Industry Trends

Why vertical farming research often fails in practice: the reasons behind a structural gap

2026-04-14

Vertical farming is an industry close to science. Lighting, HVAC, nutrient solution, environmental control — none of it holds together without research.

Even so, when you bring the conditions a paper describes into a commercial facility, sometimes they just do not work. The “optimum” of the lab is not the same as the “optimum” of a floor that ships thousands of plants every day.

In this article, I lay out why research results become hard to use on the floor, and the way of reading them you need in order to turn them into practical knowledge.

Why what the papers say does not work

When I was on the floor, I read a fair number of specialist books and papers explaining cultivation techniques. I was looking for any hint that might make the floor even a little better. But when I actually tried to apply the cultivation methods described there, more often than not they could not be used.

There are three main reasons. First, the cost of reproducing it in a commercial facility is left out. A paper may say “yield improved 20% under these conditions,” but it does not say how much it costs to reproduce those conditions in a commercial facility. Second, there is the problem of scale: an experiment that targets a few to a few dozen plants in a lab and a commercial facility that manages thousands of plants operate under completely different conditions. It is not unusual for a method that worked in the lab to stop working the moment you scale it up. On top of that, the growing environment itself is very different. A lab can precisely control temperature, humidity, and light, but in a commercial facility the HVAC has its limits, the environment varies from one shelf to the next, and it is affected by outside air as the seasons change. The “optimal conditions” are hard to reproduce in a real vertical farm.

Why research that is hard to use on the commercial floor gets produced

This isn’t the researchers’ fault. It is a structural problem.

University researchers are evaluated by writing papers. The quality of the paper, the citation count, the impact factor. Whether “this research was actually adopted at a working vertical farm” is, in most cases, not part of the criteria.

So the way research topics are chosen also prioritizes “is it academically new.” Not “can it solve what growers are struggling with,” but “is it something nobody has investigated yet” becomes the starting point.

As a result, research that has scientific value but is hard to put into practical use on the commercial floor gets mass-produced. This is not something limited to vertical farming; it is a structure common to agricultural research as a whole.

Researchers meeting growers halfway

Against that backdrop, something worth watching is happening.

Associate Professor Ricardo Hernandez of North Carolina State University (NC State) has put forward a research stance: prioritize real impact on growers over academic interest (Hortidaily, 2026).

In the CEA Coalition that Hernandez leads, growers submit problems directly, suppliers vote on which problems have the highest impact, and the CEA Coalition sets research priorities based on the results. Rather than researchers deciding “what to investigate,” growers decide “what they want solved.”

Concrete results are coming out too. Hernandez’s team, working together with experts in aerospace engineering, cut the time needed to model airflow inside a greenhouse “from two or three days to a few minutes.” This rapid airflow-modeling technique is already being used in greenhouse design. Hernandez’s words — “I want to shorten the time from research to practice (application on the floor). The best way is to get feedback directly from the industry” — are rarely heard from a researcher, and they are exactly the stance the vertical farming industry truly needs.

How do you get knowledge you can actually use

It takes time to select promising content from papers and specialist books, actually try it, and turn it into know-how. Reading a single book almost never changes things on the floor right away. You repeat trial and error over the span of years, and only then are you left with something you can genuinely say works. That is why I am now publishing on this site the know-how I have refined on the floor over more than ten years.

Researchers meeting growers halfway is something to welcome. But the structural gap is not going to be resolved overnight. Growers, too, need the ability to “read research, try it, and make it their own,” and that directly drives long-term improvement and competitiveness. Try to use research as-is and you will fail; ignore it and you will be left behind. Closing that gap takes effort on the floor as well.

The breakthrough for beating the high cost of vertical farming is “scaling up”