What is always left unsaid in the article: they're farming lettuce, a food that has 59 calories per head and is 95% water. One can hardly call that farming in

What is always left unsaid in the article: they're farming lettuce, a food that has 59 calories per head and is 95% water. One can hardly call that farming in the sense of the word people expect when hearing about robot-run farms. This thing doesn't really produce meaningful food, it produces fluff in a salad, i.e. when you eat half a lettuce on any given day, you'd get about 1% of your calories that day from lettuce. Further, the robotisation isn't really meaningfully new, either. Controlling lighting conditions for food? Old news. Moving around plants with machinery? Old news. It doesn't get much fancier than that. For example this factory-farm still requires you to plant the seeds yourself, no giant innovations here. Is it cool? Absolutely, and it's fun to explore. But I'm not seeing the thesis on a new way of farming that I'm hoping to see. The economics and sustainability of traditional farming, when done well, seems overwhelmingly better, and the practicalities of producing real food in meaningful quantities, economically and sustainably, in an automised facility, is far away and quite different from this project. Lastly, as most Guardian articles on tech, completely devoid of technical/economic details. What's the lettuce going to cost? Who knows.