Guelph, Ontario-based GoodLeaf Farms has become profitable across its vertical farming operations for the first time.

The context: GoodLeaf, which was founded in 2011 in Halifax, has spent over a decade developing recipes and proprietary tech that helps the firm maximize the yield and quality of its produce by monitoring and controlling light, air, and water delivery to its plants. The company, which counts McCain Foods, Farm Credit Canada, and Power Sustainable Lios among its backers, attributes its success to “years of innovation, disciplined growth, and strategic investment.” It also comes on the back of fivefold revenue growth over the past three years, as GoodLeaf’s total sales soared from $6.4 million in 2023 to $34 million in 2025. GoodLeaf said its revenue is up another 31 percent this year, thanks to rising consumer demand and expanded retail distribution.

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[–] 28 points 2 months ago

As climate change continues to make more of the planet's surface uninhabitable, this tech will become essential.

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  • [–] 11 points 2 months ago

    Even without profit figuring out how to efficiently and effectively farm tasty crops vertically is valuable!

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  • [–] 8 points 2 months ago

    This is good because natural disasters are about to happen to most countries due to the idiotic "hurry up and pollute" mentality of the after COVID era.

    Its like nobody learned anything from the pandemics impact on nature. Things were looking good for a while. Now we have the biggest super elniño already at peak power about to dry everything to a crisp until winter or next spring when it will flip in the strongest La Niña ever which will bring snow, rain, tornados and category 8 super hurricanes.

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  • [–] 15 points 2 months ago (6 children)

    I don't know if they can keep it up. As the economy worsens and belts tighten, I think luxury items like this will be dropped from people's lists.

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  • [–] 11 points 2 months ago

    Dude a head of lettuce is 4 bucks at my grocery store.

    I'll pay the difference, which isn't as much as it used to be, and I'm supporting novel food tech, sustainability, and I don't have to wash or cut anything.

    Bring back 99 cent lettuce heads from the good old days of 2023 and I'll chop my own salads for sure.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 months ago

    I'm not so sure, lettuce and leafy greens like the kind used in salads (basically all of what goodleaf makes) are usually cheaply priced in comparison to many other staples like meat, dairy, dry goods etc. and are extremely seasonal goodleaf may be twice as much as those but it's also fully Canadian, all it's inputs can be Canadian too, doesn't have the same issues with contamination by natural means and methods (cough, Taylor Farms, cough) and is made year round unlike normal produce. In the middle of the winter i can have a salad that costs me 75c to $1 for a portion or with goodleaf it may be just 50c to $1 more to know I'm supporting Canadian eating healthily and am not going to get screwed over by a bad rain that washes fresh cow manure from a nearby field onto collected lettuce/spinach. From what I've seen when times get tough people tend to stop buying expensive meats or fancy imported goods and tend to buy more veggies/fruits/produce to stretch what they do have. for example maybe steaks are off the menu and instead they buy cheap chicken drumsticks or pork chops that cost a half to a third as much, and instead add a salad or some local veggies to their plate to stretch their dollar (fat least from what I've seen).

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  • [–] -2 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    It's part of the vice market, which tends to do well in bad economic times as many people don't tend to reduce vice spending with discretionary spending reductions, though they might redirect their spending towards products that give more bang for the buck. Though in my experience, weed is pretty cheap for how long it can last, especially since prices have come below the black market prices pre-legalization.

    Though that black market still exists with even lower prices now and lack of funds might push more towards it, which will probably lead to a ramping up of enforcement.

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  • [+] -7 points 2 months ago (3 children)

    As a hater of vertical farming I have never doubted it could be profitable. I just doubt it can ever be environmentally friendly since light must come from someplace and either you are in the ground, you shade something else, or you use artificial lights. The last is most likely and that means more CO2.

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  • [–] 16 points 2 months ago

    generally its artificial lights but it uses ones that are just the wavelengths the plants need and then the idea is to use clean energy sources. in return you are using less land for farmland and growing it in a high density area so that you save energy on shipping. then also harvesting and such can use clean sources. I was sorta the opposite of you. I was jazzed for it but afraid it would not become cost effective.

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  • [–] 9 points 2 months ago

    Solar panels on the outside, crops on the inside. I understand your doubts but you should also consider that with vertical farming you need much less pesticides, which is a plus for the environment. It's also robust against heat waves and storms. In general, it's a reliable food source, much more so than traditional farming these days.

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  • 17 comments in c/solarpunk@slrpnk.net view that post
    [–] 37 points 2 months ago

    proprietary tech

    Ah, how solarpunk! /s

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  • [–] 18 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (15 children)

    Edit : I was wrong, vertical farming is as ground-surface efficient as horizontal.

    "Proof" with a quick calculation for those interestedI compared numbers using batavia lettuce as an example. Those are yearly outputs in kg per square meter of sunlight, assuming central Europe.

    For vertical hydroponics, I'm assuming a solar irradiation of 1'000 kWh/m²/year, a panel yield of 20%, and no other loss, that is 200 kWh/year of electric power per m² of solar panel.

    1 kg of vertical lettuce needs about 8 kWh to power the lights (https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/plant-science/articles/10.3389/fpls.2026.1783548/full)

    So a square meter of solar panel should produce about 25kg of lettuce a year. This compares to 20-50kg/m²/year in horizontal non-light-supplemented hydroponics.

    My numbers and assumptions could be quite a bit off, but clearly I was wrong with the 30x comment.

    My old comment :

    Vertical farming isn't very solarpunk though, it takes about 30m² of solar pannels to grow what could be grown on 1m² using direct sunlight. And I have not mentioned accumulators yet.

    In my opinion this is the exact opposite of low-tech energy efficient developpement that solarpunk aims.

    I do strongly support urban agriculture, if on roofs, using direct sunlight as energy source, and heated with the lost heat of the building below because that is simple and efficient (I would even call it elegant).

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  • [–] 21 points 2 months ago (6 children)

    I don't know all the details of vertical farming, but there is more to it than energy efficiency. The controlled environment is supposed to remove the need for pesticides, bring fertiliser use right down to the minimum possible, and then there's the efficiency in logistics of growing food closer to point of consumption, especially when temperature/humidity/ light control lets you grow exotic stuff locally year round.

    Whether it is worth it overall is unclear. Probably the answer is "sometimes, it depends on the situation".

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  • [–] 10 points 2 months ago (4 children)

    Also growing food in areas that wouldn’t support growing food, like deserts

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  • [–] 7 points 2 months ago* (1 child)

    That's what greenhouses are for. Deserts aren't exactly short on space, so you can drop all the extremely difficult and expensive vertical farm infrastructure and just build horizontal.

    Greenhouses can be just as environmentally controlled as vertical farms for a fraction of the cost.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago

    I figure it only makes sense in near Arctic communities where shipping costs don't make it easy to have a supply chain of fresh vegetables and the heating costs are likely going to overwhelm the cost differential of a greenhouse.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 months ago

    one adjustment to this, it's actually usaully more useful in urban food deserts rather than desert deserts, the idea being that the energy waste expended by growing crops in a tall building that would have done better in direct sunlight low to the ground is offset by reduced transport costs where most of the environmental harm of factory farming is done

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago

    I've been curious about earthworks with some small amount of tech for this. Though a with vertical farming, growing is only half the battle and you need an efficient harvest method.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 months ago

    Vertical farming is mostly used for leafy greens and shoots. For the energy dense staple foods that people get most of their calories from, it doesn't work well. They need a lot more time to mature, what means a lot more energy needs to be invested and it immediately becomes unprofitable.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (2 children)

    I get where you're coming from. (Also, "profitable" has nothing to do with "ecologically responsible.") I have a lot of the same concerns about bringing plants indoors and having to meet their needs using a lot of energy and material inputs when growing them outdoors with free energy and fewer resources works so well. However, one thing outside can't do easily is multiple layers of plants. If we can find a way to bring the vertical part of vertical farming outside, I'd be more supportive of it. It's just a tough problem to solve when it takes a lot of money to build the structures and the structures can get wiped out in one bad weather event.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    it takes aboit 30m² of solar pannels to grow what could be grown on 1m² using direct sunlight.

    Where can I read more about this? I had thought that solar panels absorb a lot more energy than plants can, and I would think that collecting energy across a wide range of wavelengths and then using that energy to emit only specific wavelengths could give plants more useful light. But I admit I don't know how each is optimized for different wavelengths.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago

    Thank you for correcting me !

    I kept the 30x number in mind since when I worked for a horizontal farming tech company. It is incorrect thanks to the wavelength trick.

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