Vertical Farming

This post described a proposal to stack farm acreage vertically. Sounds weird, particularly when they talk about "staple" crops. There's a book on economic geography I read once, where the author described a "natural" sequence of farms: closest to urban areas were the truck gardens and nurseries, then dairy, then livestock, then grain (that's rough and may be wrong in detail). The logic is fairly simple: transportation costs--what can be transported easiest and cheapest will be grown furthest from the megalopolis, then a continuum. It tracks with U.S. history, where Pennsylvania started growing wheat, but the wheat belt kept moving west and now it's vegetables and dairy.

If we ever come to vertical farming, the logical crops economically speaking should be "organic"--the highest cost, highest margin, locavore crops. Somehow there's a discrepancy there.