Consider this: the sun already provides all the energy required to grow plants, and healthy soils provide the required nutrients. Plants can already harvest solar energy, that's kinda their whole thing.

Your model requires synthetic nutrients and synthetic sunlight. Producing and maintaining solar panels and the associated infrastructure is not environmentally benign, particularly if as you suggest in your other comment you would want to install solar arrays on former farmland.

How about instead we grow plants properly, in ecosystemically responsible ways that promote soil health, which is directly connected to our health via our gut microbiome. Growing sterile plants in a controlled environment is not an ecological solution at all, it's a sterile solution.

Our agricultural system isn't in need of high-tech solutions. High-tech solutions is exactly what has been fucking agriculture up for the past seventy years.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

It doesn't require synthetic nutrients actually, but it does require synthetic sunlight: which is fine, actually.

The solar panels needed are beneficial to everyone involved. They provide electricity to locals, they help plants combat climate change by providing much needed cover from direct sunlight which these days can completely ruin your crops.

The point isn't to make all former farmland SOLELY solar panels. It's to help the crops/plants themselves grow better under the shade of the panels.

Sustainable farming is absolutely still a requirement in the future.

Vertical farming is to supplement the needed gaps in farming, like installing them inside cities so certain plants/crops can be served 1. Much faster, 2. In a much greener state, and 3. Direct-to-store which heavily reduces pollution potential from having to haul it from really long distances away, and in many cases, requiring refrigeration to keep the shipments cool, further polluting the planet.