Not all produce growing operations look the same. Some are indoors with the plants growing out of the walls, while others are nestled in cities rather than rural landscapes. The Packer covered interesting developments there as well in 2025 and will continue doing so in 2026.
Readers can look forward to more of The Packer’s Jill Dutton’s ongoing “Sowing Change” series focused on urban farming in 2026, for instance. When she kicked off the series in February, she profiled an urban farm in Kansas City, Mo., that was dealing with some of the most quintessentially urban problems: City codes, zoning regs, and NIMBY neighbors.
That story, though still in progress, didn’t go the way the urban farmers had hoped; their rezoning bid was denied, and the city required yet more costly changes to survive. But not all urban farming stories in 2025 went that way.
In a May installment of the series, Dutton highlighted how a new generation of Black farmers is changing the future of urban agriculture. She profiled Black, urban farmers in Chicago, Atlanta, Mississippi Delta, and Los Angeles, and looked at how their efforts and innovations are working to reclaim land, build food sovereignty and strengthen communities.
“Our ancestors’ legacy lives through us as we try to balance the scales for food equity and urban societies,” said one source. Another said they want the next generation of Black children and those beyond to reengage with agriculture, regardless of where they are.
In another May installment, Dutton interviewed an undercover-billionaire-turned-urban-farmer who seeks to unite trains and farms. By turning abandoned rail depots into local food hubs that connect farmers directly to consumers, Elaine Culotti hopes to turn forgotten train systems into a lifeline for the country’s farmers and food-insecure communities.
Dutton also interviewed the country’s youngest certified farmer in late September as part of the “Sowing Change” series. Ten-year-old Kendall Rae Johnson’s passion for ag started at age 3 and grew from there. At age 6, she became a certified farmer. At 9 she was offered a full-ride scholarship in agriculture from South Carolina State University.
Today, Kendall is a USDA National Urban Agriculture Youth Ambassador with a 1-acre garden and volunteered patches of land by supportive area farmers where she grows collard greens for her community. She wants to share her experience to help other kids interested in agriculture.
“I want them to know they can dream big, and with the right tools and support, we can make those dreams come true,” she told Dutton.
Vertical and indoor farms took the stage too
Some urban farms embrace the city so much, they’ve gone indoors. A couple of The Packer’s top stories in 2025 focused on controlled environment agriculture, a seemingly growing segment of the industry.
In February, The Packer’s Jenn Strailey looked to the north — Onterio, Canada, specifically — to report on gains made in the greenhouse industry there. The Canadian province is home to the largest concentration of greenhouse vegetable production in North America, and also conveniently only a day’s drive from over 58% of the U.S. population, according to one of her sources.
“As we deal with climate change globally, greenhouse farming is able to yield up to 20 times more per square meter than conventional farming,” he said. “We are able to control the growing conditions in harsh climates while producing food.”
The CEA coverage continued in March, when Strailey wrote about the two perennial stories playing out in the vertical farming industry yet again, one of bankruptcy and another of extreme growth. But the two stories actually tell an overall tale of progress in vertical farming, according to sources.
The progress is a result of the industry’s growing pains. A decade ago, vertical farmers struggled with taking too much of the wrong kind of money and trying to be tech experts before farmers. The successes of today however are learning how to scale their technology and their funds in a sustainable way, according to Strailey’s sources.
These were the top six stories on urban and indoor farming that The Packer covered in 2025. But there were, and will be, many other articles dealing with urban agriculture and indoor or vertical farming, too.
