Two months after 80 Acres Farms shut down, the postmortems are in — and the survivors are raising capital again. AeroFarms found a buyer, Stacked Farm is commissioning a A$150M facility in Melbourne, and analysts project the vertical farming market to grow from $9.6B to $72B by 2035. What the industry looks like on the other side of the Gartner trough.
A container farm in Regina now grows 800 heads of lettuce a week inside a food bank, while Cox Farms has formally integrated Feeding America into its supply chain with 4 million+ servings delivered. The food assistance sector is emerging as a real, funded, structurally stable customer segment for controlled environment agriculture.
When a Cyclospora outbreak linked to imported lettuce hit the US this summer, packaged salad sales collapsed by 31% — while greenhouse-grown Little Leaf Farms grew 6% and hit a record 6.1% national market share. Food safety has become CEA’s sharpest commercial weapon, and the data finally proves it.