Summary

Vertical farming has the potential to unlock multiplicative yield gains per area of land and catalyze development of new technologies (precision farming, rapid genetic engineering, robotics based automation, etc.). Making this transition will exponentially benefit humanity (and other denizens of earth) in multiple ways.

However, the current focus of indoor / vertical farming is fresh produce. Here, I make the argument that in order to reduce reduce agricultural land use and obtain maximal benefit of vertical farming, we need to primarily focus on cereals, pulses and oil crops, and not just fresh produce.

Background

There are several important reasons to reduce agricultural use of habitable land use:

• Agriculture use is still driving deforestation across the world.^[1][2]
• Preventing further wildlife biodiversity decline, reverting back agricultural land to natural habitats and making earth equitable for the other denizens of earth^[3]
• Reforestation still remains an effective, viable option of scaling up carbon removal and preventing large offset climate change.^[4][5]

Currently, about 50% of the habitable land on Earth is used for agriculture.^[6]About 33% of the total agricultural land is used for growing crops (crops for food, feed, biofuels), with the rest 67% used as grazing land for livestock. For this post, I will only focus on the land use for growing crops.^[7]

Proposal: Scale Yields Multiplicatively by Growing Food Vertically

In essence, agriculture is massively spread out over large regions of land. Because of this, inefficiencies creep into the system making it harder to:

1. Maintain consistent yields throughout. Although this averages out globally, the variabilities (critically, losses) are often borne by farmers. This makes agriculture a very uncertain sector, which will be made even more uncertain due to the effects of climate change.
2. Genetically engineer crops for higher yield and viable seeds. Soil, water and climate conditions vary drastically across the large area of land use making it harder to genetically engineer crops to provide consistently high yield everywhere.
3. Roll out precision agriculture technologies. Embedding sensors to monitor key parameters such as water and nutrient sufficiency while detecting (and possibly eliminating) pests scales with land area.
4. Deploy automation and robotics. Robotics requires a constrained environment, at least currently. Agriculture spread over a large area, generally with animal activity, makes it hard to build robots to help with monitoring and harvesting.
5. Efficiently transport agricultural yield. Losses can occur over multiple stages (processing, storage, transport, etc.), with typical losses being around 10-20% but sometimes going as high as 40%.^[8]

A common solution to all this is to figure out how to grow plants and trees, i.e. any flora of agricultural interest, in indoor environments of large multi-stored buildings. This automatically provides the following benefits:

1. Crop yield scales by the number of floors in the building, automatically producing multiplicative yields and can drastically reduce land use. In contrast, the global green revolution unlocked a 2.5x yield increase over the last five decades^[9]
2. Precision agriculture and robotics becomes easier by designing buildings with monitoring and automation in mind. Climate controlled buildings increase reliability under the effects of climate change.
3. Spatially concentrated high yields allow self-sufficiency over counties, states and countries, making transportation and supply-chain management easier and reducing post-yield losses.
4. This is a necessity for humans to become a space-faring civilization ;)

However, I make a couple of key assumptions:

1. Using multi-storied buildings is cost-effective in the long term, even through they have much higher upfront costs. My rationale is that the advantages of monitoring, climate-control, yield optimization and automation would eventually allow for lower costs per yield.
2. Power costs will be substantially reduced in the future. Moving agriculture indoors would require generating light, maintaining climate, etc, which would require substantial power. I am assuming that newer technologies with high power capabilities like nuclear reactors (possibly fusion reactors) would reduce power costs substantially in the future.

Avenues for Effective Change

Most of the agricultural land is used for growing cereals/grains, oil crops, and pulses (~85-90% of the land; Fig. 1).^[6]To make effective change, we need to focus on decreasing the land use required to grow these crops.

Currently, the focus of indoor and vertical farming is to grow fresh produce. From what I gather, the reason for focusing on fresh produce is because of ease of growth in soil-less systems (like hydroponics, aeroponics, etc.), ability to scale them vertically to increase yield, and a high rate of spoilage loss, necessitating local centers of fresh produce.^[10]

However, produce currently make about 3% of the total land use, so they are unlikely to make an effective dent. In addition, methods developed for these plants will likely not be generalizable for cereals, oil, and pulses. To effectively reduce land use for agriculture, the key focus should be on developing technologies that enable mass indoor farming of cereals, pulses and oil crops.

Conclusion

This essay began as an initial question/thought of why vertical farming has not taken off and what are the key bottlenecks that is preventing this transition. A dive into this made me realize that while there is a huge potential for indoor farming to be a foundational and transformative, the current focus on it is not effective. To effectively deploy indoor farming and reap its multiplicative benefits, the focus must be on cereal, pulses, and oil crops that use ~85% of the land used for agriculture for human consumption.

I would love to hear what LW community thinks about this :)

1. Hannah Ritchie (2021) - “Drivers of Deforestation” Published online at OurWorldinData.org. Retrieved from: 'https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20260518-093348/drivers-of-deforestation.html' [Online Resource] (archived on May 18, 2026). ↩︎

2. Accounting for deforestation and land use, it seems like carbon released for agriculture is equal to (or greater than) the carbon released due to fossil fuels. Paper: Increased transparency in accounting conventions could benefit climate policy - https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/adb7f2; Video. ↩︎

3. Hannah Ritchie (2021) - “To protect the world’s wildlife, we must improve crop yields — especially across Africa” Published online at OurWorldinData.org. Retrieved from: 'https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20260518-093348/yields-habitat-loss.html' [Online Resource] (archived on May 18, 2026). ↩︎

4. Carbon sink capabilities of forests: Pan, Y., Birdsey, R.A., Phillips, O.L. et al. The enduring world forest carbon sink. Nature 631, 563–569 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07602-x ↩︎ ↩︎

5. Current advances in carbon removal technologies - refer to executive summary, point 2: The state of carbon dioxide removal: a global, independent scientific assessment of carbon dioxide removal. University of Oxford. https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/F85QJ ↩︎

6. Hannah Ritchie and Max Roser (2019) - “Half of the world’s habitable land is used for agriculture” Published online at OurWorldinData.org. Retrieved from: 'https://ourworldindata.org/global-land-for-agriculture' ↩︎ ↩︎

7. Reducing livestock related land use would require change in food preferences (covered in detail here) and/or development of plant-based meats (focus of good food institute). ↩︎

8. ^{^}

   Number based on actual loss section in Post-harvest losses and Hannah Ritchie (2020) - “Food waste is responsible for 6% of global greenhouse gas emissions” Published online at OurWorldinData.org. Retrieved from: 'https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20251125-173858/food-waste-emissions.html'

9. Changes in cereal production yield in the last decade: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/index-of-cereal-production-yield-and-land-use ↩︎

10. https://www.ars.usda.gov/oc/utm/vertical-farming-no-longer-a-futuristic-concept/ ↩︎