Vertical farming has struggled to keep its lights on, leading many operators underground. A wave of costly failures has humbled the industry, and its next chapter is now being written beneath the earth. The shift reflects a practical response to the physics of growing food indoors, where the expense of lighting and climate control has proven difficult to justify for most crops.
The math of darkness
By 2025, the sector’s financial troubles had become undeniable. Plenty Unlimited, which had raised 940 million dollars from investors including SoftBank, filed for Chapter 11 in March that year. Its valuation had collapsed more than 99 per cent from a peak near two billion. Bowery Farming, backed by celebrities like Natalie Portman and Justin Timberlake and once worth 2.3 billion US dollars, shut down late in 2024 and began auctioning off its lighting rigs. AeroFarms and AppHarvest had already filed for bankruptcy in 2023; the first restructured, the second did not survive. By one count, 14 controlled-environment firms folded during 2025 alone.
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Tisha Livingston, who has kept 80 Acres Farms solvent, blames the arithmetic of light. Stacking lettuce under LEDs in a chilled shed can cost 100 times more per acre than a field, and the lamps never rest. She has said her own firm came through by staying “extremely cautious” with cash while rivals spent freely.
Deep roots
Real subterranean farming is older than the modern indoor industry. Parisians grew mushrooms in the quarries beneath their city from the early 1800s, until the metro’s tunnels drove them out. Steven Dring and Richard Ballard opened Growing Underground beneath Clapham in south London in 2015. Their farm lies 33 metres down in a wartime air-raid shelter that once held 8,000 people during the Blitz and later housed arrivals from the Empire Windrush. The business, now Zero Carbon Farms, took B Corp status in 2021 and supplies Marks and Spencer with microgreens and salad leaves grown on 70 per cent less water than a field. Olivia O’Brien, its business-development director, said in February that the tunnels run the year round on renewable power.
In 2017, Jean-Noël Gertz and Théo Champagnat began growing mushrooms in a disused Paris car park. Trading as Cycloponics, the pair filled several thousand square metres of concrete in the 18th arrondissement with oyster and shiitake, chicory and microgreens, and later added sites in Strasbourg and Bordeaux. La Caverne had been built for cars that Parisians stopped buying; it now aims for about 50 tonnes of produce a year. Its crops want little light, and each day’s harvest goes out across the city by bicycle.
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In July, Jacob Nickles and his colleagues lowered themselves 1.1 kilometres beneath England’s North Yorkshire moors, past the dark-matter detectors, and planted a crop. Their farm, in a working polyhalite mine near Whitby, is now the deepest in the world. Nickles, who co-leads the controlled-environment group at the University of Sheffield’s Institute for Sustainable Food, reckons the pit’s steady temperature and ready-made ventilation could strip out the energy costs that have sunk flashier rivals. Lord Vallance, the science minister, backed the 12-month trial as a hedge against Britain’s fickle weather. The pitch is old mine shafts reborn as food hubs in some of the UK’s poorer corners.
Sean Paling has run dark-matter experiments a kilometre below the surface for years, and his Boulby laboratory now hosts the Sheffield trial. The rock holds a steady temperature for nothing, he points out, and blocks the cosmic rays and hard frosts that trouble the surface. The lamps, and their bills, follow the crops underground all the same.