What Crops Grow in Iceland? From Fields to Greenhouses

Iceland grows far more than most people expect from a subarctic island sitting just below the Arctic Circle. Barley dominates the outdoor grain harvest, forage grasses blanket the lowlands to feed sheep and horses, and geothermal greenhouses produce tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, and herbs year-round. Wild berries like crowberries and bilberries round out what the land offers. Still, the country imports roughly half of its daily calories, so what Iceland can and does produce is a story shaped by volcanic soil, extreme daylight swings, and cheap geothermal heat.

The Soil Beneath Everything

Before you can understand Icelandic farming, you need to know what the ground is made of. Every soil in Iceland traces back to volcanic parent material. Most are classified as Andosols, a soil type built from layers of tephra, wind-blown volcanic glass, and minerals like allophane and ferrihydrite. Iceland holds the largest area of Andosols in Europe and may contain more than five percent of all the Andosols on Earth.¹ These soils have some useful qualities for agriculture: low bulk density, high water retention, and good drainage. But they also lock up phosphorus aggressively, which can limit plant nutrition, and their structure tends to be weak and granular at the surface, making them vulnerable to wind erosion.

Wetlands cover about 23,000 square kilometers of the country, yet true organic soils (Histosols) occupy only about 1,300 square kilometers. The reason is that volcanic ash and wind-blown sediment constantly dilute organic matter before it can accumulate.² For farmers, this means the productive land is concentrated in sheltered lowland valleys where erosion is less severe and the growing season, though short, offers enough warmth for cool-season crops.

Barley, Iceland’s Flagship Grain

Barley is the only cereal grain grown at any meaningful scale in Icelandic fields. The crop has deep roots on the island. Archaeological evidence from central Reykjavík shows that Viking-age settlers cultivated six-row hulled barley over a thousand years ago, with grain assemblages recovered from sites like Lækjargata containing well over a thousand identifiable barley kernels.³ Grain cultivation eventually declined during the Little Ice Age, when colder temperatures made reliable harvests impossible. It did not return in a serious way until the twentieth century.

Modern Icelandic barley production is modest. In 2014, farmers produced just under 14,000 tonnes of barley grain, while cereal imports that same year reached nearly 80,000 tonnes.³ The gap illustrates a basic constraint: Icelandic summers are cool and short, and barley needs to mature fast. Breeding research has focused on finding varieties that flower and ripen early enough to beat the onset of autumn weather. Recent genetic work identified that certain allele combinations in Icelandic spring barley can push maturity significantly earlier without a severe drop in yield, offering a path toward more reliable harvests in the country’s narrow growing window.⁴

Barley grown in Iceland goes to animal feed, small-scale milling for bread and porridge, and a handful of craft distilleries and breweries that market “Icelandic-grown” grain as a selling point. Wheat and oats are occasionally trialed in warmer southern districts, but neither has established a consistent presence in national production figures.

Forage Grasses and Hay

The single biggest use of Icelandic farmland is not food for people but feed for animals. Sheep farming has been the backbone of rural Iceland for centuries, and the country also maintains a large population of Icelandic horses. Keeping these animals through long, dark winters requires enormous quantities of preserved forage. For the past few decades, the standard seed mix for Icelandic hay fields has been roughly half timothy grass, a quarter Kentucky bluegrass, and a quarter fescue.⁵ These cool-season grasses tolerate Icelandic conditions well and produce enough biomass during the long summer days to be cut, dried or wrapped, and stored.

Most preserved forage today is plastic-wrapped haylage rather than traditional dry hay. This method works better in Iceland’s damp climate, where drying hay outdoors is unreliable. An estimated two-thirds of stabled horses are fed this kind of wrapped forage, and the proportion for sheep is similarly high.⁵ The grasslands themselves are fertilized and managed intensively on better farms, but soil erosion and degradation from overgrazing remain persistent problems in upland areas, where the fragile Andosol surface can be stripped bare by wind once vegetation cover is lost.

Geothermal Greenhouses and What Grows Inside Them

Iceland’s greenhouse sector is the reason the country can grow tomatoes, cucumbers, bell peppers, lettuce, herbs, strawberries, and even the occasional bunch of bananas. The entire industry is built on geothermal energy, using steam or hot water piped directly from the ground to heat glass-walled growing houses. Annual geothermal energy use in Icelandic greenhouses runs to roughly 216 gigawatt-hours per year, accounting for about 80 percent of all geothermal and hydroelectric energy directed at horticulture.⁶ This cheap heat is the foundation that makes greenhouse growing economically viable at 64 degrees north latitude.

Heating alone is not enough, though. During the Icelandic winter, daylight drops to as few as four or five hours, which is not enough for most vegetable crops. Greenhouses compensate with artificial lighting, historically high-pressure sodium lamps and increasingly LED systems. Growers also pump carbon dioxide into the greenhouse atmosphere to boost photosynthesis. The combination of geothermal heat, supplemental light, and CO₂ enrichment allows production to continue throughout the year, independent of outdoor conditions.⁷ In summer, the equation flips: natural daylight stretches to nearly 24 hours, growth rates surge, and electricity costs for lighting drop to almost nothing.

The main greenhouse districts are clustered around geothermal hotspots. Hveragerði, a small town in the south about 45 kilometers from Reykjavík, has been the symbolic capital of Icelandic greenhouse horticulture for decades. Other clusters exist near Reykholt in Borgarfjörður and in parts of the north where geothermal resources are accessible. Tomatoes and cucumbers are the highest-volume crops, and Icelandic greenhouse tomatoes have become a point of national pride: they are vine-ripened, grown without pesticides thanks to biological pest control, and available fresh in Reykjavík supermarkets year-round.

Making Greenhouses More Efficient

Even with essentially free heat, electricity for lighting is the largest single cost in Icelandic greenhouse operations. Modeling work has shown that switching from traditional high-pressure sodium lamps to modern LEDs can cut electricity use for lighting by about 40 percent. Adding thermal screens, which reduce heat loss through the glass at night, can cut heating demand by another 17 to 27 percent when combined with the LED switch.⁸ These gains matter because any serious expansion of domestic food production, enough to replace imported fruits and vegetables with local ones, would require far more greenhouse capacity than currently exists. If every new square meter of greenhouse can be built more efficiently from the start, expansion becomes more financially realistic.

The energy picture also ties into Iceland’s broader food security. Icelandic farmers already produce about half of the nation’s food, primarily meat, dairy, and greenhouse vegetables. But the other half arrives by ship and air, leaving the country vulnerable to supply-chain disruptions from storms, pandemics, or international trade conflicts.⁹ Researchers have found no structural barriers to expanding local cereal production, which would complement existing meat and dairy output and reduce the current reliance on imports for about half of daily caloric intake.¹⁰ The barriers that do exist are behavioral and economic: farmers need consistent demand and fair prices, and consumers need to choose local products even when imports are cheaper.

Wild Berries and Foraging

Iceland is not a forager’s paradise in the way Scandinavian forests are, but wild berries have been part of the Icelandic diet since the settlement era. Crowberries are by far the most abundant. They carpet heathlands across the country, and picking them in late summer is still a common pastime. Historically, Icelanders placed crowberries between layers of skyr, the thick cultured dairy product, and stored them through the winter as a source of vitamin C during the dark months when fresh produce was nonexistent.¹¹

Bog bilberries and true bilberries also grow wild and have traditionally been considered tastier than crowberries, though they are less plentiful. In modern Iceland, crowberries are served with skyr, stirred into soups and puddings, or mixed into the traditional blend of skyr and porridge called hræringur.¹¹ Wild Arctic thyme, angelica, and various seaweeds are also gathered, though these are used more as flavorings or supplements than staple foods. A handful of specialty producers now dry, process, or ferment these wild ingredients for sale, and they show up on upscale restaurant menus in Reykjavík as part of a broader “New Nordic” culinary identity.

Potatoes and Root Vegetables

Potatoes deserve separate mention because they are the one outdoor vegetable crop grown at a meaningful scale in Iceland. Cool-season root crops like potatoes, turnips, and rutabagas do reasonably well in Icelandic summers, particularly in the warmer southern lowlands. Potatoes arrived in Iceland in the eighteenth century and became a staple fairly quickly, partly because they tolerate the short growing season and the volcanic soils. Icelandic potatoes tend to be small, with a texture influenced by the mineral content of Andosol soils, and they are a fixture on dinner tables alongside lamb and fish.

Carrots, cabbage, and rhubarb are also cultivated outdoors in small quantities. Rhubarb is especially popular and grows vigorously during the long daylight hours of June and July. These crops occupy a relatively small total acreage compared to forage grasses, but they matter for household consumption and local food culture. A few farmers have experimented with growing cauliflower and kale outdoors with some success, though these remain niche operations rather than commercial staples.

Spirulina and Emerging Possibilities

One of the more unexpected things being produced in Iceland is spirulina, the blue-green algae sold worldwide as a nutritional supplement. A production facility at the Hellisheiði geothermal park grows spirulina in enclosed photobioreactors powered entirely by renewable energy. The setup draws on geothermal electricity for lighting, hot and cold water streams for temperature control, freshwater for cultivation, and captured CO₂ for feeding the algae.¹² Proponents argue that geothermally powered spirulina could serve as a resource-efficient, zero-carbon protein source, a potential alternative to conventional livestock protein in some dietary contexts.

Vertical farming and indoor hydroponic operations have also gained a small foothold. Several startups in the Reykjavík area grow leafy greens and microgreens in climate-controlled warehouses using LED lighting and geothermal heat. These operations are tiny by international standards, but they illustrate the same principle that drives the greenhouse sector: when your energy is cheap, renewable, and already hot, growing food indoors becomes a more rational proposition than it would be almost anywhere else.

Why More Does Not Grow Outdoors

The limiting factors for Icelandic outdoor agriculture are straightforward but difficult to overcome. Average summer temperatures in the warmest districts barely reach 12 to 13 degrees Celsius. The frost-free window is narrow, often only three to four months, and can shorten dramatically in poor years. Wind is relentless and drives soil erosion, particularly on degraded uplands where sheep grazing over centuries has stripped vegetation. The volcanic soils lock up phosphorus, requiring regular fertilization. And daylight, while abundant in summer, vanishes in winter: crops that need a long season simply cannot finish their growth cycle before the first frost.

These constraints explain why wheat, corn, soybeans, rice, and most tree fruits are absent from Icelandic agriculture. Even barley, the hardiest cereal cultivated there, fails in some years. Climate warming has extended the growing season somewhat and pushed the viable zone for barley northward, but the shift so far has been incremental rather than transformative. A few degrees of warming help, but Iceland will remain a marginal environment for grain crops by any standard global measure.

How Icelandic Agriculture Compares to Other Subarctic Regions

Iceland is not the only place where people farm at high latitudes. Northern Norway, Finland, and parts of Alaska and Siberia all face similar challenges of cold, short seasons and limited soil fertility. What sets Iceland apart is the geothermal advantage. Norway has hydropower but not the same tradition of piping hot water directly into greenhouses from the ground below. Finland grows barley successfully farther inland where summers are warmer, but it lacks Iceland’s access to essentially free greenhouse heat. Alaska has experimented with season-extension greenhouses but does not have Iceland’s geothermal density. The result is that Iceland punches above its weight in greenhouse vegetable production relative to its latitude and population, while lagging behind warmer subarctic areas in outdoor grain and root crop yields.

The geothermal resource also creates a kind of agricultural duality that is unusual worldwide. Outdoors, Iceland is a marginal farming environment where barley sometimes fails and only the hardiest root vegetables and grasses thrive. Indoors, it grows tomatoes, cucumbers, and peppers at commercial scale, with banana plants thriving in a few specialty houses. This split between outdoor austerity and indoor abundance defines Icelandic food production more than any single crop or practice.