Vertical farming: has sustainable farming reached new heights?

As the global population continues to grow at a rapid pace, the demand for natural resources, including food, rapidly increases. In order to meet this demand, as well as protect the environment from an abundance of human induced problems, the cultivation of crops must be sustainable.

Currently, 50% of inhabitable land is used in agricultural production, taking away living space of millions of people, exhausting soils, evicting native species and driving biodiversity loss [1,2]. With this huge pressure, scientists are hard at work innovating new ways to farm sustainability in order to meet long and short-term environmental goals without the continued exploitation of the environment.