Those people that are perfectly content with the traditional and industrial farming practices now in use would be advised to research the history of some great past civilizations such as Mesopatamia and North Africa to know what can happen to once-fertile regions.  Actually, we can just look at the Dust Bowl of the 1930’s for a small-scale version of this phenomena.  Huge swaths of continents that had healthy soil thousands of years ago are now mainly desert.  This is such a foreign concept to American farmers with their rich soil that has been planted for a mere two hundred years.  It is probably hard to see how certain practices deplete the organic life of soil but they do, they have and they will again.  Planting the same crops year after year (monoculture) is a great industrial production technique but it robs soil of the variety of microorganisms that keep life in soil.  It is this aspect of the dirt that keeps it healthy and rooted to the ground and less likely to wash or blow away in strong weather. Nature thrives on biodiversity and dies without it.  The organic movement is based around this fact.   Given that soil erosion has now been identified as one of the significant causes contributing to increased global warming, this problem has another dimension now as well.   Add the further soil degradation through over-fertilization with chemicals, pest and weed control and genetic engineering to counter decreasing yields and the situation creates conditions of deterioration in a drastically shorter period of time.

Soil is destroyed by current farming methods but so is Earth’s limited water supply (water quality is another conversation).  Again, history shows us the path we are heading down.  Ancient civilizations drained whole lakes for farming that have not come back.  We have done the same with the once great and mighty Colorado river which has now become a trickle by the time it reaches our southern border and has made it impossible for Mexican farmers to use any of that once vital resource for their own farms.  And you wonder why they illegally immigrate here?  The lack of water that was available to the once agriculturally thriving Pima Indian Reservation in Arizona is recognized as one of the attributing causes of the exorbitantly high rate of obesity in this once healthy tribe that lost the ability to grow its own food and depends on government and commercial supplies.  For a while scientists were attributing the problem to genetics. 

Vertical farming on the other hand, does not impact soil and uses a fraction of the water as traditional farming methods.  Those are two of the many reasons we are passionate about large-scale conversion to this method of growing food in the future!