Vertical Farming: Beyond the Hype, Towards the Ideotype

Vertical farms grow crops indoors on stacked layers under artificial light, independent of climate and season. Lighting is the largest cost, and profitability is hard: the sector grew fast, but several companies went bankrupt. My thesis opens with two reviews of the sector, European and global. One constraint stood out: almost no crop varieties have been bred for growing indoors.
I studied whether changing the shape of dwarf tomato plants could raise yield. I built a three-dimensional computer model that simulates how light travels through a dense canopy and how each leaf turns it into assimilates and fruit growth, then searched for the best plant shape.
Plants with steeper, moderately curved leaves allowed light to reach deeper and produced up to 12% more fruit under high planting density. Plant shape and planting density must be chosen together, and the model does that: for each density it returns the plant architecture that yields most.