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چکیده
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Vertical farming is being considered as a viable solution to the significant international issues, such as the decrease in arable land, freshwater shortage, and the necessity to produce food in a consistent and high standard. Despite the wide range of studies carried out on vertical farming systems, the existing reviews tend to consider vertical greenhouses and fully controlled plant factories independently and do not provide an integrated and recent comparison between the two systems. The purpose of this review, thus, is to thoroughly examine the concept of vertical farming by answering the following major questions (i) what are the differences between vertical greenhouses and plant factories in their water and energy consumption? (ii) how productive and land-use beneficial are each system? (iii) what are the technological, economic and environmental barriers to their broader adoption? The review provides the answers to these questions through the synthesis of recent developments, and especially innovations in the areas of artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things (IoT), lighting systems, and integration of renewable energy sources. Vertical greenhouses are considered to be hybrid systems, which blend natural sunlight with additional lighting to increase space-use efficiency, as opposed to plant factories that are appraised as totally regulated systems that can produce highly predictable and uniform yield. The review incorporates the most recent technological, environmental and economic knowledge to give a critical and modern view on the present performance, challenges and future prospects of the vertical farming systems.
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