely by wind energy. The first time I saw photos of it I was like… this is what a farm looks like now?

A vertical farm is a facility that grows crops in vertically stacked layers inside a controlled indoor environment, using LED lighting, hydroponic or aeroponic growing systems, and automated climate control to produce food year-round — independent of weather, season, or available farmland. Think a high-rise for lettuce instead of people.

If you want to understand how the technology behind vertical farms actually works, we break that down in detail. But this article is about the farms themselves — the ones that made my jaw drop.

And here’s the thing: Nordic Harvest isn’t even the wildest one. There are vertical farms right now that are fully run by robots. Farms built inside old coal mines. Farms that use AI to tweak the flavor of their lettuce in real time. According to Grand View Research, the global vertical farming market was valued at $7.98 billion in 2024 and is projected to grow at a compound annual rate of over 20% through 2030. This isn’t a niche science experiment anymore — it’s a global industry, and the facilities coming online right now are genuinely jaw-dropping. As part of our complete guide to urban farming, I put together a world tour of the best vertical farms operating today, because honestly, these places need to be seen to be believed.

Nordic Harvest — Taastrup, Denmark

Let’s start with the one that made me write this article. Nordic Harvest sits in a 75,000-square-foot warehouse just outside Copenhagen, and it is enormous. Fourteen tiers of growing racks stretching from floor to ceiling, producing over 1,000 tons of herbs and leafy greens per year. That’s enough salad to fill roughly 40 million bags annually.

But the size isn’t even the coolest part. The entire facility runs on wind power from Denmark’s energy grid, which is one of the greenest in Europe. That means this farm — which operates 24 hours a day, 365 days a year — has a carbon footprint that would make most conventional farms jealous. They use a hydroponic system with recirculated water, and the company claims they use 250 times less water per kilogram of produce than traditional field farming in Southern Europe. Two hundred and fifty times.

Here’s the wild part: they grow in complete darkness except for the LED lights, which are tuned to specific wavelengths that the plants actually absorb (mostly red and blue light). So the inside of the building glows this eerie purple-pink color, like some kind of sci-fi movie set. Except it’s just extremely efficient farming. Nordic Harvest supplies greens to Danish supermarkets year-round, meaning Denmark doesn’t have to import as many greens from Spain or the Netherlands during winter. That’s not just cool engineering — it’s a meaningful shift in how a country feeds itself.

Plenty Unlimited — Compton, California

Plenty is the vertical farm that Silicon Valley decided to go all-in on. The company has raised over $900 million in funding — yes, nearly a billion dollars — from investors including SoftBank, Jeff Bezos’s Explore Expeditions, and Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors. And their flagship facility in Compton, California is where that money becomes actual food.

The Compton farm covers about 95,000 square feet and is designed to produce around 4.5 million pounds of leafy greens per year. Their approach is different from most vertical farms because they grow plants on vertical columns instead of horizontal shelves. Imagine rows of plants hanging like curtains from the ceiling, roots facing inward, leaves cascading outward. It looks wild. And the reason they do it this way is that it maximizes airflow and light exposure, which they say produces better-tasting greens with a longer shelf life.

The cool thing is that Plenty doesn’t just grow generic lettuce. They’ve developed proprietary crop varieties — like their baby spinach and crispy lettuce — specifically bred for indoor conditions. They also partnered with Driscoll’s (the berry company) to grow strawberries indoors, which is a much harder crop to pull off in a vertical farm because strawberries need pollination. Plenty uses a combination of robotics and machine learning to manage growing conditions at an insanely granular level. We’re talking light recipes, humidity curves, nutrient formulas — all controlled plant by plant. They sell their greens at Whole Foods, Bristol Farms, and a growing list of grocery chains across the western US.

Spread — Kameoka and Keihanna, Japan

If you want to see what a nearly fully automated vertical farm looks like, go to Japan. Spread Co., based outside Kyoto, has been doing indoor farming since 2007 — way before it was trendy — and their Techno Farm Keihanna facility is one of the most advanced on the planet.

Here’s why Spread makes this list: they automated almost everything. Seeding, transplanting, growing, harvesting, packaging — robots handle it. Human workers oversee quality and manage systems, but the actual hands-on farming is done by machines. The facility produces about 30,000 heads of lettuce per day. Per day. That’s roughly 10 million heads per year from a single building.

And it’s not just about volume. Spread’s system recirculates 98% of its water, and they’ve gotten their energy use per head of lettuce down significantly through LED optimization and process engineering. Their lettuce is sold across Japanese grocery stores under the brand “Vegetus,” and it’s become one of the most recognized indoor-grown brands in the country. The fact that this company has been profitable — actually making money, not just burning VC cash — while operating at this scale is honestly one of the most underrated stories in the vertical farming world. (Curious about how vertical farming profitability actually works? We dug into the numbers.)

AeroFarms — Danville, Virginia

AeroFarms had one of the most turbulent stories in the vertical farming space. The company originally operated a massive 69,000-square-foot facility in Newark, New Jersey, and was widely considered a pioneer in aeroponic technology — growing plants with misted nutrient solutions instead of water baths. Then, in 2023, they filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Many people wrote them off.

But here’s what happened next: they restructured, secured new funding, and shifted their flagship operations to a brand-new 138,000-square-foot facility in Danville, Virginia — making it one of the largest aeroponic farms in the world. The Danville farm is capable of producing over 3 million pounds of leafy greens annually, using up to 95% less water than field farming and zero pesticides. The aeroponic method means plant roots hang in the air and get misted with a nutrient solution at precise intervals, which gives the plants more oxygen and faster growth rates than traditional hydroponic setups.

What makes AeroFarms genuinely interesting now is their pivot toward R&D partnerships. They’re working on growing specialty crops for pharmaceutical and flavor compounds, not just salad greens. They also collect over a million data points per harvest cycle, using that information to optimize everything from light spectrums to nutrient timing. The comeback story is compelling, and the technology they’re running in Danville is legitimately state of the art. If you want to understand why some vertical farms fail and others survive, AeroFarms is the case study.

Jones Food Company — Lydney, Gloucestershire, UK

Ok so the UK might not be the first place you think of when someone says “vertical farming capital,” but Jones Food Company (JFC) is making a serious case. Their facility in Lydney, Gloucestershire was, at the time it opened, one of the largest vertical farms in Europe — roughly 175,000 square feet of growing space.

JFC grows herbs and salad leaves that are sold through major UK supermarket chains, and they’ve focused specifically on crops that the UK normally imports. Think about it: Britain imports a huge percentage of its fresh herbs and baby leaf salads from places like Kenya, Spain, and Italy. That means long supply chains, air freight emissions, and produce that’s already several days old by the time it hits the shelf. JFC’s pitch is straightforward — grow it domestically, deliver it fresher, and cut out the international shipping.

The facility uses a hydroponic system with precisely calibrated LED lighting, and they’ve been expanding capacity to meet growing demand. According to the Association for Vertical Farming, the UK vertical farming sector has been growing steadily, driven by food security concerns post-Brexit and the country’s notoriously unreliable growing season. JFC is positioned right at the center of that trend. Their goal is to produce enough herbs to significantly reduce the UK’s reliance on imported fresh produce — and with facilities at this scale, they’re actually making progress on that.

Sky Greens — Lim Chu Kang, Singapore

Singapore is a tiny island nation that imports over 90% of its food. Read that again. Ninety percent. The country has essentially no farmland, and yet it has one of the most food-secure populations in Asia. Part of the reason is Sky Greens, which took a completely different approach to vertical farming than everyone else on this list.

Instead of building a high-tech indoor facility with LEDs and robots, Sky Greens built towering outdoor vertical structures — think of them as rotating shelving units about 30 feet tall — that use a water-pulley system powered by gravity. Troughs of vegetables slowly rotate on these A-shaped towers, getting natural sunlight as they go up and water as they come back down. The energy consumption is absurdly low: one tower uses about the same electricity as a single 60-watt light bulb.

No joke, these things look like giant green Ferris wheels for vegetables. Sky Greens operates over 100 of these towers, and while the output per tower isn’t massive compared to a Plenty or Spread facility, the sheer ingenuity of the approach is what makes it special. They proved that vertical farming doesn’t have to mean a multimillion-dollar indoor facility. It can also mean clever mechanical engineering and tropical sunlight. Their produce — mostly Asian leafy greens like nai bai, xiao bai cai, and Chinese cabbage — is sold at FairPrice supermarkets across Singapore and is labeled as locally grown, which carries a lot of weight in a country that imports almost everything it eats.

80 Acres Farms — Hamilton, Ohio

80 Acres Farms doesn’t get as much press as Plenty or AeroFarms, but they’re doing something that honestly impresses me more than the flashier names: they’re building fully automated, modular vertical farms and actually making them work at multiple locations.

Their main facility in Hamilton, Ohio is a fully automated farm where the entire growing process — from seeding to harvest — happens without human hands touching the produce. Robots plant the seeds, automated systems manage the water and nutrients, AI monitors each plant’s growth, and the harvesting is mechanized. The facility produces leafy greens, tomatoes, microgreens, and herbs. They’ve also expanded with additional farm locations and a focus on regional distribution, getting fresh produce to grocery stores within 24 hours of harvest.

Here’s what I think makes 80 Acres different: their modular approach. Instead of building one enormous megafarm, they’re designing standardized farm modules that can be deployed in different cities. The idea is to build a network of smaller vertical farms that each serve their local region, rather than one central facility that ships everywhere. It’s a distribution model, not just a farming model. And they’ve been vocal about their goal of achieving profitability at each individual location — which, in an industry where a lot of companies have struggled to get out of the red, is a pretty big deal.

Bowery Farming — multiple locations, USA

Bowery Farming is another heavily funded US vertical farm, having raised over $640 million across multiple funding rounds. They operate farms in New Jersey, Maryland, Georgia, and Texas, with a stated goal of building a network of farms across the country. What sets Bowery apart is their operating system — literally. They built a proprietary software platform called BoweryOS that controls every aspect of the growing environment, from light intensity and spectrum to temperature, humidity, and nutrient delivery.

Every plant that grows in a Bowery farm is tracked by this system, which collects data from thousands of sensors and cameras to make real-time adjustments. The company says BoweryOS gets smarter with every crop cycle, essentially learning what works and applying those lessons across all their facilities simultaneously. It’s the kind of thing that sounds like marketing speak until you see the consistency of their product — their greens look the same in January and July, in New Jersey and Georgia, which is genuinely hard to achieve in agriculture.

Bowery sells through major retailers including Walmart, Amazon Fresh, Whole Foods, and Giant Food, and they’ve expanded their crop list to include everything from crispy lettuce and mixed greens to herbs and specialty items. They’ve also been one of the more transparent companies about yield numbers, reporting that their farms produce over 100 times more food per square foot than traditional agriculture. Whether that exact multiplier holds up under independent scrutiny, the productivity per square foot is undeniably massive.

How these farms actually compare

With all these names and numbers flying around, it helps to see them side by side. Here’s a snapshot of the farms I’ve covered:

What’s interesting is how different the approaches are. Spread is going full automation in a compact space. Sky Greens is going low-tech and gravity-powered. Plenty is going AI and proprietary crop breeding. There’s no single “right” way to do vertical farming — there are like eight right ways, and they all look completely different from each other. If you’re weighing the pros and cons for yourself, our breakdown of indoor vs outdoor farming lays it all out. And if you’re curious about what grows best in these systems, here’s our guide to the best crops for urban farming.

The honest downsides nobody talks about

I genuinely believe vertical farming is going to matter a lot in the coming decades. But I’d be doing you a disservice if I only showed the highlight reel. So here’s what the press releases leave out.

Energy costs are brutal. Running thousands of LED panels 16+ hours a day is expensive, and electricity is typically the single largest operating cost for a vertical farm. In regions with expensive power, the math can break a business before it even ships its first box of lettuce.

The bankruptcy list is long. AeroFarms filed Chapter 11 in 2023. AppHarvest went under. Fifth Season shut down. Kalera went bankrupt. Infarm, once valued at over $1 billion, collapsed. The pattern is real: massive capital raises followed by operating costs that exceed revenue. Plenty has nearly a billion dollars in funding and still hasn’t turned a profit. For a deeper look at what keeps going wrong, we break down why vertical farms go bankrupt.

Crop variety is still very limited. Almost every farm on this list grows some variation of leafy greens and herbs. That’s a tiny fraction of what humans eat. You cannot economically grow rice, wheat, potatoes, or most fruits this way. The technology serves a real niche, but it’s not replacing traditional agriculture any time soon.

The “local food” claim has caveats. Yes, vertical farms can be built near cities. But the concrete, steel, LEDs, HVAC systems, and sensors all have their own supply chains and carbon footprints. A full lifecycle analysis is more nuanced than “zero food miles.” For the full picture on what makes urban food production genuinely hard, see our piece on the real challenges of urban farming.

Why this matters beyond just cool buildings

Ok so beyond the “wow, cool” factor, why should you actually care about vertical farms in Denmark and Japan?

Here’s why: according to the United Nations, the world will need to produce roughly 50% more food by 2050 to feed a global population approaching 10 billion, and nearly 70% of those people will live in cities. Traditional farmland is shrinking. Freshwater is getting scarcer. Extreme weather events are becoming more frequent and more destructive to crops. The math on “just keep doing what we’ve been doing” doesn’t really work anymore.

Vertical farms won’t replace conventional agriculture — nobody serious is claiming that. You can’t economically grow wheat or rice or corn this way (yet). But for leafy greens, herbs, strawberries, and other high-value crops that currently get shipped thousands of miles in refrigerated trucks? The case for growing them in climate-controlled buildings close to where people eat them gets stronger every year. Especially when those buildings use 90-95% less water, need zero pesticides, and produce food 365 days a year regardless of drought, flood, or frost. For a look at where this is all heading, check out why your vegetables might be grown in a skyscraper by 2030.

The biggest remaining challenge is energy cost. Running thousands of LED lights 16+ hours a day isn’t free. But as renewable energy gets cheaper and LED efficiency keeps improving (LED costs have dropped roughly 90% in the last decade), the economics keep tilting further in vertical farming’s favor. Nordic Harvest running on wind power isn’t just a nice PR story — it’s a preview of what happens when cheap renewables meet indoor agriculture.

FAQ

These farms are just the beginning

That building in Denmark I told you about at the start? It opened in 2020. Most of the farms on this list either opened or significantly expanded within the last three to four years. This is not a mature industry polishing what already exists — it’s a young industry figuring out what’s possible, in real time, at an accelerating pace. Five years from now, the farms on this list might not even make the top ten. And honestly? That’s the most exciting part.

Written by Lorenzo Russo — food tech nerd and founder of FoodLore. Currently growing an unreasonable amount of basil.