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Food in the Anthropocene
The study published in the Lancet: Food in the Anthropocene: the EAT–Lancet Commission on healthy diets from sustainable food systems
The editorial in the Lancet: The 21st-century great food transformation
An article in Cosmos for people (like me!) who don't have access to the Lancet: Feeding the planet: a call for radical action
Why do they never mention vertical farming in these reports? We could just increase our farming yields by a few thousand percent, use the greenhouse emissions as a power plant, and return all existing farmland to the wilderness by planting trees since we won't need it for outdoor farming anymore. This change is already well underway in several countries, yet to read these reports it seems like none of the policy makers are aware of the technology. They are still operating on the assumption of traditional farming and making recommendations from that mindset.
Isn't vertical farming pretty limited in what you can grow? And energy intensive? I'm certainly no expert so maybe things have advanced but last I recall, only lettuce and tomatoes really could be grown at scale.
Here's a fairly excellent summary of the state of vertical farming in 2018.
In short - no. They can produce more energy than they consume, so a vertical farm is also a power plant. They recycle all of their water (and even convert city waste water back to drinking water). Crops are a bit tricker - while all crops can be grown indoors, the aeroponics/aquaponics systems we're developing right now certainly favor some crops over others, though that's more an artifact of how we've designed them than any kind of hard natural limitation. Any crop can be grown indoors, we just need to develop the right systems to do it (or engineer/breed the crops to make them more suitable). This is a very active area of research, particularly in Asia. LED growing systems have contributed to a massive reduction in power use that has just recently made these farms more practical.
In a nutshell, you find some old industrial area in a big city that's rusting away, stack a 30-story skyscraper there with a one-block footprint. Turn it into a greenhouse, power plant, and waste/water recycling facility, which generates a few million tons of produce every year and provides plenty of farming and tech jobs. The chief cost is just building the skyscraper - it requires a lot of up-front investment and profitability only comes years later. There's been a trend to just convert old factories for this purpose in the USA because that blunts some of the startup costs.
Edit: In fact I should probably post that as a new submission. :)