Vertical farming, the best solution to support an ever growing population or just a scam?
IMHO it has a lot of potential but not being able to grow grains really is something that should be tackled sooner rather than later. But I could see this being used by self sustaining communities to provide lots of food while using very little space. And it's technically more environmentally friendly than just using vast stretches of land to produce the same amount of food.
it works pretty well for some kinds of produce - bushes/lettuce, fungus, root vegetables, etc but fails for other things (tree nuts, fruit, corn/grain, etc).
the benefit is that you can use existing infrastructure like high density residential/skyscraper buildings so there's potentially less distance between farm & table