I've tried this at home, and quickly realized the costs of the lights and electricity don't make this approach very practical. I've been wondering how they overcame this in the larger commercial setups, turns out they never did.
Is it the laws of thermodynamics? Because agriculture being fundamentally <i>solar powered</i> in an ideal situation (you know, photosynthesis and all that), vertical farming it never made much sense to me.
Vertical farms trade energy cost for efficiency in physical resources like water, soil, etc. The trade-off is worth it if the energy is cheap and plentiful enough, especially if the farm is going someplace where a traditional (open air) farm is impractical or infeasible, such as a desert.<p>In a place like Europe, where farmland is plentiful but energy is relatively expensive, vertical farms never really made sense beyond proofs of concept.