>>508789023>You cannot grow crops on top of one another without shading themYes, you absolutely can. You can't pack them in like bloody sardines, but you absolutely can to the point you're fitting many times more than if you were just using the floorspace. The sun does not come in solely from directly above, and many plants do not LIKE to be lit completely.
>No water is wasted unless you launch it in to space.Water is wasted if it goes towards things which aren't useless to your cultivated environment. Feeding root fungus and eroding the rock under your fields isn't beneficial to you or the environment.
>completely removing the water used for agriculture from the environment would be an ecological disaster.I'm not advocating for that, but even if I were - they aren't completely sealed systems and they wont remove natural water sources from the environment, due to how they work hydroponic or greenhouse irrigated crops use significantly less total water, which you could just friggin leave in a dam to do as it will.
>Which is only one thing that soil doesNot even close mate, you don't know dick about gardening.
Soil is fucking awful at retaining moisture, it's there as a conveniently premade source of nutrients, this is why shit like mulch, overlay, and additives like perlite even exist.
>To switch to vertical farming is to limit what crops can be grownTrue, not everything can be grown like this.
>Needlessly and with no benefit.Completely and utterly false.
Horses for courses, there are use cases for vertical farms, and they have benefits traditional agriculture does not, and not just in space efficiency - but in that you can grow anything bloody year round in a greenhouse, because you alter the temperature by cracking the vents more.