Imagine walking into one of the towering buildings in the Chicago Loop.
You ride the elevator up a dozen floors. When the doors open, a faint earthy smell greets you. Stepping off the elevator, instead of rows of cubicles, you find racks of vegetables growing under LED lights in the office.
That’s the vision Russell Steinberg has for downtown Chicago office spaces.
Steinberg is the founder of Farm Zero, one of a few vertical farming companies around Chicago. Nearly a decade ago, vertical farming became part of an agricultural technology craze, introducing a new way of growing crops indoors using stacked trays set up under artificial lighting, hydroponics and tightly controlled environments.
But since then, the industry has seen mixed success. A handful of companies have shuttered because of unsustainable business models amid high energy and infrastructure costs, urban agriculture experts say.
Despite that, Steinberg believes Farm Zero has one major advantage: the location of his farm.
“We need to produce healthy food inside the center of the city,” said Steinberg, who grew up in Riverwoods in Lake County.
Most vertical farms around Chicago have historically operated in large warehouses away from downtown, according to Kevin Erickson, an urban agriculture instructor at Loyola University Chicago. Farm Zero’s facility is on the 18th floor of an office tower at 30 N. LaSalle St.
“My impression is that they are one of the first, if not the first, downtown Loop-based operations distributing mostly within the downtown Chicago area,” Erickson said.
Since construction finished in 2024, the farm’s central location has allowed it to partner with several companies headquartered in the Loop, including caterers, healthcare partners and restaurants, according to Steinberg.
One of Farm Zero’s biggest customers has been Blue Plate, a large-scale Chicago caterer. Charles Haracz, the executive chef at Blue Plate, said the company buys between 30 and 60 pounds of produce every week, including microgreens, lettuces and pea shoots.
Some of the workplaces he has served have been just streets away from Farm Zero.
“We’re really looking for local, clean ingredients, fresh food. … I think we have an opportunity at Blue Plate to change how people eat and think about food,” Haracz said.
Empty office spaces
Steinberg’s idea for Farm Zero first emerged during the pandemic, when downtown office buildings in Chicago began to empty out.
Data from the real estate firm CBRE showed downtown office vacancy was 13.8% at the start of the pandemic but jumped to 21.4% by the end of 2022.
Up to that point, Steinberg said he had never worked in farming. He graduated from Purdue University studying finance and spent most of his career in the insurance advisory business.
He remembers first exploring the idea of vertical farms after a friend complained about a bell pepper from a grocery store that was rotten and had worms in it. He said that conversation led him to start studying different food systems, like Singapore’s Green Plan 30 by 30, which aimed to grow 30% of its food locally by 2030 through exploring more technological farming solutions. The government has since revised those targets to focus on increasing local production of fibers and proteins by 2035.
The 45-year-old said he initially considered building a small greenhouse in Lakeshore East, a Loop development where he lives with his wife and two children.
“ There was obviously a need for some high-quality, healthy vegetables inside the city, and I thought it would be a good idea and a nice thing for Lakeshore East to have a food production system, even on a small scale,” Steinberg said.
Steinberg, who has played in Chicago’s Downtown Real Estate Softball League since 2003, said he also floated the idea with some of his teammates. One of them was his longtime friend and real estate developer Lee Golub.
“COVID hit, all the offices closed. … What’s going to happen with all this obsolete office space?” Golub recalled Steinberg asking. “The easiest part of this whole equation is that there’s office space everywhere. There’s a lot of it.”
Even after the pandemic, many older office spaces struggled to attract tenants back, Golub said. The pair then saw an opportunity: These indoor spaces already had the infrastructure needed for indoor farming, including water, electricity and HVAC systems.
“We want to be right in the heart of the city, because every building has that,” Golub said.
With the start of Farm Zero, Steinberg said he saw a window to deliver fresh produce around downtown. He started courting investors and speaking with urban agriculture experts around the world, including those in the Netherlands, one of Europe’s leading countries in vertical farming.
Indoor and local growing
In June 2024, Farm Zero moved into its first location on LaSalle. After receiving a special-use permit from Chicago’s Department of Planning and Development, the company built a 1,000-square-foot farm.
The staff currently grows four main types of plants: microgreens, leafy greens, herbs and edible flowers. The farm is organized almost like a production line, with five people overseeing operations.
After the seeds are germinated, the plants are brought into a room designed to simulate ideal growing conditions, complete with elaborate LED lighting, water and irrigation management systems.
“The environment is so stable that when we build our controlled environment, it creates what is effectively a panic room and a spa for the plants,” Steinberg said.
After a few weeks, the plants are brought into a preparation area, where they are harvested, washed and packaged, Steinberg said.
Because most of the produce is highly perishable, the team acts quickly. Typically, the products are delivered within 48 hours to Farm Zero’s partner restaurants, companies or healthcare programs across downtown Chicago, Steinberg said.
The company sells food to the University of Chicago Medicine and University of Illinois College of Medicine for their healthcare programs, Steinberg said. It provides workplace dining services for organizations such as Jump Trading, Tempus AI and Uber, as well as restaurants like Bazaar Meat and NoMI.
Farm Zero also donates food to the Chicago High School for Agricultural Sciences. As part of the partnership, roughly 30 to 40 students participate in tours, informational sessions and hands-on activities at the farm each year, according to William Hook, the school’s principal.
“The kids come back really optimistic and hopeful,” Hook said. “The concept of having production right in the backyard of consumers is just really impressive, especially when you think about eliminating that carbon footprint.”
Compared with Farm Zero, Haracz, the Blue Plate chef, said most of the produce he sees in grocery stores around town is sourced from out of state. Many of the vegetables are grown in California, Canada, Mexico or areas of South America, some of the U.S.’ main import partners. But he said he would much rather use fresher ingredients like those from Farm Zero, which he can receive hours after they’ve been harvested.
“We really don’t have a lot of opportunities in Chicago or the Midwest. I have to buy from California because there aren’t many other options,” Haracz said. “The future is growing more food indoors and locally, I think that’s a huge opportunity.”
Vegetables are grown on only 0.2% of Illinois farmland, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, based on crop acreage recorded in Illinois’ 2022 Census of Agriculture.
Because of the nature of vertical farming, Farm Zero can also produce crops year-round, which experts say could help meet Chicago’s demand for fresh food.
“There aren’t many growers in the Midwest that can satisfy those orders, especially during the winter,” said Erickson, the Loyola agriculture instructor. “That creates a major opportunity for year-round production because most food production still happens during only three seasons of the year.”
Expansion plans
Today there are more than 890 urban farms around the Chicago area, according to the Chicago Urban Agriculture Mapping Project. In the 42nd Ward, where the Loop is primarily represented, only six farms exist across the area, the data shows.
Some of the other vertical farming companies around Chicago include Gotham Greens, which operates two greenhouses in Pullman, and MightyVine based in Rochelle.
Many vertical farms, however, have struggled over the years. Most commonly, companies have failed to adjust to high energy and operational costs, according to Kheir Al-Kodmany, an urban planning professor at the University of Illinois Chicago. Vertical farming is also limited in the types of produce it can grow compared with traditional farms, he said.
“Technology is successful, no questions about that, but the energy and operational costs are really in question,” Al-Kodmany said. “There is little variety in production, most of it is leafy greens and microgreens.”
In the next few years, Steinberg said that Farm Zero will partner with several Dutch companies to explore expanding their portfolio to other crops like tomatoes, berries, peppers and cucumbers.
Farm Zero is close to approaching its break-even point on the first farm, Steinberg said. The company expects to reach around $300,000 in revenue and plans to continue expanding to two additional locations in the next year, he said.
“The amount of water we use versus a typical tenant is probably less because we recycle it, and it gets to be about 92 to 94% reusable,” said Golub, one of the company’s earliest investors. “The amount of electricity we are separately metered … we have all the infrastructure in any office building.”
Farm Zero will begin construction on a new farm at 125 S. Wacker Drive in July, with the facility expected to be seven to 10 times larger than the current operation and completed by this fall, Steinberg said. The company also plans to open another spot at 401 S. State St. by summer 2027.
At the 30 N. LaSalle location, Steinberg said the farm will soon be moved onto the 19th floor because parts of the building are being redeveloped for affordable housing.
Steinberg eventually hopes his business can expand into other downtown areas and set a precedent for similar hubs across the country.
He believes there is demand to repurpose abandoned office space into hyperlocal food networks for city residents.
“My dream is to have 50 million square feet of office space converted to farms throughout the country by 2050,” Steinberg said.
Jerry Wu is a freelancer.