Plenty closes Compton farm in ‘strategic shift’ to berries

Less than two years after it opened, San Francisco-based vertical farm Plenty Ag is closing its Compton, CA, facility.  

The company said in a LinkedIn post that it is undergoing a “strategic shift” to strawberries.  

“This is a bittersweet moment in Plenty’s journey,” the company said in the post. “Compton was our first commercial farm and marked our transition from a startup to a scaling business. But the rising cost of doing business in California, including climbing energy prices, made operating here challenging. Closing this chapter was not a decision we made lightly, but it was a necessary step as we shift our focus to strawberries.”  

Plenty is partnered with Watsonville, CA-based Driscoll’s. The companies recently opened a 40,000-square-foot Richmond, VA-based facility that is expected to produce up to 4 million pounds of strawberries annually.  

The company outlined reasons for the shift to strawberries in the post:   

“Plenty’s future is in growing strawberries because they fill a supply gap, provide a locally grown product with peak-season flavor year-round, and command a premium price,” the company said. “While most vertical farms are limited to lettuces, Plenty spent the past decade designing a modular growing system flexible enough to support a wide variety of crops.”  

Plenty’s Compton farm was backed by a $400 million investment from Bentonville, AR-based Walmart Inc., which included an agreement for Plenty to supply leafy greens to Walmart stores in California.