Still Here

Every August, my wife's extended family goes to the Outer Banks for two weeks. Same timeshare, same stretch of sand. She has been going since she was little, and her father was going when he was little.

Somewhere along the way it became more than a vacation. My wife and I call it our end of year. December 31 is a date somebody else picked. This is the one where we actually take stock and figure out what the next twelve months are supposed to look like.

This year was a hybrid. Vacation with work on the side. Emails with my feet in the sand, a few calls that could not wait until later in August, then putting the phone down and getting in the water with the kids.

That is where I was sitting when the news came through.

On August 3, 80 Acres Farms announced it was shutting down. Eleven years, eight farms, product in more than 18,000 retail locations. Mike Zelkind's statement was about as plain as it gets: they could not secure the capital required to keep going. Eleven days later, reporting surfaced that BFG Supply was preparing a Chapter 11 filing.

That second one I had been hearing for a couple of weeks. This industry is small. You carry something like that around a while before it ever becomes news, quietly hoping the people telling you have it wrong.

So I had more time than usual to think about all of it, at exactly the point in the year when I do my thinking.

It was hard to stay positive

It was disheartening. That is the word.

Hindsight makes all of this look obvious. A lot of us saw the models that never quite closed and watched financiers get colder feet every quarter. Knowing something is coming does not make it land any softer when it arrives.

What hit hardest was the people. Hundreds of jobs, gone in a morning. I have toured 80 Acres facilities and interviewed people who worked there. They are proud of what they grow. They talk about their crop the way other people talk about their kids.

Then came the thought I am less proud of. Every one of these closures pushes another wave of very smart, newly available people into consulting, and a small selfish part of my brain went straight to what that means for the rest of us trying to make a living here.

Which led to the question I actually sat with for a few days. Am I putting my time, my energy, and my effort into an industry that is failing?

I do not think it helps anybody if I pretend I didn't ask it.

Where I came from

I got into this in 2014, with a bachelor's degree from the The Culinary Institute of America and years in kitchens behind me. The pay cut was steep enough that at twenty three I moved back in with my mom and dad to make it work.

My days were transplanting, cleaning trays, and harvesting in an aquaponics greenhouse in New York. The leadership had come out of JP Morgan, and it showed.

One afternoon I was walking with one of the owners. We came into a house that was one hundred percent ready to harvest, the whole crop in all its glory, the kind of stand that makes you stop for a second. He looked at it and said he wanted every greenhouse we had to look exactly like this.

Here was the problem. We had no buyer for all of that produce. We were badly understaffed to harvest what was already in the ground. Beautiful crop, not enough hands to cut it, nowhere for most of it to go.

I was a year into the industry and I could still see it. A greenhouse that photographs beautifully and cannot be harvested, transplanted, and delivered fresh is a time bomb. The picture had become the goal. The operation behind the picture was an afterthought.

That company went out of business in 2015.

So my first full year in this industry ended the same way this August did. The ambition outran the operation, the money ran out, and the people doing the actual work found out late.

I stayed anyway. Twelve years and counting.

What happens to a farm after it dies

A few years later I was at Hort Americas , and one of the projects I worked on was Fifth Season in Pittsburgh. I knew that team well and was part of their paradigm from early concept through to a massive facility. They shut down on a Friday in late October 2022, about a hundred people out of work.

What I learned from that closure has stayed with me longer than the closure itself, and it is the part nobody puts in the press release.

The assets do not move cleanly to a new operator. There is no orderly handoff where somebody experienced picks up a working farm and runs it better. Equipment gets scattered, purpose-built systems get parted out to buyers with no interest in growing anything.

I still find myself trying to find homes for equipment out of facilities like this. It is incredibly difficult. Most of it has nowhere to go. And when you do find a buyer, it moves at pennies on the dollar, and not a whole lot of pennies.

So we do not just lose companies. We lose the infrastructure, and we lose it in a way that makes the next operator's job harder than it needed to be.

Fifth Season was early in a run that has been steady enough to lose track of. AppHarvest in July 2023, its Kentucky greenhouses sold off in pieces. Bowery Farming in November 2024, after more than $700 million raised against a $2.3 billion valuation. Plenty® in March 2025, after close to a billion. From 2017 to 2023 alone, indoor farming companies raised close to $8 billion, a figure we covered with Adam Bergman that still stops me every time I say it. Around those names sit dozens of smaller closures nobody wrote up at all.

Then last August, 80 Acres Farms and Soli Organic announced they were merging. The coverage framed it as consolidation finally arriving, the start of a new era. Twelve months later both halves went down together.

The Soli piece is personal for me, as Soli was one of my favorites in this industry. Their head grower who has since retired, had close to fifty years of experience and told me flatly, very early on, that vertical farming was being romanticized and that greenhouses were the better bet. He was not being cynical. He had run the numbers and he had run the crops, for five decades. Leadership made the call against his advisement.

Soli's original Harrisonburg plant, the old Shenandoah Growers home, closed on July 21, two weeks before everything else. His farm went first.

The people who are actually winning

The story going around right now is that CEA is dying, and that is lazy.

Greenswell Growers in Virginia is the one I keep pointing at. Carl Gupton and Gus Brennan run 80,000 square feet in Goochland County and expect to move more than 900,000 pounds of lettuce this year. They have raised somewhere around $20 million across their entire life as a company, and they just landed at number 858 on the Inc. Magazine 5000 with 404 percent three-year growth. That is verified growth on roughly one twentieth of what the famous failures burned through.

Little Leaf Farms is the leader on scale. When my own parents, who know nothing about this industry, stop me to talk about how good the lettuce was, that tells me more than any pitch deck I have ever seen. I want to be straight about the capital though, because it matters to my argument. Little Leaf has raised north of $390 million, including $300 million from TPG's Rise Fund. Same order of magnitude as 80 Acres.

So the money by itself was never the variable, what Paul Sellew did with it was. One crop. Regional density built around demand instead of ahead of it. Expansion in steps that each had to work before the next one started.

There are more operators like this. They are quieter than the failures, they are the actual state of this industry, and they get a fraction of the coverage.

What actually worries me

Its not the grower side.

When a farm goes down it is mostly a capital story, and it mostly stays in one place. It lands hard on the people who worked there and on the investors who wrote the checks. It does not change what it costs the grower down the road to run their business next season.

BFG is a different kind of news, and I want to be careful about what I am saying it means.

BFG is not a CEA company. It is a fifty-three year old lawn and garden and professional horticulture distributor out of Ohio. Fifteen warehouses, north of a hundred thousand products. Hydroponics and CEA are a piece of what they do, and not the biggest piece. From what has been reported, this looks like a debt problem well before it is a demand problem. Private equity bought them at the top of the market in late 2021, the lender wrote the loan down to around 42 cents on the dollar this summer, and last November there was a $300 million refinancing that the banking world files under special situations, which is a polite way of saying trouble.

So no, we did not cause this. We do not buy enough through that channel to swing it in either direction, and anyone telling you different is flattering us.

That is the part that bothers me.

My time at Hort Americas was on the distribution side, so I know what that job actually is. It is not a catalog. It is the person who knows your operation, the one who tells you the substrate you are about to order is wrong for your system before you order it, who finds you the part on a Thursday when your line is down, and who carries you thirty extra days through a slow stretch because they know you are good for it. That takes years to build and it is worth more than the margin on any of the product.

Now look at who is deciding the future of that business. Big box buyers leaning on commercial growers over price. Private equity ownership cycles with loan payments that do not care that spring was slow. Companies trimming the slow-moving specialty items a small category like ours depends on. None of those decisions have anything to do with us, and every one of them lands on us.

When that layer thins out, everybody pays, including the operations doing everything right. Fewer places to buy from means less pressure on price and longer waits. It means less give when you need those thirty days. It means a warranty that only matters if the company is still around in eighteen months. And it means the person who knew your farm is gone, and the next one starts over from nothing.

You can run a clean operation, hit your numbers, and still watch your cost of doing business creep up over something happening three steps upstream. A farm closing gets written up everywhere. This does not, and it touches a lot more of us.

What over 250 episodes of CropTalk has taught me

This was never a tech business, and scale never fixed it. Christopher Higgins put it as directly as anyone: "They were selling investors on technology, but in the end, they were trying to justify their valuations by selling lettuce." Anthony Bellot said the rest in one sentence: "If your cost structure is broken at one facility, it'll be worse at ten." Curt Meltzer gave us the epitaph for the whole boom: "We backed concepts, not businesses."

Energy and labor decide this, and they get the least airtime. Marco de Bruin has been telling me for years that the real constraints are not tariffs or technology. He put labor cost increases in key regions at 50 to 75 percent over five to seven years. Curt Meltzer walked me through what it costs to retrofit a lighting system that was state of the art the day it was commissioned and obsolete two years later. Every collapse in this article had a version of those two lines on its P&L.

The people closest to the plant are still standing. Gus Brennan, on our Leafies roundtable: "We growers, we are the lifeblood of this industry. Don't forget that." Marco de Bruin says there is no shortcut for experience, and twelve years in I have never seen that proven wrong. The head grower at Soli spent fifty years earning the right to the call he made, and the room went the other way.

Failure only pays if the next mistake is a new one. Katia Kouloumprouka Zacharaki: "All these failures hopefully are helping other people learn and do different mistakes, not the same other mistakes."

Why I am still here

A while back I asked Adam Greenberg what he would say to a listener sitting down to type a resignation letter and walk out of this industry for good. I asked it half as a joke. His answer has been rattling around my head all month.

"This industry is hard, and it's hard for a reason because it's meaningful. It's very different to be able to be working in an industry where you can be proud to tell your kids, you know, I help grow this food that's at the grocery store. And I think you need to not lose sight about the fact that there's always going to be turbulence, and it's just a matter of how you take the turbulence head on."

Here is where I landed on that beach.

The capital that left was the wrong capital for what we are. It came in on a software timeline to build steel, biology, and payroll, and it was never going to stay. What is arriving now moves slower and asks harder questions, and I would rather answer hard questions than raise easy money again.

The demand has not moved either. People still want food grown close to them, picked at the right time, and delivered fresh.

So what has to change is us. Christopher Higgins told me once that monotony leads to consistency, that the best farms are the ones doing the same thing every day and doing it slightly better. That is the least fundable sentence in this entire industry and the truest thing anybody has said on my show.

This next phase belongs to the operators who adapt fastest, who know exactly what they are not going to do, and who are willing to be that kind of boring on purpose.

So no, I am not going anywhere. I closed out my year on that beach the same way I have for a while now, and twelve years in, the two hardest weeks of news I can remember did not change what I believe about this industry.

Keep growing strong.