> The vertical farms that have been commercially active for several years all focus on the same crops. These are agricultural products with a high water content

> The vertical farms that have been commercially active for several years all focus on the same crops. These are agricultural products with a high water content, such as lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, and herbs. However, these are not crops that can feed a city. They contain hardly any carbohydrates, proteins, or fats. To feed a city, it takes grains, legumes, root crops, and oil crops. They may not "feed a city" in a raw caloric/survival sense, but they're certainly consumed in cities and if that continues to be true, they'll be grown somewhere. The question shouldn't be "can we grow subsistence crops vertically?" Rather, the question is whether vertical farming can provide any crop more efficiently along any of several axes (and at sufficient scale for us to bother talking about). If something can be usefully grown vertically, netting us realizable gains in terms of cost, land use, freshness, price, carbon, or some other metric, then by all means, why not?