A Note From the Author
As a systems thinker, I weave together solutions from across disciplines to tackle the biggest challenge of our time.
In 2022, nearly a third of Pakistan was underwater.
Torrential monsoon rains, intensified by a brutal heatwave and melting glaciers, unleashed some of the worst flooding in modern history. More than 1,700 people died. More than two million homes were destrohyed or damaged, and over 1.2 million livestock animals perished. Nearly 5.5 million acres of farmland—an area larger than Vancouver Island—were swallowed by the floodwaters. Crops like rice, onions, and tomatoes were wiped out, plunging millions into food insecurity and economic collapse. The financial toll exceeded $40 billion. The human cost, however, was far greater.
This wasn’t a fluke. It was a glimpse of what climate change is already doing to global food systems. And a warning of what could happen here in Canada.
Consider Alberta. It’s smaller than Pakistan, but it generates more farm revenue than any other province in Canada. In 2021, it was home to more than 41,000 farms and accounted for nearly a third of the country’s farmland. It produced over a quarter of Canada’s total agricultural revenue. If even part of that land were lost to floods, droughts, hail, or fire, the damage wouldn’t just be economic. It would put national food security at risk.
And we’ve already seen it begin.
Agriculture is a significant contributor to climate change, in addition to being one of the economic sectors most at risk from it. It is estimated that the food system contributes about one-third of total anthropogenic emissions.
- Environmental Research Letters, via IOPscience (2021)
That same year, British Columbia experienced a record-breaking heat dome. Temperatures soared above 49 degrees Celsius, hotter than most desert cities. Crops scorched on the vine. Cherries baked on the trees. Livestock collapsed in the heat. Meanwhile, drought spread across the Prairies and devastated wheat harvests. By the end of the year, wheat production had dropped by nearly half in some provinces.
Then came the floods. In November, a month’s worth of rain fell in just 48 hours. Rivers burst their banks. Highways buckled. More than 640,000 farm animals drowned. The rebuilding effort cost $9 billion, but the real devastation was in the livelihoods and communities that were lost.
The next year brought more destruction. A derecho windstorm tore through Ontario and Quebec in 2022, damaging farms across the region. Months later, hurricane Fiona slammed into the Atlantic provinces. All of these disasters ranked among the ten costliest in Canadian history. All of them happened within two years. And all were eclipsed the following year in 2023, when Canada faced one of the worst wildfire seasons the world has ever seen.
According to a 2025 study in Nature, climate change is projected to reduce agricultural yields by up to 41 percent in high-income regions—home to many of the world’s breadbaskets.
– Nature, 2025 Study
Our food systems are no longer safe from climate disruption.
Agriculture isn’t just a pillar of Canada’s economy. It’s the foundation of our survival. In 2021, the agriculture and agri-food sector contributed $135 billion to the national GDP and supported over 2.1 million jobs—one in every nine working Canadians. By comparison, the oil and gas industry employs about a third as many. That same year, we exported more than $82 billion in food to over 200 countries.
But now, the entire system is under threat.
Canada may be one of the largest countries on Earth, but when it comes to farmland, we have far less usable space than you might think.
Only about 10.3 percent of Canada’s land is suitable for agriculture—roughly one million square kilometers. That’s about the size of France and Sweden combined. It may sound like plenty, but not all of it can grow food. As of 2016, just 64 million hectares (158 million acres) were actually being used for farming, and only 59 percent of that was arable. The rest was suitable only for pasture or grazing livestock.
What’s worse is that we’re steadily losing the best of it.
In the past 35 years, Ontario has lost 2.8 million acres (18%) of its farmland to non-agricultural land uses like urbanization and aggregate mining.
- Ontario Farmland Trust (2021)
Over 90 percent of Canadians live in the southern edge of the country. That’s also where most of our highest-quality farmland is located. As our cities grow, they’re expanding outward rather than upward, swallowing the very land we rely on to feed ourselves. Each year, we lose an estimated 25,000 hectares of farmland to urban development. Between 1971 and 2001, Canadian cities expanded by 15,000 square kilometers—an area three times the size of Prince Edward Island.
The trend isn’t limited to Canada, either. In the United States, 11 million acres of farmland disappeared between 2001 and 2016. That’s twice the size of New Jersey.
Worldwide, we’ve already lost a third of all arable land since the 1970s. To compensate, we’ve turned to clearing forests, overworking the land we have left, and pushing for ever higher yields using methods that deplete the soil, pollute the water, and throw ecosystems out of balance.
With farmland shrinking and demand for food rising, we turned to chemistry to keep pace.
Synthetic fertilizers—derived from natural gas and other fossil fuel by-products—revolutionized agriculture in the twentieth century. They fed crops directly with the three nutrients plants crave most: nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium. Yields soared. But as the plants thrived, the soil began to suffer.
Healthy soil isn’t just dirt. It’s alive, teeming with bacteria, fungi, and microorganisms that cycle nutrients, retain water, and build structure over time. Synthetic fertilizers bypass that system. They nourish the plants but starve the soil life—and often poison it. Over time, the land degrades. There’s less organic matter, less microbial activity, and less capacity to hold moisture or nutrients. Eventually, you’re left with sterile dirt that needs more and more fertilizer just to maintain the same output.
We’re losing fertile soil much faster than we can replace it. It takes about 500 years to form just 2.5 centimeters of healthy topsoil. Yet we’re eroding it 100 times faster than nature can replace it. Every year, the world loses 12 million hectares of productive land to degradation and contamination. Once it’s gone, it’s gone for good.
Degraded soil, resulting largely from intensive farming practices, is low in “organic matter,” which means it does not retain water as effectively, making us vulnerable to climate shocks such as droughts, wildfires, and water shortages.
- Earth.org, 95% of the Earth’s Soil is On Course to Be Degraded by 2050 (2024)
And the damage doesn’t stop at the farm. Rain carries those synthetic chemicals into rivers, lakes, and groundwater. Fertilizers feed algae blooms that choke waterways, block sunlight, and suffocate aquatic life. You’ve probably seen the result: green scum blanketing lakes, accompanied by a sickening stench of decay. That’s fertilizer runoff.
But fertilizers weren’t the only tool we embraced. To push yields even further and defend crops against pests and weeds, scientists began modifying the crops themselves. Through genetic engineering, they gave plants traits like faster growth, resistance to disease, and tolerance to drought. Genetically modified organisms, or GMOs, were hailed as a breakthrough for global food security. And in many ways, they were.
Some varieties of GMO corn were engineered to produce a protein that kills specific insect pests but is harmless to humans and animals. Others were designed to survive powerful herbicides—most notably glyphosate, the active ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup. That’s where things get complicated.
A typically healthy soil will be teeming with biodiversity and may include a variety of earthworms, 20-30 types of small arachnids, 50-100 species of insects, hundreds of different fungi and thousands of bacteria species.
Monsanto’s breakthrough allowed farmers to spray entire fields with glyphosate, wiping out weeds without harming the crop. It simplified weed control, reduced labor costs, and improved yields. But the more we sprayed, the more we poisoned the land… and ourselves.
Glyphosate doesn’t just kill weeds. It disrupts soil biology, contaminates water systems, and increasingly shows up in the food we eat. Long-term exposure has been linked to increased cancer risk, and to the increased severity and re-emergence of crop diseases. Most troubling of all, it’s been implicated in the global collapse of bee populations.
That’s especially troubling because bees don’t just make honey. They pollinate about one-third of the food we eat: fruits, vegetables, nuts, and more. Globally, pollinators support more than $170 billion worth of crops each year. In the U.S. alone, honeybee populations declined by 60 percent between 1947 and 2008.
It’s a bitter irony that we’ve engineered food to grow faster and more resilient, while simultaneously destroying the very species that make it possible.
The world’s population is expected to reach 10.4 billion people by the end of the century, with two-thirds of humanity living in urban areas by 2050. To meet the food demands of this future, we’ll need to increase global production by at least 60 percent.
But traditional agriculture is facing unprecedented stress. Climate change is making outdoor farming increasingly unreliable. At the same time, overuse of chemicals and genetic modification has degraded much of the land we still rely on. Rather than just trying to fix what’s broken, we may need to build something fundamentally different.
Japan is already showing what that future could look like. High-rise farms there can produce up to 648 heads of lettuce per square meter—compared to just five on a traditional farm.
For most of human history, agriculture meant working with the land: tilling the soil, planting seeds, and hoping for rain. But that model no longer guarantees a harvest. Droughts, floods, fires, and heatwaves are becoming more extreme and less predictable. In many parts of the world, food production is already faltering. If we’re going to feed a growing population without further damaging the ecosystems we depend on, we need a different approach.
And now we have one.
What if every city can grow 10 percent of its food indoors? That shift could free up 881,000 km² worth of farmland, which could then revert to hardwood forest. That’s enough to take 25 years’ worth of carbon out of the atmosphere.
– Dickson Despommier, Columbia University professor emeritus, via IEEE Spectrum (2018)
Indoor farming is no longer science fiction. Whether through hydroponics, aeroponics, or more advanced vertical systems, we now have the technology to grow food indoors—without soil, without pesticides, and with dramatically less water. These systems operate inside climate-controlled buildings where temperature, humidity, airflow, and lighting are all optimized for plant growth. Instead of soil, crops grow in nutrient-rich water or mist, supported by LED lighting that mimics sunlight and enables photosynthesis day and night.
This approach removes many of the risks that plague conventional farms. Rainfall isn’t required, since water is recycled in a closed-loop system. There’s no runoff to contaminate rivers and lakes. No erosion. No need for pesticides or herbicides.
The advantages aren’t just environmental. Indoor farms bring production closer to where people live, cutting down on transportation, refrigeration, and spoilage. They can grow food year-round, regardless of the season or growing conditions, and operate in places where farming has never been viable—from northern Canada to arid desert cities.
Still, indoor agriculture isn’t one single solution. It comes in many forms, each with different strengths and tradeoffs. Some methods are best suited for large-scale commercial growers. Others are better for remote communities or urban neighborhoods. Understanding these differences is essential to grasping where this shift in agriculture is heading—and what it could mean for Canada’s food security in the decades ahead.
When people picture indoor agriculture, they often imagine something futuristic — glowing towers lined with plants and bathed in purple LED light. And while that vision is part of the story, the reality is broader and more grounded. Indoor farms come in many forms. Some are technological marvels. Others are remarkably simple. But they all share a common goal: regaining control over food production in an era of climate instability.
Greenhouses are the oldest and most widely recognized form of indoor farming. At their core, they’re simple structures — steel frames covered in glass or plastic — designed to trap sunlight and maintain a warm, stable environment for crops. For decades, they’ve helped extend growing seasons, protect against storms, and improve yields in colder climates. What makes today’s greenhouses powerful is how far they’ve evolved.
Modern greenhouses are often equipped with climate control systems and supplemental lighting. During winter months or short days, LED or fluorescent grow lights extend daylight hours to support continuous growth. Heating systems maintain optimal temperatures, while ventilation and humidity controls help create a stable microclimate. Some even integrate solar panels for energy generation or automation tools that adjust conditions in real time.
Despite these upgrades, greenhouses remain one of the most affordable and accessible paths to indoor farming — particularly for crops like tomatoes, cucumbers, and strawberries that thrive in natural light but need protection from weather extremes.
For large-scale operations, commercial greenhouses can be built for as little as $2 to $4 per square foot, making them one of the most cost-effective ways to move agriculture indoors. While still vulnerable to severe storms or structural damage, they offer significantly greater resilience than open fields — and a critical advantage in a world where traditional growing seasons can no longer be relied on.
Where greenhouses are broad and expansive, container farms are compact, modular, and mobile. Built inside repurposed shipping containers, these units function as self-contained ecosystems, designed to operate year-round in virtually any climate. Fully insulated and climate-controlled, they often use hydroponic systems, growing crops in nutrient-rich water instead of soil.
Container farms aren’t intended to feed entire cities. Their strength lies in serving specific communities — especially in remote or harsh environments where access to fresh produce is limited or nonexistent.
Northern Canada offers a clear example. Many Indigenous and rural communities rely on long-distance shipments for fresh food, which can be costly, irregular, and low in quality. A single container farm can grow fresh vegetables year-round in environments ranging from minus 40 to plus 40 degrees Celsius. Canadian companies like The Growcer have designed models specifically for these extreme conditions.
These farms are also gaining traction in urban neighborhoods looking to reduce dependence on global supply chains. They can be installed behind schools, beside grocery stores, or even partially buried in hot climates to lower cooling costs. A well-run container farm can yield between 4,000 and 6,000 plants per week — up to 80 times more food than a traditional farm occupying the same footprint.
While container farms aren’t necessarily well-suited for mass-scale agriculture, they offer a decentralized, resilient way to grow food exactly where it’s needed — from remote northern towns to underserved urban food deserts.
Vertical farms represent the most advanced and ambitious form of indoor agriculture. Housed in multi-story buildings or warehouse spaces, these farms stack crops in layers from floor to ceiling, each bathed in carefully calibrated LED lighting. Every variable is optimized — water use, nutrient delivery, airflow, lighting schedules. In some facilities, robots handle planting, watering, and harvesting without human involvement.
These systems use no soil, very little land, and as little as one percent of the water required by traditional farms. Their productivity is remarkable. With ideal growing conditions maintained year-round, crops grow faster and can be harvested multiple times annually. Lettuce, for example, can go from seed to harvest in under three weeks — again and again.
Japan is a global leader in vertical farming, with companies like Spread leading the way. At their high-tech facility outside Kyoto, robots tend racks of lettuce growing in sealed, sterile rooms under precision lighting. Each square meter yields hundreds of heads of lettuce per year — far more than traditional outdoor farms.
But vertical farms also face hurdles. They demand more electricity than other indoor systems, especially for lighting and climate control. Construction costs can be high — particularly in urban centers where land isn’t cheap. Still, their potential is enormous. As cities grow and farmland becomes scarcer, vertical farms offer a way to produce food close to where it’s consumed — reducing transportation, emissions, and supply chain risk.
By the year 2050, the world’s population is expected to reach nearly ten billion people — an additional two billion mouths to feed. And while population growth is slowing in many regions, urbanization is accelerating. According to the United Nations, two out of every three people on Earth will be living in cities by mid-century, many of them in megacities with ten million people or more.
That’s not just a demographic shift. It’s an agricultural one.
For thousands of years, food production happened outside of cities, often far outside, where land was cheap and plentiful. The model worked, until it didn’t. Today, most of the world’s food still travels hundreds or even thousands of kilometers before it reaches a grocery store. That means long supply chains, massive refrigeration networks, and enormous waste. It also means vulnerability. A heatwave in California can disrupt lettuce shipments to Toronto. A flood in Manitoba can ripple through bakery supply chains in Ontario. In a warming world, where extreme weather is becoming more frequent and severe, this system is increasingly brittle.
At the same time, we’re running out of space to farm. Arable land is declining globally — not just from climate change and overuse, but from expanding cities that pave over farmland to build homes and highways. That puts even more pressure on the land that remains, pushing it to produce more, faster, and often at the expense of the environment.
Indoor farming — particularly vertical and modular systems — offers a chance to flip this model on its head. Instead of growing food where land is cheap and shipping it to where people live, we can grow food where people live, eliminating the distance entirely. Lettuce grown in a vertical farm in downtown Toronto can be harvested in the morning and on store shelves by afternoon. There’s no need for refrigerated trucks, no spoilage in transit, and no exposure to heat, drought, or pests.
And the gains in efficiency aren’t small. Vertical farms can produce anywhere from 10 to 600 times more food per square meter than conventional outdoor farms, depending on the crop, number of growing layers, and harvest cycles. It can also be done while using up to 98 percent less water — a critical advantage in regions facing growing water scarcity.
But the goal isn’t just to grow more food. It’s to grow food that can endure the extremes of a changing climate. Food that doesn’t deplete the soil or poison the water and ecosystems we depend on. Whether indoor farming can truly meet that challenge remains to be seen.
Despite its enormous potential, indoor farming isn’t a miracle solution. It won’t replace every wheat field, orchard, or cattle ranch. It can’t grow every type of crop. It doesn’t make food magically cheaper. And for now, it consumes more energy than most farms can generate on their own.
So what can it do?
Indoor farming excels at growing certain types of crops — especially fast-growing, high-yield plants that don’t require much vertical space. Leafy greens like lettuce, kale, and spinach are ideal. So are herbs such as basil and mint, along with high-value specialty crops like microgreens and strawberries. Mushrooms stand out as well. They don’t need light and can be stacked densely with minimal energy use. These are the crops that thrive in controlled environments and produce enough value to offset the higher setup and operating costs.
But many staple crops present a different challenge.
Grains like wheat, corn, and rice need more space, time, and energy. Fruit trees, nut orchards, and root vegetables such as potatoes and carrots bring additional hurdles due to their size, depth requirements, or long growing cycles. Technically, some of these can be grown indoors, and researchers have modeled how it could work, but the economics are still difficult to justify. These crops tend to have slim profit margins and need enormous scale to be cost-competitive. Until vertical farming becomes far more efficient or clean electricity becomes much cheaper, indoor grain farms will remain rare.
We are looking into using gene-editing technology to produce plant cultures that will excel in a vertical farm environment.
- Ricardo Hernandez, horticulture professor at NC State, via Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond (2021)
There are also technical limitations.
Indoor farms rely heavily on electricity for lighting, pumps, climate control, and automation. In places where power is expensive or unreliable, the business case quickly falls apart. And if that electricity comes from fossil fuels, the environmental benefits of indoor farming begin to fade. The most promising systems are those powered by renewable energy or located in regions where clean electricity is affordable and abundant.
Each type of indoor farm has its niche. Greenhouses work well for sun-loving crops and moderate climates but remain vulnerable to severe weather. Container farms are a strong fit for small communities and harsh environments but can’t scale to feed large populations. Vertical farms offer the highest yield per square meter but are costly to build and energy-intensive to operate. No single model will work everywhere. The future will require a mix of strategies, tailored to local needs, resources, and conditions.
The goal isn’t to replace traditional farming, but to supplement it. To ease pressure on overstretched land. To provide food security where the risks are highest. And to ensure that when climate chaos strikes, we have resilient systems to keep food on the table.
It’s one thing to imagine rows of glowing towers feeding a megacity. It’s another to ask whether the model actually works. The short answer is that it does—in the right conditions.
Indoor farming is already being used successfully around the world, from vertical lettuce farms in Japan to container farms in Canada’s North. The goal in these cases isn’t to feed an entire nation. It’s to solve specific problems: food insecurity, unreliable growing seasons, long supply chains, or harsh climates. And in those contexts, it works remarkably well.
Controlled studies show that vertical farms can produce wheat at yields hundreds of times greater per hectare than conventional outdoor farms. That’s not just because crops grow faster indoors; it’s because you can harvest multiple times per year and grow far more densely, layer upon layer. Leafy greens, mushrooms, herbs, and strawberries can be cycled even faster. In the right environment, production becomes not only predictable but programmable.
It has been estimated that a 10-meter-tall vertical farm could produce up to 600 times more wheat per land area compared to traditional farming.
– Applied Energy, ScienceDirect, Volume 331 (2023)
Automation plays a big role in making this viable. Many modern indoor farms use robots or conveyor systems to plant, monitor, and harvest crops, dramatically reducing labour costs. Smart sensors track light, humidity, and nutrient levels in real time. Some systems even use artificial intelligence to fine-tune conditions for maximum growth. The technology continues to improve every year—and it’s becoming more affordable as it scales.
Of course, indoor farming is energy-intensive. Lighting alone can consume vast amounts of electricity, especially in vertical farms that rely entirely on artificial light. But advances in LED efficiency, energy-recycling designs, and smarter control systems are steadily bringing those numbers down. As more farms integrate with clean energy—solar, wind, or geothermal—the carbon footprint shrinks even further.
Indoor farming isn’t cheap, and it isn’t simple. But the pieces are falling into place. The real question isn’t whether it’s technically feasible. It’s whether we’ll invest in it at the scale required, and whether we’ll see it not just as a tool for profit, but as essential infrastructure—as vital to resilience as roads, hospitals, and clean water.
Moving food production indoors could ultimately free up vast amounts of land. But if that happens, what should we do with it?
That unused land represents more than a logistical challenge. It’s an opportunity — a chance to give it back to nature and restore what we’ve lost. The answer isn’t to pave it over for suburbs or shopping malls. It’s to use it more wisely than we have in the past.
Some of that land could be rewilded. Forests, wetlands, and grasslands that once absorbed carbon, supported biodiversity, and protected against floods and fires could return. Every acre we free up is a chance to restore balance to ecosystems we’ve pushed to the brink. It’s a chance to bring back pollinators, store carbon, and let damaged soil heal.
Other land could support regenerative agriculture. Instead of depleting the soil, these methods enrich it. Instead of releasing carbon, they store it. Instead of fragile, centralized systems, they build resilient local food economies. Organic farms, agroforestry, rotational grazing — none can feed ten billion people on their own, but all have a role in a diverse, climate-adaptive future.
And then there’s another option: grow something entirely different.
Not just food. Not exactly fuel. A crop that can replace plastics, reduce deforestation, clean contaminated soil, and provide a sustainable alternative to petrochemicals. A plant with thousands of uses, banned for the wrong reasons, and now poised for a comeback: hemp.
Industrial hemp offers rare versatility. It grows faster than corn, restores degraded soil, and captures carbon efficiently. Its fibres can replace petroleum-based plastics. Its stalks can become building materials stronger than concrete. Its seeds can produce protein-rich food, oils, and biofuel. Hemp can clean the land while replacing the products that helped pollute it — a rare win for farmers, consumers, and the planet.
But freeing up enough land for climate-positive crops like hemp means finding ways to move more staple food production indoors — especially wheat, one of the most space-hungry, low-margin crops we grow.
Total wheat production fell 38.5% to 21.7 million tonnes in 2021, because of lower production in the Prairies. Lower yields were driven largely by drought conditions in Western Canada, which resulted in lower production.
– Production of principal field crops, Statistics Canada (2021)
Scientists at Princeton modeled what’s possible when wheat is grown indoors under optimal conditions. A ten-layer vertical system could produce between 700 and 1,940 tonnes of wheat per hectare, depending on lighting and CO₂ levels. Conventional outdoor wheat farms in Canada average less than 3.5 tonnes per hectare — and in bad years, less than 2.5. Indoors, wheat could be grown year-round, harvested five times per year, and packed far more densely. The result? A potential yield over 500 times greater than traditional farming.
However, wheat alone isn’t profitable indoors — at least not yet. But when combined with fast-growing, high-margin crops like microgreens, mushrooms, and leafy greens, the economics shift. The fast pays for the slow. The valuable pays for the essential.
This isn’t about replacing every field. It’s about building a complementary system that produces enough food, in the right places, with less risk and more control. A system that protects us not only from climate disruption, but from fragile supply chains and degraded farmland.
It’s a way to grow food close to home, reclaim exhausted soil, restore ecosystems, and repurpose farmland for climate-positive crops. A way to build an agricultural system that’s cleaner, smarter, and far more resilient than the one we rely on today.
We can now grow food virtually anywhere — land is no longer the limit. The tools are here. The challenge isn’t technology — it’s having the imagination, and the will, to use them. Indoor farming won’t solve everything. But it changes what’s possible.
We know what’s coming: drought, heat, floods, famine — a future that outdoor agriculture was never built to withstand. But the future of food isn’t just about survival. It’s about the kind of civilization we choose to become. For a century, we’ve tried to dominate nature with chemistry and machines. Maybe it’s time to remember we’re part of nature, too. Do we keep reshaping it to serve our short-term needs? Or do we learn to work with it — to rebuild what we’ve broken, and to grow not just crops, but a resilient future for us all?
Curious about why I wrote this book? Read my Author’s Note →
Want to dive deeper? A full list of sources and further reading for this chapter is available at: www.themundi.com/book/sources
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