What Is Vertical Farming, and What Are Its Benefits?

Agriculture is an essential industry — after all, people need food to survive. It also has deep, complicated connections to climate change, both in contributing to it and in suffering from its effects. As climate issues have grown more prominent, alternative methods like vertical farming are starting to take off.

What Is Vertical Farming?

Vertical farming involves growing crops indoors in stacked rows instead of traditional horizontal fields. Just as skyscrapers build up to create more room for people in dense areas, these greenhouse environments take advantage of verticality to bring farms to inner cities.

Some trace this concept as far back as the Babylonian Empire, citing the Hanging Gardens of Babylon as an early example. Similar practices also emerged in the 1600s, when European nations grew fruit along stone walls for heat management. The modern version takes the same idea but pushes it to extremes with technologies like hydroponics, LED lighting and smart humidity controls.

Vertical Farming Examples Today

Modern vertical farming began in concept in the late 1990s, and while it may not have reached mainstream adoption yet, it’s not as niche as it may initially seem. There are more than 2,000 vertical farms in the U.S. alone.

Many of these facilities operate in large cities — the opposite of conventional farms. Walmart and Albertson’s sell vertically grown produce from a San Francisco-area warehouse. Other vertical agriculture operations have opened in Atlanta, Orlando, Houston and Seattle, among others. Internationally, Munich and Kuwait are now host to their own indoor urban farms.

It’s worth noting that while there are many such farms, most are relatively small. The practice has not reached the industrial heights of traditional agriculture, but it’s also far newer. It will take time and development to see how far it could go.

Benefits of Vertical Farming

Vertical farming’s growth is more than just an investment fad. This emerging field has several environmental benefits that could help offset agriculture’s impact on climate change and reduce the consequences it suffers because of it.

Space Efficiency

The biggest benefit of vertical farming is that it uses much less space than traditional agriculture. Farmland covers 4 billion acres globally, and much of this topsoil is degrading 10 times faster than it can regenerate. As the population grows, continuing this trend could mean humans will run out of room.

Growing things vertically instead of horizontally lets greenhouses reverse this worrying trend. In some cases, indoor farms can produce 10 to 20 times the yield per acre as conventional fields. Such density could keep the growing population fed without further habitat destruction and topsoil degradation.

Resource Efficiency

Similarly, vertical farms use fewer resources than their open-crop counterparts. Many of these facilities rely on hydroponics, which delivers water to a plant’s roots through pipes instead of spraying the ground. This system uses up to 90% less water than traditional irrigation methods, reversing agriculture’s historical trend of massive water consumption.

Cultivating crops indoors also removes threats like pests, weeds and extreme weather. As a result, farms can improve their yields without resources like pesticides and herbicides. Removing these chemicals from the equation can both lower ongoing expenses and eliminate health or environmental concerns around their usage.

Year-Round Production

This protection against the elements means once-seasonal crops can grow year-round, too. Vertical farms can maintain consistent conditions regardless of what the weather is like outside. As a result, farmers can work around historical barriers to ensure a consistent food supply at all times, even with plants with relatively short growing seasons.

Along the same lines, indoor farms remove climate-related barriers to crop viability. Facilities can simulate tropical conditions in a temperate city or create a drier environment in the middle of a rainforest. As a result, crops that were once region-specific, limiting their availability, can expand to virtually anywhere. This shift could protect threatened plant species and shorten the food supply chain for reduced emissions.

Crop Resilience

All of these other benefits work together to ensure farms can achieve higher yields with the same space and resources. The more controllable the growing conditions are, the easier it is to protect sensitive plants from an increasingly harsh environment. This protection is essential in the struggle to maintain food supplies amid a changing climate.

Experts predict global food demand will rise by over 50% by 2050, but major crop yields will decline in that same period. Consequently, the world will experience greater food insecurity, price uncertainty and conflict if nothing changes. Vertical farming may not be the only solution to that problem, but its added crop resilience could prove a vital piece of the puzzle.

Potential Downsides to Vertical Farming

Despite these impressive advantages, vertical farming is not a perfect solution. It still carries some unique downsides that may limit its potential without further innovation.

High Costs

One of the biggest obstacles to vertical farming is that it’s expensive. Indoor farms require advanced technologies like smart lighting, precise climate control and hydroponic systems. All this infrastructure results in high upfront costs, and the ongoing expenses of running it can be high, too.

At least two indoor farming startups have filed for bankruptcy in the past few years. Others have closed entirely, citing financial issues. Without strong profitability, this practice could fail to take off on a large scale. As a result, its environmental benefits won’t reach their full potential, minimizing any improvements it makes over conventional practices.

Energy Usage

Much of the financial burden associated with vertical farming comes from its energy consumption. This produces another issue. Relying so heavily on electricity could limit the practice’s climate advantages by resulting in larger carbon footprints.

Traditional farms are not necessarily energy-efficient — they often rely on heavy equipment and long logistics routes. Indoor facilities avoid some of this consumption but use far more electricity, most of which comes from fossil fuels today. On average, these farms consume 38.8 kilowatt-hours per kilogram of produce, whereas a conventional greenhouse uses just 5.4.

Renewable power can offset these concerns. However, wind and solar account for relatively small portions of available electricity today, so this energy consumption remains an issue. 

Is Growing Up the Solution to Agriculture’s Climate Woes?

Vertical farming could be a vital part of the shift to greener agriculture. However, it cannot be the only solution. Its limits and downsides are too significant for it to replace conventional farms entirely, especially in its current state.

While concerns remain, it’s hard to overlook the potential of this practice. Further research and innovation, as well as pairing vertical farms with other steps, could lead to more climate-friendly farming.