> What agriculture really needs is an effective way to make and keep decent soil. After that its water management, after that is pest management. If you can mak

> What agriculture really needs is an effective way to make and keep decent soil. After that its water management, after that is pest management. If you can make an automated, sustainable & cheap way to do that, you'll be actually helping the world. Isn't this exactly what vertical farms solve in a single move? The automated part is extremely hard to do in a field, wind, rain, UV and sheer sq footage all work against you. We pretty much nailed automated warehouses at this point, vertical farms are just a re-implmentation of that technology for agriculture. Humanity has spent close to 10 millenia at this point improving and optimising agriculture. I think it fair to say that we've made all of the major breakthroughs for farming in a field at this point, and if we want to see a step change in food production efficiency and reliability (which we need if we intend to feed 8-12 billion mouths) then we need to start looking beyond traditional farms. We know there won't be enough arable land in the world to feed everyone in world 50-100 years from now using any currently known techniques, and climate change is only making that worse by reducing the amount of arable land available. Being able to build high efficiently (both in terms of land and energy) farming systems is incredibly important. Being able to move to a system where almost all of the energy input is electricity opens up a whole world of new possibilities. Allowing us to build farms almost anywhere without regard for the local climate, and with our electricity production becoming increasingly carbon neutral it'll allow these farms to have little to no environmental impact on the world. One your other points: > Monocultures are spectacularly fragile. You have to be extraordinarily careful about your air system to ensure that you don't suddenly loose your crop to aphids/greenfly/other. Thats also not counting fungus or bacteria. True but we know how to build controlled environments inside of factories. Just look at microprocessor fabrication. This is a completely solved problem already. > None of this is good for the environment. It takes a huge amount of resources to setup, keep heated and lit. Modern building insulation is basically magic. Once you get it hot the first time, the energy to keep it hot is negligible. Additionally you can site these farms near natural geothermal sources etc, you don't need to put them in perfect climates. Same applies for electricity, put them near hydro, wind or even solar farms. Pick a place where the input resources are easily and readily accessible.