(cont'd from yesterday's post)
Controlled environment agriculture (CEA) can yield crops at 100x the per-square-foot productivity of a flatland farm by scaling vertically. They use much less water, no pesticides, and the crops don't have to adapt to weather in any way.
But light is available to traditional farmland for free in the form of sunlight. Not so for vertical trays or towers of lettuce indoors. Light, in fact, is expensive. Recent advances in LED lighting (a doubling of its efficiency coupled with a big drop in its cost) have cut the operational expenses of these farms to the point where they can now provide about 5% of all our produce.
In a mostly-free market like ours, individual customers choose which businesses will survive. They pick the product which serves their needs best and which is offered at a price they are willing to pay. That's the sweet spot these farmer-entrepreneurs want to find.
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