One of the nation's largest vertical farming businesses is closing up shop. Hamilton-based 80 Acres Farms announced Monday it will begin winding down operations of its large-scale, indoor vegetable-growing facilities.
"Unfortunately, under current circumstances, we could not secure the capital required to continue that work," says CEO and Co-founder Mike Zelkind in a release.
80 Acres Farms was founded in Spring Grove Village in 2015 by Zelkind and Tisha Livingston. They moved the company to Hamilton in 2019, and opened their eighth farm in Florence in 2023.
The sustainable farming method took off in the 2010s, drawing loads of venture capital investment from Silicon Valley. Benefits included using less water than traditional farming, requiring less space by growing indoors in stacked rows of planters, climate controlled conditions, lack of pesticides, and quick growing times. The farms could be built in cities — like in Cincinnati — requiring less time and money to transport the produce to market.
A decade later, however, those early funding sources began drying up, and what was a booming start-up industry has just a handful of players left.
80 Acres Farms was among them, as pointed out in a March 2026 New York Times article, until now. Giant infrastructure and energy costs hurt bottom lines, and The Times reports "farms and their investors were not fully prepared for what they would encounter in the agriculture industry, where margins are already thin."
Still, Zelkind says vertical farming hasn't failed.
"We have seen vertical farming’s potential up close, and we still believe that this industry is just getting started, and that we have helped plant the seeds for generations of future harvests," Zelkind says in Monday's announcement.
As WVXU reported in 2023, world leaders and companies from four continents had visited 80 Acres to study its advanced growing operations, including the president of the Bahamas, who toured the Hamilton plant in 2022 to talk about food security solutions.
"For a decade, our team has proven that vertical farming can work at scale — building and operating indoor farms that ultimately supplied more than 18,000 retail locations across the U.S. We’re proud of our work, the problems we solved, and the fresh, clean produce that fed so many people," Zelkind says.
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