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.
Vertical farming only makes sense if we do it as aquaculture- but we would have to eat much more kelp
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