Yields increased by 10x for costs increased by 10x sounds cheaper to me.
For greens, an conventional farm is $0.65/lb and a greenhouse is $2.33/lb.
> Assuming a 40-45% gross margin for a typical supermarket produce department, retail prices for greens would need to be approximately $1 a pound for conventional, $4 a pound for greenhouse, $5 a pound for vertical, and $12 a pound for container-grown. A typical head of bibb or butter lettuce weighs less than half a pound. Therefore, the lettuce can be grown in a greenhouse or vertical farm and sold at retail for $2 to $3 per head.
> Although greenhouse or vertical farming is three to five times more expensive than growing on a conventional outdoor farm, it still allows for competitive pricing to the consumer with other vegetables and sides.
The yield can go up, but the cost per unit goes up too.
You can't run a harvesting tractor through a greenhouse. So, a lot of produce from greenhouses or vertical farms (etc) ends up with a manual harvesting step.
This is why you pretty much see greenhouses exclusively used for foods which would require that manual step anyways.
It's similar to the "burger flipper robot" problem. Possibility solvable, but also gonna be costly and buggy for v1 of the robot.
Note that this is an area that is rather specialized - a pepper picking robot isn't good for tomato picking or lettuce picking ( https://youtu.be/EFC3OvkVKaQ ). Compare that to the incredibly versatile human ( https://youtu.be/oxbJVqfIK1U ).
Sure you can. Just needs to be big enough.
Increase yields 100x per sqft Increase costs 10x per lb