“Even when it’s 115 degrees outside, we can still grow food,” founder Troy Albright says about True Garden. (David Blakeman/For The Washington Post)
Empty downtowns and rural food deserts welcome small indoor farms to revive urban areas and solve food insecurity.
By Samuel Gilbert
Washington Post
May 13, 2025
Excerpt:
“We can grow 10 times the food using 90 to 98 percent less water,” True Garden founder Troy Albright says as he walks past rows of butter lettuce, basil and softball-size fennel bulbs grown in a vertical aeroponic environment that recirculates nutrient-filled water from a reservoir to seedlings above. In one month, his farm produces 15,000 pounds of leafy greens.
“Even when it’s 115 degrees outside, we can still grow food,” Albright says.
Vertical farms have emerged as a potential solution for problems as diverse as food insecurity, changing climates and urban renewal. Their economic viability, however, is in question. During the past five years, almost $4 billion of venture capital funding has poured into large energy-intensive and tech-dependent indoor vertical farms, yet many of these companies such as the Jeff Bezos-backed Plenty, have declared bankruptcy. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.) Only a handful of vertical farming companies remain operating in the United States.
“We’re now in vertical farming 2.0,” says Nona Yehia, co-founder of Vertical Harvest, the first hydroponic vertical greenhouse in the U.S., based in Jackson, Wyoming, with plans to open a new farm in Maine this year.
An estimated 53 million people live in food deserts with limited access to healthy affordable food, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Precinct 2 in Houston is one of those deserts — one of the largest in Texas.
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