Crops
Growing Cereals in Vertical Farms: Wheat and Soybeans Are Possible, but Nobody Does It
Growing wheat or soybeans in a vertical farm is not impossible if you look only at the technology. The question is not whether you can grow them, but whether it works as a business.
Cereals use a lot of light, take a long time to grow, and sell at a low price per unit. These crops have always been built on sunlight and wide tracts of land. Bring them into a vertical farm, where electricity and capital equipment carry the load, and the economic wall comes straight to the front.
In this article, starting from the differences between a vertical farm and open-field farming, I lay out why wheat and soybean hydroponics struggles to become a real business.
I have already discussed why vertical farms lean toward leafy greens in another article.
Why vertical farms end up growing mostly leafy greens
The difference between vertical farms and open-field farming
A vertical farm is a facility that artificially controls environmental conditions such as temperature, humidity, light, and CO2 concentration. By holding the optimal conditions for crop growth, it enables stable quality and year-round production, and the timing of shipment and the output volume can be matched to market demand. That is its strength.
Open-field farming, on the other hand, is the traditional form of agriculture that relies on outdoor natural conditions to grow crops. Because it uses sunlight and soil directly, costs stay low, but the exposure to weather makes stable production difficult.
This contrast maps directly onto how suited each model is to growing cereals. A vertical farm, which controls the environment artificially, carries fixed costs on an entirely different scale from open-field farming, which leans on natural resources. Unless the price per unit and the number of crop cycles per year are high enough to recover that burden, the numbers do not add up.
The challenges of growing wheat and soybeans in a vertical farm
From a purely technical point of view, growing cereals “can be done.” But the moment you try to grow cereals in a vertical farm, you run into a triple wall on the economic side.
1. Securing light and its cost
Wheat and soybeans require more light for growth than other vegetables, and during the reproductive growth stage in particular, from flowering through the grain- and seed-filling stage, a large amount of light is essential. In a vertical farm the light source runs directly on electricity, so supplying the light that cereals need with artificial lighting brings an enormous power bill.
At this point, even lettuce, which does not require much light, is being grown in many farms on margins that are barely breaking even. Cereals need several times that amount of light, so the cost of electricity becomes a fundamental barrier.
2. Growth period and efficient use of cultivation space
Wheat takes about 6 months from seeding to harvest, and soybeans take 3 to 4 months. Plant height also reaches more than 1 m for wheat and 60 to 70 cm for soybeans. The growth period runs long because reproductive growth, the phase of setting grain, takes time.
To make efficient use of the limited space of a vertical farm, you want crops that are short in height and can be harvested in a short cycle. Leafy greens suit a vertical farm precisely because they meet these conditions. Cereals are at a fundamental disadvantage on this point.
3. The balance with selling price
The business model of a vertical farm comes down to one of two things: secure revenue with a high-unit-price item such as strawberries, or maximize production efficiency through a high number of crop cycles per year, as with lettuce. The market price of wheat and soybeans is far lower than that of vegetables, so recovering the vertical farm’s production cost at the market price is structurally difficult.
You could try to bring costs down through economies of scale, but unless the problems of light, space, and growth period are solved, there is a limit to how much scaling up can improve the numbers.
The future of wheat and soybean cultivation in a vertical farm
As things stand, growing cereals in a vertical farm is hard to make work economically. Given that even leafy greens do not easily clear the profitability bar on the extension of current energy-saving technology, growing cereals would require a major shift in the cost of the underlying technology before it could become a real business.
Where a possibility does come into view is in settings where stable supply is prioritized over cost. In outer space, polar regions, and other places where open-field farming is simply not possible, the strength of a vertical farm, its “controlled production,” works in its purest form. In research and development aimed at food production in such special environments, growing cereals in a vertical farm does carry meaning.
For vertical farms already in operation with current items such as leafy greens, there is room to raise profitability depending on the know-how built up on the floor.
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Q: What can be grown in a vertical farm?
A: In vertical farms, leafy greens are the main crops grown. Lettuce, spinach, and butterhead lettuce are representative examples. These vegetables can be harvested in a short cycle and sell at a relatively high price per unit, which makes them a good fit for vertical farms. Fruiting vegetables such as tomatoes and strawberries, as well as herbs, are also grown. These carry high added value, and they are items where the advantages of vertical-farm cultivation can be put to work. Cereals, on the other hand, are currently difficult to grow in a vertical farm due to the problems of cost and cultivation efficiency. Technology may advance in the future and open up the possibility, but food production in special environments such as outer space is drawing attention as a more realistic scenario for use.