In April, Gotham Greens named a new chief executive, and the choice said more than the announcement did. Craig Stevenson, who succeeded co-founder Viraj Puri, is not a grower. He ran Lundberg Family Farms and before that held senior roles at Procter & Gamble, Clorox and Burt's Bees. A greenhouse company that spent seventeen years learning to grow lettuce handed the top job to a packaged-goods brand operator and moved its founder to executive chairman. That is not a farming decision. It is a decision about what Gotham Greens intends to become, and it rhymes with what much of controlled-environment agriculture, both the sunlight-fed greenhouse growers and the energy-hungry vertical farms, is signaling this year. The growing was rarely where the money was. The brand, the shelf, the crop mix and the technology were. To understand why so many operators are drifting away from produce, start with who is no longer here.

Three years ago the sector's leaderboard was a list of billion-dollar promises, and being well funded turned out to be no protection at all. Plenty, backed by SoftBank and Walmart, had raised $961 million on a $1.9 billion valuation. Bowery Farming was valued at $2.3 billion. AppHarvest had gone public at roughly $1 billion, AeroFarms had raised more than $500 million, and Germany's Infarm had pulled in around $600 million. Every one of them filed. All told, at least 41 controlled-environment companies have gone out of business, and the failures arrived in waves that are still cresting. Fifth Season and Agricool closed in 2022. Then 2023 took AppHarvest, AeroFarms, Kalera, Infarm, Upward Farms, Iron Ox and Growing Underground. Bowery and France's Jungle Corp followed in 2024. In 2025 the count jumped past a dozen in a single year, among them Plenty, Freight Farms, Britain's Jones Food Company and GrowUp Farms, and Vertical Future; 2026 has already claimed 80 Acres Farms, the Netherlands' Artechno and Sweden's Heliospectra. Some deaths even chained together: Kalera's German arm, once branded &ever, sold its international farms to Growy, which promptly failed too. The pure-play grower of commodity greens, the model that raised the most and promised the most, could not make the economics work.

The failures split by model, not just by luck. Vertical farms, the energy-hungry tower design that burns several times the power per unit of a greenhouse, account for most of the venture-backed collapses. But greenhouses were hit hard too, from a different direction: the 2022 European energy shock pushed a wave of Dutch and Belgian growers under as gas prices made winter heating unaffordable, and North America lost large operators including Ontario's Lakeside Produce, which filed owing $188 million, AppHarvest, whose Kentucky glasshouses passed to Mastronardi, and Minnesota's Bushel Boy Farms. The stress even reached the middlemen: in August 2026, BFG Supply, a 54-year-old horticultural distributor carrying roughly $342.5 million in debt, filed for Chapter 11 and cut its workforce from about 700 to 461. Because so many greenhouse and CEA growers bought their inputs and equipment through BFG, its abrupt failure pulled a shared piece of the industry's supply chain out from under them at once, one distributor's collapse landing on everyone's balance sheet. Different failure modes across growers, technology providers and distributors, but one lesson for the survivors: the value was never in the produce. They are acting on it four ways.