Vertical Farming, Controlled Environment Agriculture & Urban Farming

Abstract

Vertical farming and controlled environment agriculture (CEA) represent a rapidly evolving set of approaches that move food production into engineered, often urban, spaces. By controlling light, temperature, humidity, nutrient delivery and air quality, these systems decouple crop growth from local weather and seasonality, offering year-round production, rapid crop cycles and high yields per unit footprint. It explains core system types, the physiology of crops in artificial environments, engineering components (lighting, HVAC, fertigation), resource flows and efficiencies, business models and economics, environmental trade-offs, social and policy dimensions and the research frontiers shaping the field. The piece aims to be academically rigorous without feeling dry centered on the day-to-day realities of operators, investors, planners and city residents who will steward the next wave of urban food systems.