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Vertical farming usually uses LED lighting, not direct sunlight. And I think the idea is that once the water is present on a given level it gets recirculated and reprocessed there, so it wouldn't need much additional pumping.
That's one method of bringing"sunlight" to plants. Another would be to grow them outside.
Even if all you do is pump all the water from the floor of each level to the ceiling of the respective level, you've done the exact same amount of work as pumping all the water for the top floor back to the roof in the first place. Only you've done it with a hundred pumps and a hundred times the points of failure and repair rate as a single pump for the entire building.
You'd be so much farther ahead to just install a reservoir on the roof that gets filled by a single pump and let gravity feed the lower floors. Much the way we already do for flat farming.
And then you've got to make up for the inefficiencies lost in planting and harvesting. Vertical farming brings nothing to the table except a smaller footprint in a world where that's not a real advantage.
A far better use of empty office buildings would be to convert much of the space into full-time living space.
I think you'd be surprised to learn that vertical farms do actually exist already. The problems you're imagining have all already been overcome. Having a hundred pumps actually isn't a big obstacle to having the system function well.
I'm not imagining any problems. The difficulties I've outlined are genuine issues that have to be addressed. I think you'd be surprised to learn how much difference there is between a thing existing and it actually operating efficiently.
“Based on an analysis we did for a large private-equity firm, we don’t actually see a scenario where in the next 10 years vertical farming will compete with field-grown at scale in North America,”
I really don't see much beyond "it doesn't look perfect to me so it's a bad idea and we shouldn't even try" in your arguments.
Great way to grow local and buy local with next to no pesticides.