Indoor Automation for leafy greens and some high value produce like edible/gastronomic mushrooms and others like controlled drug producing products does make economic sense, but it’s overkill for other things when you have proven transportation networks to bring things to market from the hinterlands.
Ok it may make sense in st Helena and Tristan da Cunha islands for some things.
I've not heard of it being financially viable even when farmland is very constrained - say, in Holland.
The numbers probably work on the ISS, Moon, or Mars...so those places will probably be "stars of the show", in the next round of hype which vertical farming companies use to bilk idiot VC's.
(St. Helena has a reasonable latitude and low population density - so at most you'd need some greenhouses.)
There is EU single market. If farmland in Holland is constrained, it would be still cheaper to farm in other EU countries with plenty of land.
Since when is electricity not a resource?
Unlike cannabis, you can’t sell tomatoes for $2,000 a pound.
Also, the trick to vertical tomatoes is not what most people expect. They should look more into the upside-down pot idea and think about how best to take advantage of a top-down hanging system, like near-360 degree lighting between rows of hanging tomato plants to maximize exposure along the entire length of the curtain. These can be mounted horizontally under the nft channels the hanging plants grow from, allowing them to receive all the light they want while leaving walkway space (and overhead human-vision lighting space.)
It takes a LOT of research to make things work and everyone just promises a turn-key system. THAT can't work. My systems work because of research and lots of first-principles thinking.
This is like saying mice are a desirable pest because drug labs use them for research. Yes, sure but it’s a very specific use case, but don’t pretend it’s the norm.
No, they are not the only viable crops. I'll guarantee your studies don't take into account various methods of hydroponics for various crop types. Almost every study I've ever seen is purely focused on NFT vertical farming. NO JOKE it doesn't cover everything. You aren't growing corn in an NFT system. You will do it in a vertical DWC system.
I took ag/hort-sci in high school, where I learned about these systems (hanging gardens of Babylon, anyone?) I was running vertical farming systems in the 90s in high school. The tech works. Learn which method of hydroponics is required for which crop. Plan your economic requirements.
Literally basic high school education requirements and most of you don't seem to get it. not sure what happened between the 90s and now for y'all to mess up basic technology so badly.
I was trying to figure out how the blockchain helped with hydroponics.
Is that the reason subsidies exist?
From my experience in farming, subsidies exist to ensure I can stay afloat if a crop fails for whatever reason, or if the market tanks, or just ensures a minimum income to make sure I don't go out of business.
It seems like ag subsidies are one place we actually want government intervention (but I am surely biased). We don't really want our food supply to be open directly to the whims of both nature and direct market changes. There is too much of a ramp up time needed if a large share of farms go out of business. It's not like we don't need food next year just because we had a bumper crop this year that caused prices to tank, I guess is what I'm trying to say.
For example - look at pork in the 90's. The price fell, and hard, causing most family pork farms went out. This is the reason we have like 2-3 producers of pork for the US now with mega factory pork farms. Is that good? I can't be convinced it is.