The transition to vertical farming, would IMHO, allow regular farmland to transition to forest — which would help offset carbon — and reduce the cost for regular farmers bc the crops would grown in a more-controlled environment. So, what’s the holdup?
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Plants need sunlight to grow. Sunlight is free. When you start putting farm plots on top of each other (vertically), you have to provide artificial light for each plot – that drives complexity and cost.
Then you have other factors that are complicated in a vertical farm: irrigation and nutrient distribution (how to make sure water stays where it’s needed instead of being pulled by gravity), harvesting (special machinery is needed to get the crops instead of a simple tractor + attachments), and so on. All that increases the cost by an order of magnitude compared to traditional farming.
To transition, we would need a few radical inventions that would make things cheaper and simpler – currently these aren’t available and the incentives aren’t there yet. It may all change once we start losing arable land to the climate change though.
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