Vertical Farming: A Resource Leverage Perspective

In light of ever increasing shortages of several key resources like water and oil, it is growing more and more indispensable to embrace new technologies and new business models to address the imbroglio of food scarcity and crises all over the globe. While technology paradigms like precision farming, drip irrigation, cloud seeding and genetic farming have solved this problem to some extent, the benefits gained were either one-sided or sub-optimal in nature apart from few concerns pertaining to the ecology. The upcoming vertical farming paradigm seems to address all these issues in a holistic manner. Given the finite resources on planet earth, it makes sense to be prudent in leveraging our scarce resources. Resource leverage framework from the domain of strategic management maps very well to this vertical farming paradigm. This paper attempts to synthesize wisdom from the dual domains of agriculture and strategic management in terms of various resource leverage practices that come to the rescue of humanity facing a multitude of resource shortages. As it is an emerging paradigm, ground level difficulties need to be addressed step by step in a spirit of discovery-driven planning before scaling up this paradigm. No technology is perfect on day one and vertical farming is no exception. Governments need to promulgate laws and policies that are congenial and conducive towards making this vertical paradigm a reality so that an entrepreneurial opportunity is leveraged for the larger benefit of nations along with the vertical farms