Vertical farming economics: crop performance targets for cost-competitive vertical farming

Vertical farming may offer a scalable solution to land, water, and climate constraints in agriculture, yet its viability hinges on reducing energy and capital costs. Despite these promises, the economic competitiveness of VF is strongly contested. High energy use, labour requirements and investment costs raise concerns about both economic feasibility and environmental sustainability. Vertical farming is a form of controlled-environment agriculture in which light, temperature, humidity, CO₂ concentration, irrigation, fertilisation and crop management can, in principle, be adjusted independently, enabling reproducible cultivation recipes that deliver consistent yield and quality. In this study, a crop-physiological source–sink model (the Plant Balance Model, PBM) is combined with an energy and techno-economic framework to analyse lettuce and tomato production in a modelled vertical farm. Three sink scenarios (Current, Current+, NextGen) are evaluated together with six levels of intercepted light-use efficiency (LUE INT = 0.8–1.8 g DW mol −1 PAR), resulting in 18 scenarios per crop. Production costs are compared with Dutch greenhouse benchmarks from KWIN 2023. Results show that cost reduction depends primarily on increasing effective daily light integral and converting light efficiently into biomass through higher light interception and LUE INT . As source capacity increases, production rapidly becomes sink-limited, making sink capacity and crop cycle time the next critical constraints. Under advanced but conceptually achievable performance targets, lettuce can approach Dutch greenhouse benchmark costs, whereas tomato requires both accelerated crop development and sustained high LUE INT levels not yet realised at full-cycle scale. The framework defines crop performance targets rather than predicting realised commercial outcomes.