The problem here is that in many cases, you're replacing things that have historically been free (light, water, air) with things that are not free (LED lights,

The problem here is that in many cases, you're replacing things that have historically been free (light, water, air) with things that are not free (LED lights, irrigation systems, exhaust/air circulators). The increase in complexity also incurs a lot of additional overhead costs. Modern "horizontal" farming is already largely automated; so vertical farming doesn't deliver any savings on that front. Don't get me wrong -- I am a fan of vertical farming and I think that it's an important technology for us to develop because we're going to eventually trash the planet and we need some way to grow food -- but there are way too many economic problems with it for it to be much more than a novelty right now. IMO the most promising near-term use case is marijuana - there are already regulatory reasons to incur most of the costs of vertical farming, so it's less of a disadvantage (not to mention that high-grade stuff has to be grown indoors to prevent cross-pollenation).