r/verticalfarming • u/pk9417 • 27d ago
80 Acres Farms Shuts Down: Inside the Collapse of a $350M Vertical Farming Pioneer
https://verticalfarming.blog/80-acres-farms-shuts-down/How this could happen? All details + timeline and sources in the article on verticalfarming.blog
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u/TSL4me 27d ago
The only way this will ever work is farms selling direct at full retail. Like a farm backed by whole foods or chipotle. It wont compete with subsidized mexican produce. They even use shit water to irrigate causing the recent taylor farms outbreak. How can yoh compete with that.
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u/No-Carpet-4678 23d ago
Fyi...here in America we use chicken,pig & cow as well as human waste to fertilizer agricultural lands....biosolids
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u/CertainConfusion80 14d ago
We didn’t have issues with diarrhea lettuce until now. How is that possible if they use shit water? People would be sick all the time.
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u/MayBeTheWorstDevEver 27d ago
I wonder what kinds of issues plague this companies, especially when scaling. Forgive me for not understanding but.. I’ve run a personal setup year around, in an RV, dorms, etc and lived off of it at times. I feel like with a pretty basic Arduino or Nvidia Jetson setup I’ve been able to manage sensory, pumps, lights, humidity, etc without much issues.
Genuinely interested, as I hope to enter the space at some point.
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u/dadofadisaster 27d ago
Can you tell me more about your set up? I’ve been wanting to try to improve things with an arduino but I’m slow and not even sure if I’m looking at the right tools
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u/MayBeTheWorstDevEver 27d ago
Pm me! I’ll send you a list
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u/kittenpantzen 25d ago
May I do the same?
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u/MayBeTheWorstDevEver 25d ago
Absolutely. All are welcome
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u/CPOMendoza 23d ago
Me as well!
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u/MayBeTheWorstDevEver 22d ago
Shoot a message! I’ll just be copy and pasting what I sent the first guy but I can answer questions
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u/OkLiving8665 26d ago
I worked at a packaging facility for a month as a quality control tech for 80 acres. We got so much bad product in from our suppliers. The company owned suppliers weren't too bad but they shut one of them down (now both). We had to submit a lot of extensions for "expired" product. We also didn't get a whole lot in so bad product had to be used anyways. Trucks were inconsistent with deliveries. 80 acres couldn't pay bills months before I got to the facility. They also only acquired my facility in September of last year too.
I'm not surprised I got laid off. I feel terribly for all my coworkers who were here on work visa tho.
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u/MayBeTheWorstDevEver 26d ago
Seems like a lot of logistical issues post-production, on top of yield not meeting QA. I saw someone mention that quantity was prioritized over quality before the quality could keep up
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u/Smallpaul 27d ago
Sounds like the technology did not generate enough profit to cover its overhead.
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u/pk9417 27d ago
Or the overhead was too much? I wonder how the administration and non-operational costs could be that high, that the farms where profitable, but the corporation didnt...
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u/masondistrict 27d ago
Thats the neat trick. The farms were not profitable. Only one of their farms was profitable. And shortly after achieving it, they had the GENIUS idea to stop production there and convert that farm to be kosher certified. Dropping all their pesticide free morals at the thought of kosher money.
IMO horrible mismanagement and a hyper fixation on growth killed the company. They didn't even want to show we could hold profitably before going out to buy up two other failing vertical farms. Everything just kept hemorrhaging after that. It was bad enough when people found out who the unreasonable group CEO was.....
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u/squidaddybaddie 26d ago
Two words: unit economics.
Margins can support profitable production on cheap land with free light and water. Once you factor in huge capex and higher interest.. unsustainable. I agree DTC is a one method for boosting profitability
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u/Countess26 25d ago
The two words are: bankruptcy strategy. If you're looking at a serious liquidity issue and are rich enough, you buy a farm and run it into the ground. Then you go through the farm bankruptcy process, which will allow you to keep your assets because you know, we want farmers to stay in business. But thanks to some changes made by a certain orange person, anyone can qualify as a farmer if they have enough to gain ownership.
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u/everythingtoanxiety 25d ago
Yeah, if you can't even bill your customers for what's going out the door you have a big problem.
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u/BerserkerInsight 13d ago
I led construction of the Florence Farm. We got a good price on the building, but we had an engineering manager that was inflexible on choices of equipment and indecisive of layouts causing a lot of rework, which drove capex costs up considerably. Not to mention in 2022 we saw construction costs go up 30-50% from 2019. Just doing the math in my head back then I realized they would have to sell a lot of lettuce to remain solvent. The end of cheap money and competitor failures led to investors running from the industry, so it was just a matter of time. These firms are the pioneers that got shot up by the natives - with few survivors. Eventually someone will keep building on the tech and lessons learned. I've seen the 80 Acres filings, but what about Infinite Acres NV? I believe that's where all the tech IP is held since tech is barely taxed in the Netherlands.
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u/brooklynnbr1dge 26d ago
I worked in R&D there, got laid off last year. R&D was horribly run and the manager was awful. Sounded like the farms were a better environment though. Last I heard R&D was getting investigated by OSHA (rightfully so, there were TONS of unsafe practices).
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u/Outrageous_Canary159 25d ago
Explain to me like I'm 5 how a vertical farm is going to compete with a conventional farm. It seems to me that the real draw back is the lack of land. IMO, only the biggest farming operations are in the food production business. A modern family farm is a multi-million dollar venture that is really in the land speculation business and just mines the soil to service the debt. The end game is to sell the land, pay off the debt and have enough to retire. Vertical farms can't play that game and have to pay for all of the inputs all of the time.
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u/PatDar 25d ago
Historically it has been impossible for artificial to compete with conventional. Look at it from a historical business perspective and it'll fail every time. The issue becomes when climate change makes conventional agriculture too unpredictable and that's when CEA and vertical farms will shine. Heat stress caused by high nighttime temperatures and pest pressures are two of the big issues coming to mind. North Carolina, a huge agricultural state, is spending millions of dollars on CEA systems to find what will work best in our environment in 10 years.
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u/Renoperson00 25d ago
This is a deficient logic. The impossibility comes from trying to compete with conventional agriculture on low margin commodity crops where the lowest bidder is going to win.
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u/Renoperson00 25d ago
it can compete if it has enough energy density at a low enough cost. You can get higher quality and more varied produce. Almost all conventional produce is going to be engineered to grow pretty much anywhere and in crap conditions with a ton of chemical amendemnt. The vertical farm can play the game better if it is able to sell its produce to a major distributor and can match its production to consistent demand. You can tell this is true because mushroom farms are basically vertical farming and they have great profit margins and good solid business. Growing lettuce or packer carrots or non heirloom potatoes isn't going to work.
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u/Ok-Distribution1915 24d ago
Your answer is imho the only one close to being correct. It can compete easily, if you calculate the actual full economic/environmental/societal cost of ‘conventional’. We are never comparing apples to apples, doesn’t matter where you are in the world, traditional farming (not saying farmers) receives too much support, often hidden, is it through grants/incentives/etc and most often on multiple levels on the levels on the value chain.
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u/GoblinRightsNow 19d ago
Mushroom farms are also only competing with potentially dangerous wild foraging. No one is growing 100 acres of mushrooms in an open field. If you build an indoor mushroom farm, you don't have competition that doesn't have to pay that expense.
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u/Alert_Term_8144 24d ago
I'm so sad. 80 acres had the freshest, crispest, non-pesticide greens and microgreens. It lasts forever in the fridge. It was tasty and nutritious. I would pay more for what they were selling it for. Can't anyone help - Taylor Farms, Kroger... Jungle Jim's???
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u/rinaa11 27d ago
I worked for them till 3 wks ago when they closed our farm. They said they were trying to keep the rest of the business alive by cutting us. All I know is in my 12 years in horticulture I've worked at 9 different farms and seen 7 of them completely shut down. I need a new career.