Will vertical farming ever become sustainable and scalable?

Vertical farming has come under fire in the past, with opponents blasting its high energy usage and cost. So, will new findings to mitigate these drawbacks, silence the critics?

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[R]esearch, published in Frontiers in Science, is exploring how dynamic environmental control in indoor farms could help ensure the success of vertical farm crops, while also keeping energy usage and costs to a minimum.

Because plants’ biological functions are heavily influenced by environmental conditions like temperature changes, light wavelengths, and the amount of CO₂ in the atmosphere, manipulating the environment allows a vertical farming system to manipulate plant development.

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The authors created a model for testing smart lighting that aims to keep plants’ ability to photosynthesise steady over the course of a day…. They found that an optimisation algorithm could cut electricity costs by 12% without compromising a plants’ carbon fixation, just by varying the intensity of the light.

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