I second this sooo much.
There are different reasons why vertical farms are still a thing. They are rooted in technocracy, academia and capitalism*.
- technocracy: technology changed many aspects of our lives, so people tend to think that there are technological solutions for everything. Academia and public funding strongly prefers tech-solutions over system solutions.
- The epistemology of natural sciences (= the idea that everything mechanism can be observed and understood individually). This hampers the ability of natural sciences (including agronomy) to understand the complexity of biological systems. Therefore, scientists shy away from truly interdisciplinary real-world agroecosystem science (cooperating with farmers for #agroecology? what a hassle!) and feel way more comfortable doing lab-experiments. And what is more lab-like than a lab-greenhouse?
Plus, if you resolve the problems of the world, maybe people will call you saviour and this is what the ego of us scientists makes us crave for.
- capitalism (or however you want to name this shit): small-scale farming systems don't work so well with neoliberal scaling ideologies.And we have many large capitals pushing into agriculture, either because they are greedy asshats (or simply don't care) or, even worse, because they want to be the good guys: Many pension funds, churches, governments, wealthy individuals with a pinch of bad consciousness are receiving pressure from society to shift towards "sustainable" investments and green their portfolio. Since you can't easily invest in small-scale farmers, "green" tech-solutions are the main remaining possibility to invest in agriculture. And this is why there is an endless stream of money pouring into any start-up that promises to resolve the problems of agriculture.
- Cheap energy and and a lack of understanding what "resilience" and "food sovereignity" means.
Ok, I forgot some other drivers: urbanization (the proportion of people living in megacities continues to grow) and the fact that industrial agriculture has a really shitty environmental record and this is known. So people are looking desperately for easy and market-compatible solutions.
We need more #Solarpunk, folks!
@big_louse
*Here we could go deeper and identify also colonialism and patriarchy and so on, but I hope you get my point here.
Biodiversity in action! A must-watch video on how protecting nature benefits us all.
Now their crops are thriving like never before, all thanks to the golden elixir of life. Who knew the secret to 
