Greenhouse growers
Greenhouse growers currently do everything they can to assure the public their product is not the source of the outbreak.
Responses include comments from KingsOne, Gotham Greens, Little Leaf Farms, Adrina Farms, Planted Detroit and more.
Read full story from HortiDaily.com…
After warning of a possible shutdown for months, an indoor agriculture company operating in Pittsylvania County has canceled the prospect of a mass layoff and now says it will be a “stronger, more stable business.”
Between December and late March, the company, AeroFarms, sent multiple notices to state and local officials under the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act, or WARN Act, which requires large employers to provide advance notice of major layoffs or plant closures.
The notices originally indicated that AeroFarms would permanently close its Pittsylvania County facility but changed course to say that the company had secured short-term funding to stay open as it sought a buyer for the operation. At least 120 employees’ jobs were at stake as the saga unfolded.
Read full story from Cardinal News…
Indoor Ag-Con and Sollum Technologies have announced Karli Barton, a Master of Environmental Science student at the University of Guelph, as the recipient of the 2026 Sollum Student Scholarship to Indoor Ag-Con.
The scholarship supports emerging leaders in controlled environment agriculture (CEA) by providing a fully funded opportunity to attend Indoor Ag-Con 2026, taking place February 11–12 in Las Vegas, Nevada. The program is designed to connect academic research with real-world industry application through mentorship, networking, and exposure to the latest technologies shaping indoor farming.
Scholarship benefits include
About the Scholarship Recipient
Karli Barton is a second-year Masters of Environmental Science student at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada. Her research focuses on the intersection of advanced LED lighting strategies and sustainable pest management in controlled-environment strawberry production. A key component of her work examines how dynamic lighting regimes—such as blue-light night interruption and continuous lighting—affect the performance of biological control agents used to manage aphid pests.
Before beginning graduate studies, Barton spent nearly a decade working in integrated pest management roles across both field and controlled-environment systems, including six years as a biocontrol consultant supporting commercial greenhouse operations. Her research aims to help growers adopt innovative lighting technologies without compromising the effectiveness of biological pest control, bridging scientific research with practical, on-farm decision-making.
“Supporting emerging researchers like Karli is critical to the future of controlled environment agriculture,” said Jenny Zammit, Vice President of Marketing and Customer Success at Sollum Technologies. “Her work reflects exactly what this scholarship was designed to encourage—rigorous, applied research that helps growers integrate new technologies in a sustainable and practical way.”
“Indoor Ag-Con is proud to partner with Sollum Technologies to provide meaningful opportunities for students who are shaping the future of indoor agriculture,” said Brian Sullivan, CEO of Indoor Ag-Con. “Karli’s background and research exemplify the kind of industry-connected innovation we aim to support through this scholarship.”
About Indoor Ag-Con
Indoor Ag-Con is the premier trade show and conference for the indoor and vertical farming industry. Held annually in Las Vegas, the event attracts CEA growers, suppliers, researchers, and technology providers from across the globe for two days of educational sessions, networking, and innovation showcases. Learn more at www.indoor.ag.
About Sollum Technologies
As the leader in advanced, dynamic LED lighting for commercial greenhouses, Sollum Technologies offers a unique proposition. The comprehensive solution provides the flexibility to adapt lighting in real time to meet crop needs at every stage of growth, supports producers operational and financial goals in a sustainable manner, and offers unmatched technical and agronomic guidance. Designed and manufactured in North America, Sollum’s technology is deployed across major greenhouse operations to support year-round production, consistent quality, and smarter energy use. Founded in 2015, Sollum is headquartered in Montréal with regional offices in Ontario and Georgia. For more information visit www.sollum.tech
After an incredible inaugural year with 50+ participants, Women in CEA is bringing its Luncheon back to Indoor Ag-Con 2026 in Las Vegas. Program – Thursday, February 12 from Noon – 1:30 PM on day two of Indoor Ag-Con.
This time centered on the theme “Action vs. Waiting.”
The luncheon will include:
• A short introduction to WiCEA and why this community exists
• Recognition of our sponsors and their commitment to elevating women in CEA
• The kickoff of our mentorship program
• Guided networking to foster meaningful, long-term connections
The tickets are as always for free, but donations are open.
Register here to save your spot at the luncheon.
JR Peters is already signed on as a sponsor of the event and Women in CEA is looking for additional sponsors, too.
Women in CEA, is community open to all women (and allies) working in controlled environment agriculture. WiCEA’s purpose is to foster a collaborative and supportive environment through the power of networking, information and resource sharing. The WiCEA community endeavors to strengthen the overall industry of CEA, creating food stability in the face of climate change and geopolitical instability in a dynamic world. The group is creating a space for women to innovate, connect and inspire.
–Indoor Ag-Con and Inside Grower magazine are pleased to announce the finalists for the 2nd annual CEAs – Cultivating Excellence Awards, a program honoring excellence, innovation, and leadership within the controlled environment agriculture (CEA) sector.
Celebrating outstanding achievement across three categories—Operational Excellence, Product Innovation, and the newly added Trailblazer Award—The CEAs spotlight growers, innovators, and individuals who are shaping the future of indoor agriculture.
The 2026 CEAs will be presented during a special gala luncheon on Wednesday, February 11, 2026, at the 13th annual edition of Indoor Ag-Con, held at the Westgate Las Vegas. Winners in each category will be announced live during the event.
Operational Excellence Award
Recognizing a commercial CEA grower that consistently delivers quality products while distinguishing itself through innovation in production, technology, marketing, and overall strategy.
Product Innovation Award
Honoring a breakthrough product that addresses critical industry challenges and delivers exceptional value for CEA customers.
Trailblazer Award
Honoring an individual whose vision, leadership, and impact have meaningfully advanced the CEA industry. The winner will be announced at the awards ceremony.
“It’s inspiring to see the range of thoughtful innovation reflected in this year’s finalists,” said Brian Sullivan, CEO of Indoor Ag-Con. “The CEAs offer a chance to acknowledge the people and companies making a real impact in CEA, and we’re pleased to team up with Inside Grower magazine to celebrate and recognize their work at the 2026 event.”
“Inside Grower is proud to partner with Indoor Ag-Con to shine a spotlight on the innovators elevating controlled environment agriculture,” said Paul Black, Publisher, Inside Grower. “With the addition of the new Trailblazer Award, we’re excited to honor a true leader whose long-term contributions have helped shape the industry into what it is today.”
All Indoor Ag-Con 2026 Full Access Pass Holders are invited to attend The CEAs Gala Luncheon on Wednesday, February 11, from 12:00–1:00 PM.
For more information on The CEAs and to register for Indoor Ag-Con, visit www.indoor.ag
ABOUT INDOOR AG-CON
Founded in 2013, Indoor Ag-Con has emerged as the largest trade show and conference for vertical farming | greenhouse | controlled environment agriculture. The event brings together industry professionals from across the globe to explore the latest trends, technologies, and innovations in the CEA sector. Its events are crop-agnostic and touch all sectors of the business, covering produce, legal cannabis | hemp, alternate protein and non-food crops. More information, visit www.indoor.ag
ABOUT INSIDE GROWER
Part of Ball Publishing’s family of media brands, Inside Grower is a leading publication serving the controlled environment agriculture industry. The magazine delivers in-depth production guidance, crop-specific insights, market intelligence, and timely reporting to help CEA operations thrive. More information: www.insidegrower.com
As controlled environment agriculture matures, growers are looking beyond new tools and toward proven systems that perform under pressure. In this guest blog, Indoor Ag-Con exhibitor Elevated draws on years of experience in commercial cannabis—one of the most demanding forms of indoor cultivation—to explore how precision, integration, and systems thinking translate across crops. The result is a grounded perspective on what it really takes to scale indoor agriculture with consistency and control. (Meet Elevated at Booth 403 at Indoor Ag-Con 2026.)
The future of agriculture is controlled. Whether driven by climate volatility, resource constraints, or the demand for consistent, high-quality yields, growers across industries are moving indoors, toward environments where variables are measured, managed, and optimized rather than left to chance.
At Elevated, this isn’t a new frontier. It’s a natural evolution.
For years, we’ve operated at the center of the commercial cannabis industry, one of the most technically demanding, tightly regulated, and performance-driven forms of agriculture in the world. Success in cannabis doesn’t come from theory. It comes from precision, repeatability, and systems that perform day after day under pressure.
Now, we’re taking that hard-won expertise and applying it to the broader world of controlled environment agriculture (CEA).
Cannabis cultivation is unforgiving.
Margins are tight. Regulations are complex. Crop failures are expensive. Every decision, from lighting layout and nutrient strategy to airflow, water treatment, and data collection, has measurable consequences.
To succeed, you need:
That reality forced us to build differently from the start.
We didn’t become successful by selling individual products. We became successful by helping growers design and operate complete cultivation systems, spaces where lighting, nutrients, environmental controls, and plant data work together to support predictable outcomes at scale.
Those same fundamentals are exactly what controlled agriculture requires—whether you’re growing leafy greens, herbs, strawberries, or specialty crops.
At our core, Elevated is a full-cycle cultivation partner.
We support growers from early planning through full operation, providing:
Because we work directly with commercial operators, our solutions are grounded in real-world constraints: budgets, labor efficiency, energy use, compliance, and long-term scalability.
This approach translates seamlessly into controlled agriculture because the problems are the same:
We’ve been solving those problems for years.
Controlled agriculture isn’t about copying cannabis methods, it’s about transferring principles.
What carries over:
What changes:
Our value lies in knowing the difference and building systems that reflect it.
Another key differentiator: we’re brand-agnostic but performance-obsessed.
Over time, we’ve aligned with best-in-class partners across lighting, nutrients, grow media, water management, and ag-tech companies that share our standards for reliability, innovation, and commercial viability.
That allows us to design solutions around what works, not what needs to be sold.
For controlled agriculture operators, this means fewer compromises and systems built around outcomes, not catalogs.
The controlled agriculture space is growing fast but growth alone doesn’t guarantee success.
Many operators are discovering that building a controlled environment is one thing. Running it profitably, consistently, and at scale is another.
This is where experience matters.
Our background in cannabis means we’re comfortable operating where stakes are high and variables are tightly constrained. We understand that technology only delivers value when it’s integrated correctly and when teams are supported with the right knowledge and processes.
As controlled agriculture continues to mature, the industry will favor partners who’ve already proven they can perform under pressure.
That’s the role we’re here to play.
At this trade show, we’re not just showcasing products, we’re sharing a perspective.
A belief that the future of agriculture will be built by operators who think in systems, design with intention, and rely on data as a decision-making tool rather than a buzzword.
We’re proud of our roots in cannabis. They shaped how we think, how we build, and how we partner.
And we’re excited to apply that same rigor, precision, and accountability to the next generation of controlled agriculture.
If you’re building a cultivation operation and looking for a partner who understands what it takes to make controlled environments actually work, we’d love to talk.
Over the past month, I had the privilege of spending a concentrated amount of time in pre-planning conversations for Indoor Ag-Con in Las Vegas on February 11–12. These were not surface-level calls. They were working sessions meant to shape discussions that go beyond the usual talking points and actually serve operators and suppliers.
In every group, I asked for the same thing: be honest, address the elephants in the room, and focus on what people can actually act on when they go back home. By the end of the month, my head was spinning. Not from volume, but from how consistently the same themes kept coming up across different crops, roles, and geographies.
Each of these conversations generated meeting notes and transcripts. To step back and avoid over-weighting any single perspective, I used AI as a tool to analyze and organize those notes, looking for repeated patterns and shared concerns. The insights below are not AI conclusions. They are a synthesis of real conversations, filtered through experience and judgment. Names and companies are intentionally left out. This is about clarity, not attribution.
A few things became very clear.
There is noticeably less appetite for hype and far more focus on trade-offs, sequencing, and consequences. People are asking better questions. They are more willing to talk openly about what did not work and why. That shift showed up across nearly every conversation and is reflected directly in how Indoor Ag-Con sessions are being framed this year, with more emphasis on execution, scaling discipline, and post-build reality. CEA feels less like it is trying to prove itself and more like it is trying to operate well.
Across greenhouse and vertical systems, the message was consistent: scaling before operations are stable creates problems that are hard to undo. Facility size, location, labor availability, and market access are now being discussed as interconnected decisions rather than isolated ones. Bigger is no longer assumed to be better. Proven, repeatable, and financeable are carrying more weight. This mindset shows up clearly in sessions focused on facility design, expansion timing, and responsible growth.
The conversations shaping sessions on integration, automation, AI, and data were far more grounded than in past years. Operators are not looking for more dashboards. They want fewer tools that actually help them make decisions, reduce labor strain, or manage risk. AI came up often, but almost always with its limits clearly acknowledged. Useful when paired with good data and sound agronomy. Risky when positioned as a shortcut around experience. That realism is guiding how AI-related discussions are being handled at the show. Technology is still important. It is just no longer the headline.
Labor was raised in almost every conversation, often before yield or technology. Staffing challenges are no longer being treated as temporary. They are structural. Facilities are being designed and redesigned around workforce realities, training capacity, and management bandwidth. There was also strong alignment around culture. Systems introduced without grower buy-in tend to fail. Tools designed without operator input tend to be ignored. These realities are shaping sessions that focus on operations, leadership, and the human side of CEA.
Leafy greens continue to expose pricing pressure and overproduction risk. Cannabis conversations have become notably more pragmatic, with open acknowledgment of complexity, climate mistakes, and labor misalignment. Strawberries and berries keep pushing back against automation narratives, reinforcing the need for deep plant knowledge and airflow mastery. Specialty crops, including mushrooms, consistently highlight that market development often matters more than production capability. These crop-specific realities directly informed how tracks at Indoor Ag-Con were built this year, with less emphasis on novelty and more on fundamentals.
Pricing, commoditization, and distribution came up as often as production. Yield alone is no longer being mistaken for success. Operators are talking more openly about differentiation, channel strategy, and demand alignment. Several sessions at the show are designed specifically to confront these issues directly rather than dance around them. Market awareness is no longer optional. It is foundational.
Despite all of this, the dominant feeling coming out of these conversations was not pessimism. It was clarity. There is more honesty now. More shared learning. More willingness to say what does not work and move forward anyway. That is exactly the tone these Indoor Ag-Con discussions are meant to set. This past month did not feel like an ending for CEA. It felt like a reset that needed to happen. And based on what surfaced in these conversations, the industry is stepping into the next year with clearer eyes and stronger fundamentals.
The expo floor at Indoor Ag-Con 2026 will feature the GLASE | Vivid Canopy Job Lounge, a new hub for gathering attendees to accelerate careers. The Job Lounge will showcase opportunities across diverse roles in the indoor farming industry and serve as a meeting place for making new connections.
The Vivid Canopy initiative was launched by Cornell University Greenhouse Lighting and Systems Engineering (GLASE) consortium at Indoor Ag-Con 2024 with a panel of diverse industry professionals and a roundtable discussion. Vivid Canopy curates conversations about expanding the CEA workforce and enables candidates to grow careers in the CEA industry.
Are you growing your team or interested in accelerating your career in a new role?
If you are interested in sponsoring the Vivid Canopy Job Lounge, please contact suzanne@indoor.ag.
80 Acres Farms® and Soli Organic® announced a strategic merger to form one of the world’s largest and most advanced indoor farming networks, bringing together decades of leadership in indoor farming. The newly formed company, with projected first-year revenues approaching $200 million, will operate under the 80 Acres Farms name and be headquartered in Hamilton, Ohio
“Vertical farming is entering the next phase of business maturity, and it’s about execution, efficiency, and results,” said Mike Zelkind, co-founder of 80 Acres Farms and CEO of the combined company. “This merger unites two top operators that, together, have the scale, economics, and teams to deliver the results that the industry has been waiting for. Both companies have spent decades developing enhanced technology, improving operations, and building winning brands. Our value proposition is clear: fresher, better-tasting produce that’s pesticide- and heavy metal-free, locally grown, climate-resilient, and built for shelf life.”
“This merger is a win for forward-thinking retailers and the customers they serve,” said Walter Robb, former co-CEO of Whole Foods Market, current co-chairman of Soli Organic, and a board member of the combined company. “Retailers today want differentiated products, surety of supply, and a compelling story. Given recent trade volatility, indoor agriculture is playing an increasingly important role for retailers. The combined company checks all the boxes: great product quality, increased product portfolio, supply chain resilience, and enhanced customer choice through both vertical farming and field-grown organic products.”
The merger combines 80 Acres Farms’ GroLoop™ platform, an integrated system of hardware, software, and environmental controls designed for precision, automation, and scalability across the entire farm network, with Soli Organic’s longstanding retail footprint and agronomic expertise, developed over more than 35 years of commercial production.
Deal highlights:
“GroLoop was built to adapt and scale across crops, climates, and facility types,” said Tisha Livingston, co-founder of 80 Acres Farms and CEO of Infinite Acres, the company’s tech-focused subsidiary. “By combining it with Soli’s reach, experience, and knowledge in agronomy, we’re able to move faster, work smarter, and deliver more value across the entire supply chain.”
“I spent the first part of my career helping build some of the most advanced greenhouse systems in the world,” said Ulf Jonsson, a founder of Soli Organic. “But we’ve moved beyond what greenhouses can deliver. I’ve said for years, ‘The sun is free, but it’s not worth the cost.’ Vertical farms offer greater consistency, quality, and yield. I’m excited about combining two leading technologies to create the system that will define the next generation of indoor agriculture.”
The combined company’s growing and distribution capabilities are matched by deep experience in branding, merchandising, and customer service. With a unified team and proven technology, the company is positioned to lead the next phase of growth in indoor agriculture with a steady supply of the cleanest produce in the marketplace, including USDA Organic herbs and salads free from pesticides, heavy metals, and other contaminants.
Verbitsky Capital served as financial advisor to Soli Organic.
About 80 Acres Farms
80 Acres Farms is a vertical farming leader based in Hamilton, Ohio. Founded by Mike Zelkind and Tisha Livingston in 2015, the company operates indoor farms powered by Infinite Acres’ GroLoop™ technology platform. Using 100% renewable electricity and 95% less water per pound of produce, the company’s farms deliver pesticide-free, longer-lasting harvests while reducing food waste. 80 Acres Farms’ branded salads, salad kits, herbs, microgreens, and dressings are available at retailers and restaurants across the United States.
About Soli Organic
Soli Organic Inc., founded in 1989, is the nation’s leading indoor organic agriculture company dedicated to high-quality, high value, sustainably grown, 100% USDA Certified Organic produce. As the category leader in fresh, organic culinary herbs, Soli Organic serves thousands of retail doors and 70% of the top ten retailers. Soli Organic continues to redefine how to bring produce to market, operating across a nationally integrated platform of farms, production, and logistics facilities.
Read full article from Vertical Farm Daily
