IS VERTICAL FARMING A WASTE OF TIME AND MONEY? UNEQUIVOCALLY NOT AND HERE’S WHY........Now, anyone who has ever dabbled in CEA (controlled-environment agriculture) – of which vertical farming is a subset – will understand empirically that the degree of achievable success in growing certain plants within indoor environments oftentimes exceeds that which can be achieved in an outdoor garden or farm. This is because a CEA facility permits you can create the most favorable environment possible for any indoor-appropriate plant to flourish. This benefit is derived without nighttime halting growth, without colder seasons substantially limiting annual crop yields, and without the destructive or limiting effects of high winds, excessive rain, drought, pests, moulds, and fungus. No, vertical farms won’t feed the entire world, but one would be hard-pressed to determine that the model doesn’t work well.  “The vertical farming model was proposed with the aim of increasing the amount of agricultural land by ‘building upwards,’” writes University of Melbourne engineering researchers Kurt Benke and Bruce Tomkins in Future Food-Production Systems: Vertical Farming and Controlled-Environment Agriculture. “In other words, the effective arable area for crops can be increased by constructing a high-rise building with many levels on the same footprint of land.”Think of the possibilities of such a system: without external influences like pests, bad weather, poor soil, and even a lack of acreage being a concern, vertical farms can grow food anywhere, in any climate, and in any country, provided they are connected to a source of power and have access to some water (because of the recycling of greywater and less evaporation, hydroponic/aquaponic systems only require 10 percent of the water used by traditional agriculture). These systems can be set up within cities, right next door to the people, communities, restaurants, and grocery stores they feed, thereby eliminating food miles (the distance farmed food has to travel to reach the plates of consumers) and providing a reliable source of fresh, nutritious food that was still growing that very morning. In an article chapter published on Clean Metrics, titled Food Transportation Issues and Reducing Carbon Footprint, the authors write: “Transportation is the largest end-use contributor toward global warming in the United States and many other developed countries. Transportation has a significant impact within the food and beverage sector because food is often shipped long distances and not infrequently via air. Pirog et al. (2001) report that nearly half of all fruit sold in the United States is imported, and that produce grown in North America travels an average of 2,000 km (1,200 miles) from source to point of sale. Dr. Foley claims that prime American farmland is a far better investment than vertical farms, both in terms of food production and future economic value. But traditional farming’s arable land requirements are too large and invasive to remain sustainable for future generations. With the ever-so-rapid population growth rates, it is expected that arable land per person will drop about 66 percent in 2050 in comparison to 1970, according to the 2017 study by Benke and Tomkins.  One also needs to consider the environmental impacts of traditional farming as they relate to CO2 emissions. When you take land from nature and turn it into a mass production farm such as those we see across the United States, you destroy the ability of that land to absorb carbon from the atmosphere as it once did when it was covered with trees and indigenous vegetation. Moreover, in order to expand traditional farmlands, indigenous land needs to be razed of its vegetation, displacing countless species of birds, animals, and essential insects in order to set up an unnatural ecosystem where only one or two crops are planted. This is what’s happening in the Amazon and large-scale deforestation is one of the greatest tragedies of our time. The overall consequence of this kind of farming is a myriad of negative environmental influences, from soil erosion and exhaustion to excessive carbon emissions from the transport of food all over the country (if not to other countries entirely) and increased atmospheric warming due to changing land surface type. In short, we need other solutions and indoor vertical farming is an intelligent one that is already making a significant difference in cities and communities around the world.                 https://www.globalaginvesting.com/vertical-farming-waste-time-money-unequivocally-not-heres/