Role of Vertical Farming in Modern Horticultural Crop Production—Series Ⅱ

Dear colleagues,

With the rapid growth of the global population, there is an urgent need to develop adaptive agricultural strategies to guarantee future food security without requiring additional land. Vertical farming is a new promising method of growing crops in many stacked layers under fully controlled conditions with artificial lighting that can stably produce high-yield and high-quality crops. Indoor farms and plant factories with artificial light (PFALs) are another term used to describe vertical farms.

Vertical farming has advantages such as intensive crop production, year-round planned production, clean and high-quality production, and labour-saving production, regardless of time and space. Therefore, the production of leafy vegetables for salads on vertical farms has already been commercialized. However, at present, vertical farming has major limitations of high initial and running costs as well as difficulties in nutrition solution management. High value-added crops such as medicinal plants can be a good solution to improving the profits of vertical farming, and have recently been cultivated to obtain health-beneficial phytochemicals.

Therefore, relevant and updated knowledge and technologies are required for vertical farming. From academic and industrial perspectives, the role of vertical farming is becoming more and more important as a next-generation plant production system. Last year, we successfully published the Special Issue on the “Role of Vertical Farming in Modern Horticultural Crop Production—Series I.” Additionally, this year, we propose “Series II” of the same topic for a broader range of applications.

Prof. Dr. Jung Eek Son
Prof. Dr. Eiji Goto
Prof. Dr. Qichang Yang
Prof. Dr. Myung-Min Oh
Guest Editors

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