In 2019, two researchers at the University of Arkansas did something nobody had done before: they surveyed microgreen growers across the United States. They got 176 responses. The most important number in that survey has nothing to do with varieties or yields. Of the 124 farms willing to state their revenue, 99 earned less than $10,000 a year from microgreens. Here are nine reasons the business usually does not work, each one traceable to a number you can check.
Small growers close quietly, without press releases. The documented failures in this space are the large venture backed vertical farms, and those we covered in a separate piece. For everyone else there is silence. What does exist is data showing the mechanics of failure, and the mechanics repeat.
The survey half this article rests on
One source, worth naming in full: Gina Misra and Kristen E. Gibson, “Characterization of Microgreen Growing Operations and Associated Food Safety Practices,” Food Protection Trends, volume 41, number 1, 2021, pages 56 to 69. The work was done at the University of Arkansas with USDA funding. It remains the first and only national survey of the US microgreens industry.
The questionnaire was open from October 1, 2018 through March 30, 2019. It drew 142 complete responses plus 34 partial ones, 176 total. Every percentage in the paper uses 176 as the denominator, which means people who skipped a question stay in the denominator rather than getting dropped. That is the honest way to do it, and it matters when you read the percentages.
Now the weaknesses, which the authors state themselves. They recruited through Facebook groups and Reddit, seed supplier mailing lists, and roughly eighty direct emails. That skews the sample toward small and beginning growers, and Misra and Gibson say so plainly. When they did reach commercial scale farms by direct email, those farms mostly declined to answer; two said outright they did not want to share trade secrets with competitors.
There is a second caveat about volume. Respondents who answered in trays were converted to pounds at 0.46 pounds per 1020 tray, a figure derived by averaging typical yields across seven varieties. The authors call that conversion “error prone” and add that some respondents may have entered whole farm production instead of microgreen production alone.
So here is the scope. The survey shows how the mass of small growers operates. It does not show how the industry as a whole operates. That is exactly how I use it below.
One detail for anyone who goes to the source. The abstract says “<10,000 USD/year in microgreen revenue (62%).” Table 2 gives 71 farms in the bottom bracket and 28 in the next one, which is 99. That is 56 percent of 176, or 80 percent of the 124 who answered. Neither figure is 62. I could not reconstruct where 62 comes from, so I use the table, which is internally consistent: 71 plus 28 plus 10 plus 9 plus 6 equals 124, another 18 declined to state revenue, another 34 did not answer, totaling exactly 176.
Three reasons visible in the revenue numbers
Reason one: 99 of 124 farms never reached $10,000
Here is the full revenue table with monthly production alongside it. The n column is the number of farms in each bracket.
| Microgreen revenue, USD/year | n | lb/month |
|---|---|---|
| under 5,000 | 71 | 14.7 |
| 5,000 to 9,999 | 28 | 45.2 |
| 10,000 to 24,999 | 10 | 97.5 |
| 25,000 to 49,999 | 9 | 420.4 |
| over 50,000 | 6 | 7,629 |
Seventy one farms out of 124 make under $5,000 a year on microgreens. That is less than $14 a day before a single expense comes out. Another 28 sit between $5,000 and $10,000. Together those 99 farms are four fifths of everyone who gave a number at all.
Put that next to the University of Missouri enterprise budget G693, which we worked through in detail in our profit per tray analysis. That budget puts income over total costs between $5.84 and $19.45 per 1020 tray depending on the crop. At 14.7 pounds a month, the bottom bracket is running somewhere between 16 and 29 trays a month. Two independent sources, and they describe the same very small operation.
Reason two: the jump to the top bracket is 18x, not a step
Look at the right column again. From 14.7 to 45.2 pounds is roughly triple. To 97.5 is double again. To 420.4 is a little over four times. Then comes 7,629 pounds a month, which is 18.1 times the bracket below it.
A jump that size means the top bracket runs on different rules. It is a different operation with different equipment and different logistics, rather than a bigger version of the farm below it. There is no gradual path in this data, and that is where most scaling plans die. A grower calculates that doubling the rack doubles the income, then hits a ceiling that was invisible from the starting line.
In fairness: the standard deviations in the top two brackets exceed the means. The over $50,000 bracket is 7,629 plus or minus 8,635 pounds across six farms. The spread inside the bracket is enormous, so the mean there is a marker rather than a measurement. The cliff between brackets is real, but those six farms cannot tell you how tall it is.
Reason three: seven employees on a farm earning under $5,000
The strangest table in the survey is this one.
| Microgreen revenue, USD/year | n | employees on the farm, average |
|---|---|---|
| under 5,000 | 27 | 7 |
| 5,000 to 9,999 | 19 | 4 |
| 10,000 to 24,999 | 7 | 6 |
| 25,000 to 49,999 | 3 | 3 |
| over 50,000 | 5 | 128 |
A farm in the bottom bracket carries seven people on average and earns under $5,000 a year from microgreens. That works out to about $700 per person per year.
The question asked “How many total employees work at your farm?”, meaning the whole farm rather than the microgreens side. That is the explanation, and it is worse than the arithmetic looked. Microgreens on these operations are a sideline attached to a larger farm. The survey confirms it from another angle: only 24 percent grow microgreens alone, 31 percent also grow other vegetables, and 10 percent grow vegetables and livestock both.
If your plan is to live off microgreens, this is the most important number in the article. Three quarters of the people doing it live off something else.
Three reasons built into how it is grown
Reason four: the top bracket does not use stacked shelves at all
Forty percent of respondents grow in trays on stacked shelves under artificial light. That is the picture in every startup video: racks stacked one above another, LED strips, trays in rows.
Now the finding, in the paper’s own words: farms earning over $50,000 a year from microgreens did not use trays on stacked shelves, while at least half of every other revenue bracket did. The dominant methods in the top bracket were unstacked container farms at 50 percent and hydroponic systems at 16.7 percent.
Six farms is a thin basis and I am not going to turn it into a law. But the direction is unambiguous. Stacked shelves under lights are a starting tool, and the top bracket does not run on them. Anyone planning to scale on the same rack is planning to scale on a method that the successful bracket has already left behind.
Reason five: a farm the size of a studio apartment
The authors took a typical yield of 0.3 to 3 kilograms per square meter over a 10 to 14 day cycle and worked out how much space the bottom bracket needs. The answer was 4.4 to 44 square meters, roughly 47 to 474 square feet. Their own description: anywhere from a midsized walk in closet up to an average American studio apartment.
For contrast they cite California sprout operations producing 318 to nearly 40,000 kilograms a week. The gap between those two worlds is not a gap in effort or knowledge.
The single most common setup in the survey, at 26.7 percent, was residential space with stacked shelves. The typical American microgreen farm is an apartment or a garage. When that grower calculates cost per tray, rent is zero, because the space is already paid for by living in it. The moment they decide to grow, a rent line appears all at once, and the economics that worked at home stop working.
Reason six: they learned from videos
Where respondents learned to grow microgreens:
- websites and online videos, 48.3%
- informally from other growers, 12.5%
- books and magazines, 9.1%
- social media groups, 8%
Read this one carefully, and the authors do. They recruited online, so internet learners had a better chance of landing in the sample. The 48.3 figure is almost certainly inflated.
Discount it and something still remains. This is a young industry: 75 percent of the farms surveyed opened after 2010, and there is nobody to do the teaching. No trade school, no settled body of practice, no established textbook. What there is instead is a video showing a rack and a 474 percent return calculated without labor, electricity, or spoilage. That arithmetic is what delivers people into the bottom bracket.
Three reasons waiting outside the farm
Reason seven: profit per tray swings 3.3x between crops on one price list
The University of Missouri budget G693 prices out five microgreen crops on the same 1020 tray, same rack, same 10 to 14 days, same $5.00 labor line. Income over total costs per tray:
| Crop | Sales, $ | Seed, $ | Total costs, $ | Income over total costs, $ |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cabbage | 60.00 | 4.00 | 40.55 | 19.45 |
| Broccoli | 46.00 | 1.04 | 31.64 | 14.36 |
| Mix | 46.00 | 1.04 | 31.80 | 14.20 |
| Radish | 32.00 | 2.00 | 26.16 | 5.84 |
Cabbage returns $19.45 a tray, radish returns $5.84. Same shelf, same cycle, 3.3 times the money.
The pea column is missing from that table on purpose. G693 budgets 0.79 ounces of pea seed per 1020 tray against a market yield of 200 to 275 grams, which overstates pea profit by more than four times. We documented that error when we rebuilt the budget, and the other four crops check out against the Johnny’s field trial ounce for ounce.
Here is the part worth sitting with. All four crops in that budget are already priced at exactly $4.00 an ounce. The single price list is not a mistake the grower has to make later; it is the baseline assumption, and the 3.3x gap opens anyway, because yield per tray and seed cost per tray move independently of each other. Cabbage yields 15.0 ounces, radish yields 8.0, and radish needs twice the seed spend to get there. A handful of simple metrics tracked separately for each crop is what catches a gap like that early, and the wiki lists which ones in its article on growing KPIs worth tracking.
Reason eight: pack size moves the price, the crop does not
This one comes from our own shelf data rather than from the US survey, so take it as a European price observation. In September 2026 we pulled 52 retail microgreen listings, 49 of them with a stated pack weight, and normalized every one to price per 100 grams.
The spread by pack size was 5.4 to 1. The spread by crop was 1.2 to 1. A 200 gram pack worked out to the lowest price per 100 grams on the shelf; a 45 gram pack worked out to the highest, from the same producer, in the same store, on the same day.
Two conclusions follow. Competing on crop selection is close to pointless, because the market does not pay a premium for it. And your packaging decision moves revenue more than your variety and growing method combined. The full price breakdown by chain and pack size is a separate article.
Reason nine: eaten raw, exempt from the rule
Fresh produce safety in the US falls under the Produce Safety Rule, 21 CFR Part 112. Growers averaging under $25,000 a year in produce sales over three years are exempt. Compare that threshold with the revenue table: at least 99 of the 124 farms that gave a number fall below it.
The practice answers show what that means on the ground. Asked “Do you test your soil or growing media for bacteria?”, 87.5 percent of 104 respondents said no. Across all 176, 46.6 percent do no water treatment of any kind.
Now the precise wording, because it is easy to overstate here. There are no documented outbreaks tied to microgreens. There have been recalls: several since 2016 in the United States and Canada, for Salmonella and Listeria monocytogenes. One named case in the paper’s reference list is the Greenbelt Microgreens recall for Listeria monocytogenes, issued by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency on April 30, 2018.
For a large company a recall is a loss and a bad quarter. For a bottom bracket grower selling to restaurants and farmers markets under their own name, one recall is the end of the business. Low probability, total consequence. Those are the risks people underweight most.
What to do about it
None of this says microgreens cannot make money. It says they make money under fairly narrow conditions, and those conditions are worth testing before you buy equipment rather than after. A state grant does not remove that test: Ukraine’s greenhouse grant covers up to 50 percent of project cost, not the 70 the ministry advertises.
- Cost every crop separately instead of averaging. A 3.3x spread in profit per tray survives no blended number.
- Price from pack size, not from crop. On the shelf, the pack is what moves price per 100 grams by a factor of five.
- Confirm your buyers before you add volume. An 18x gap between brackets means gradual scaling is not on the menu.
- Put your own labor in at a market rate. The bottom bracket pays about $700 per person per year, which is why it only survives as a sideline.
- Write your procedures down while the operation is still small. Handwashing, storage, lot codes, seed provenance. It costs nothing and it covers the one risk that closes a farm in a single day.
The short version
Ninety nine farms out of 124 earn under $10,000 a year from microgreens. Seventy one earn under $5,000 while carrying seven people on the farm. The top bracket produces 18 times more than the one below it and does not use the stacked shelves everyone else runs on. The typical operation fits in a walk in closet, its owner learned from videos, and at one flat price per ounce the weakest crop on the list returns a third of what the strongest does.
Not one of these failures is about laziness or about not knowing how to grow. Every one of them is arithmetic you can see coming, if you run it before you start. How many farms are in the category at all was counted for the first time in the federal microgreens census: 516 operations, $86.4 million.
