The goal Singapore set, and the one it kept
In November 2025 Singapore quietly retired one of its best-known policy targets. “30 by 30” — the 2019 ambition to produce 30% of the country’s nutritional needs locally by 2030 — was replaced with two targets for 2035: 20% of fibre (leafy and fruited vegetables, beansprouts, mushrooms) and 30% of protein (eggs and seafood). The arithmetic behind the retreat is stark. In 2024, local farms produced about 3% of the vegetables Singapore consumed. Fibre overall stood at 8% and protein at 26%, carried almost entirely by eggs at 34.4%; seafood managed 6.1%. Announcing the change, Minister for Sustainability and the Environment Grace Fu cited supply-chain disruption, inflation in energy and manpower costs, and a tougher financing environment. Vertical farming — the technology 30-by-30 was most closely associated with — is where that reckoning has been most visible, in both directions.
What vertical farming is supposed to solve
The case for growing upwards is Singapore’s geometry. The country imports over 90% of its food, farms less than 1% of its land, and pays some of the region’s highest prices for both land and labour. A vertical farm stacks growing layers in a climate-controlled building, replaces sunlight with LEDs and soil with hydroponic or aeroponic systems, and in principle produces an order of magnitude more per square metre than a field — pesticide-free, weather-proof, and minutes from the supermarket rather than days. The technology stack is genuinely sophisticated: growth-stage LED recipes, automated seeding and harvesting lines, AI-driven climate and nutrient control, and logistics-grade racking borrowed from warehouse automation.
What the model has struggled to solve is the operating account. Electricity for lighting and cooling in a tropical climate, capital cost per tonne of capacity, and a consumer accustomed to cheap Malaysian and Chinese greens combine into margins that have broken several well-funded operators.
The closures are the caveat
Any honest account of the sector runs through its exits. I.F.F.I closed its 38,000 sq m indoor facility in Tuas in April 2024. VertiVegies, once among the most publicised ventures, never built its planned Lim Chu Kang farm and returned the land in 2022. Most striking was Growy, the Dutch-headquartered operator whose highly automated 8,000 sq m farm at Changi Logistics Centre — rated to up to 500 tonnes of leafy greens a year and partly funded under the Singapore Food Agency’s 30x30 Express grant — entered provisional liquidation on 4 November 2025, roughly a year after its official opening, with losses widening from S$2.17 million in 2023 to S$5.5 million in 2024. The same pressure reached the sea: about a quarter of Singapore’s sea-based fish farms exited in 2024. The pattern is consistent — capacity is buildable; a cost structure that survives contact with import prices is the hard part.
The new bets are bigger, not smaller
The instructive fact is that capital keeps arriving anyway — and at larger scale. In January 2026, Greenphyto opened what it bills as the world’s tallest indoor vertical farm: a 23-metre, five-storey purpose-built facility in Jurong West, built for S$80 million on two hectares. It is rated to around 2,000 tonnes of leafy greens a year at full capacity — it currently produces about 200 tonnes — growing kailan, lettuce and other Asian greens with AI-powered robotics and growth-stage LED control, and selling through about 95 supermarkets including FairPrice and Sheng Siong. The thesis is that the failures were a scale and automation problem: drive labour out with robotics, drive yield up with height and control software, and the unit economics begin to close.
Beneath the flagship sits a quieter tier that has survived by staying niche. Artisan Green runs an indoor hydroponic farm in Kallang supplying premium leafy greens to restaurants and retail — a margin-first rather than volume-first model. Singrow goes further up the value curve, using controlled-environment systems and its own breeding technology to grow crops the tropics normally cannot, best known for a climate-resilient strawberry. The pattern across survivors: either sell something imports cannot match on freshness and premium, or something imports cannot supply at all.
What the 2035 targets actually require
The Singapore Food Agency’s latest statistics, published in May 2026, put local production at about 8% of fibre and 25% of protein consumed in 2025. Reaching 20% of fibre by 2035 therefore implies roughly two and a half times today’s vegetable output within a decade — from a sector that has just watched several of its largest facilities close. The protein target looks nearer, but it leans on an egg industry already at 34.4% self-sufficiency and a seafood sector moving the other way. The government’s own framing has shifted from headline ambition to capability-building: the 2035 goals are described as targets for what local farms should be able to supply, a formulation that acknowledges commercial reality will decide the rest.
The verdict
Vertical farming in Singapore is neither the revolution of the 2019 prospectuses nor the write-off the closures suggest. It is a capital-intensive infrastructure sector going through its first real shake-out, with the surviving models splitting into automated scale (Greenphyto), premium niche (Artisan Green) and proprietary crops (Singrow). The 30-by-30 test was failed on the original terms and honestly rescheduled. Whether the 2035 version is passed will be decided less by policy than by whether farms like the ones now on the record can sell a tonne of greens for more than it costs to grow one. The producers are listed on the indoor farming capability page.