Vertical Farm Basics and Overview

The Biggest Challenge in Vertical Farming: Why Skilled Staff Don't Stay

The challenges of vertical farming tend to be framed as problems of electricity costs and sales channels. Those are real and serious. But from the perspective of keeping a facility running, there’s a deeper problem underneath — and it’s about people.

Running a vertical farm requires the ability to span plant physiology, equipment, hygiene, production management, and cost management. People with that combination are hard to hire and take time to develop. And if they don’t stay, the know-how never accumulates on the floor.

This article maps out why vertical farms tend to run short on skilled people, and how that shortage flows through to productivity and profitability.

Yes, Operating at a Loss Is a Problem

Let me start with the obvious.

It’s true that many vertical farms operate at a loss, and this isn’t a business where money comes easily.

That said — the general perception that “vertical farms run at a loss” carries a negative connotation that I think is partly a misreading.

But the picture that “vertical farms run at a loss so there’s no future in them” — that’s a bit of a misunderstanding.

I’ve written about this in the articles below.

The Truth Behind “Vertical Farms Run at a Loss” — What Most People Don’t Know

172 Tips for Improving Vertical Farm Profitability

The Reality of the Skilled Talent Shortage

Now, to the real subject.

“People with strong crop management and production management skills are rare” — this is something I have consistently felt through years on the floor.

Here’s what the reality looks like.

1. Manufacturing as a Whole Is Already Short on People

A December 2017 survey by Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) found that over 94% of manufacturing companies reported a labor shortage.

A 2023 survey by the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare (MHLW) found that the effective job-openings-to-applicants ratio in manufacturing (a labor market indicator showing the ratio of job openings to job seekers) was approximately 1.74, well above the cross-industry average of 1.27. The labor shortage in manufacturing overall is serious, and vertical farms are not exempt.

That said, vertical farms have industry-specific conditions on top of this.

2. Vertical Farms Demand an Unusually Wide Skill Set

A vertical farm manager needs to command a wide range of capabilities:

• Plant physiology and cultivation knowledge (understanding growth stages, optimizing light, temperature, humidity, CO2, and nutrient solution)
• Operation and troubleshooting of equipment and machinery including HVAC, lighting, and nutrient delivery systems
• Data-driven productivity improvement using sensor data
• HACCP-based hygiene management
• Cost management covering energy and labor
• Training and shift management for inexperienced staff

Management and leadership are naturally expected on top of all that.

Even when you try to hire someone with that range of skills, people who have studied both plant physiology and engineering in any systematic way are rare. In practice, finding someone with vertical farm or controlled-environment agriculture experience is the ideal — but in reality, the overwhelming norm is to hire people with no experience and train them on the floor.

Even after investing time in developing staff, there’s no guarantee they’ll stick around. That’s where the real difficulty of the talent shortage lies.

Vertical Farm Work Guide: What Qualifications and Responsibilities Are Involved?

3. When the Parent Company Is Large, There’s Another Layer to It…

In large-scale vertical farms, there’s an additional dynamic.

The larger the operation, the more capital is required to fund it, so vertical farm businesses often launch as a division or subsidiary of a larger corporation. In those cases, on-site management positions are often filled by, or include, someone on secondment from the parent company or headquarters.

Secondees eventually leave the facility, so they’re hard to count on as long-term human resources from a long-term perspective. If the handoff to direct-hire staff doesn’t go smoothly, you end up with people rotating through the facility without the know-how ever accumulating on the floor.

Labor Shortage Means the Farm Can’t Stay Operational

We’ve covered the factors pushing vertical farms into a talent shortage.

When I say vertical farms are short on people, I don’t mean the working environment is so poor that people keep quitting and the business is unsustainable. It’s a structural problem: specialized talent is hard to secure, and development takes time. The longer the training period, the higher the probability that staff will leave before they fully master the work.

And when specialized expertise is scarce, problems cascade across the floor.

What Happens When Expertise Is Lacking

Vertical farms need to finely tune temperature, humidity, light levels, and other variables to maintain an optimal environment for the plants. When the advanced technical knowledge and specialized expertise to do that are lacking on the floor, problems emerge on the production, management, and financial fronts.

Production Problems

When environmental control precision drops, management of temperature, humidity, light levels, CO2 concentration, and nutrient solution formulation becomes inadequate — leading to poor growth and lower yield. Failure to get value from sensor data means missing opportunities to improve productivity. Failure to detect plant problems early means small issues develop into large-scale damage.

Management and Operational Problems

If operations continue without proper cost management and pricing, it leads directly to losses. If the farm can’t communicate the added value that justifies a high-cost structure, consumers and buyers simply write it off as “expensive vegetables” and look elsewhere.

Financial Problems

Without the knowledge to optimize energy use and production processes, running costs stay persistently high. And if the plan for recovering the high initial investment is poorly designed, the business ends up in a cash flow crunch.

The production, management, and financial problems listed above are interconnected and feed a downward spiral.

Sustaining and growing individual vertical farm businesses requires building systematic education and training programs, and actively promoting the sharing of know-how.

In short: the problems that occur on the vertical farm floor trace back to a shortage of specialized expertise.

Conclusion: Staff Retention Is a Structural Problem, and There Are No Shortcuts

The talent problem in vertical farming is serious not because individual operators aren’t trying hard enough, but because of structural conditions across the industry. Labor shortages across all of manufacturing, a shortage of educational institutions with specialized curricula in vertical farming, and the inherently time-intensive nature of developing floor expertise — when these stack up, every operator hits the same wall.

There are no shortcuts. The foundation is building systematic training programs. Equally important is putting structures in place to keep the facility running while staff develop mastery. What matters is keeping two things together: “delivering the right knowledge in a structured way” and “continuous support to embed it on the floor.” The farms that manage to build systems that function even when people turn over are the ones that maintain long-term competitiveness.