Will indoor vertical agriculture completely replace traditional agriculture one day?

Let's discuss the steps of vertical agriculture first. Vertical agriculture is very important to the future of agriculture because it maximizes the area of any landscape. The first step is only horizontal growth. Plants that leave a huge footprint horizontally need to grow vertically.

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These are your cucumbers, watermelons and even tomatoes. Any plant that expands outward needs to grow vertically. Now, more plants can grow together without the risk of disease. Side note: Marigold in the picture is actually used to increase soil nutrients and should be planted around many (not all) plants that need nutrients most. You can also sow clover in the autumn after harvest, and then press it into the soil before the first frost or after the first flowering period, taking the first flowering period as an example.

This vertical growth has limited potential in the field of automation, but it is possible. While sowing, the machine can be placed in a vertical shed. This may be the first step taken by many poor countries. The equipment that can sow seeds while burying grids in the ground is a relatively simple machine.

At the other extreme is your indoor hydroponic wall.

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With a few exceptions, most of them are run manually, not automatically. The problem with vertical agricultural automation is that plants don't always look the same. If you don't need to teach automation personnel how to see things, it just needs to repeat the same tasks over and over again in the same way, then the cost of automation is the lowest. If each factory is slightly different, automation will fail. Therefore, this automation is limited to factories with high mirror image characteristics and parent/child correlation characteristics. Some cabbage, some lettuce, and so on. Don't have your tomatoes, peppers, potatoes, melons and the like.

This is feasible, but it limits your output. The mass market agriculture in your future picture is waiting for the arrival of full robot technology. This means robot hands, robot vision and robot reasoning. Robots must observe, evaluate and take action on each plant.

This is the future, but we are talking about Asimov's future before the completely vertical agricultural acquisition.