I feel like whenever I hear about people interested in vertical farming, it's typically centered around greens, or something where freshness is highly important. Is this responding to some group of people who are actually enthusiastic about indoor vertical farming of cereal crops?
Notably absent from this is discussion of transport, storage and refrigeration. People have long complained about the 3000 mile ceasar salad. Is it better to grow lettuce and tomatoes far away and ship them to mostly urban consumers, or is it better to grow those in/near urban areas for local consumption? This is a real question; if someone has numbers on the per-serving energy cost of refrigerated shipping, and how they compare to the lighting energy cost, I think that would be an important comparison.