article · Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems
Controlled environment agriculture and vertical farming are widely discussed as solutions to urbanisation and climate instability, yet technological sophistication alone does not guarantee public-health benefits. A conceptual Public-Health-by-Design framework connects facility design and growing choices to nutrition, food safety, equity, and environmental health. The underlying evidence indicates that controlled environment systems can realistically complement conventional agriculture for perishable, nutrient-dense crops, but cannot replace conventional farming for staple crops such as cereals, pulses, and roots. Nutritional outcomes depend heavily on factors including lighting, temperature, nutrient formulation, and post-harvest processes. Closed-loop facilities can reduce resource losses, but operators must manage pathogen transmission, salinity, and waste discharge. The framework introduces operational pathways and a digital-governance module to evaluate these facilities against clear public-health indicators.
Vertical farms and automated greenhouses are frequently promoted as the future of food, but high yields do not automatically improve population health. This work demonstrates that technology choices must intentionally incorporate nutrition, safety, and equity. It offers clear boundaries on what indoor agriculture can achieve, helping urban planners and health authorities evaluate where these systems genuinely add value.
This work represents early-stage conceptual research that provides design principles for vertical farming operators, agritech developers, and municipal planners. It outlines operational opportunities in circular nutrient recovery, risk-based microbiome monitoring, and digital governance architectures incorporating robotics, sensor networks, and digital twins. Because the framework is analytical and comparative rather than an applied product, commercial adoption depends on operators integrating these operational pathways into facility design and evaluation.
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Vertical farming and controlled environment agriculture (CEA) are increasingly promoted as responses to urbanisation, climate instability, water scarcity and the need for more reliable fresh-food supply. Yet high yield, technological sophistication and internal resource efficiency do not by themselves establish public-health value. This conceptual analysis reframes CEA as a conditional component of urban and regional food systems and develops a Public-Health-by-Design framework that links production choices to nutrition, food safety, environmental health, affordability, labour, governance and equity. The analysis draws on a targeted evidence update and interprets comparative findings within their original crop, system and geographic boundaries. The evidence supports a realistic complementary role for CEA in producing selected perishable, high-value and nutrient-dense crops; it does not support the near-term replacement of conventional agriculture for staple cereals, pulses and root crops. Nutritional outcomes vary with cultivar, light, temperature, carbon dioxide, water quality, nutrient formulation, nutrient origin, electrical conductivity, harvest stage and post-harvest handling. Nutrient circularity should therefore be assessed at two levels: recirculation within the facility and substitution of virgin mineral inputs with safe, standardised nutrients recovered from waste streams. Closed-loop systems can reduce water and nutrient losses, but salinity, sodium accumulation, pathogens, residues and final discharge remain material constraints. CEA may reduce selected field-associated hazards, while recirculating water, biofilms, seeds, workers and equipment can also transmit contamination. Beneficial produce-associated microbiota should be included in future food-quality research rather than treating all microorganisms as hazards. Economic competitiveness is similarly contextual because CEA operates within markets shaped by agricultural subsidies, energy prices, finance, procurement and infrastructure. The proposed framework contains an operational pathway from design choices to intermediate outcomes, public-health effects, governance and adaptive learning, while six cross-cutting principles guide decisions at every stage. CEA should consequently be evaluated against explicit comparators, distributional outcomes and transparent indicators. To strengthen operational use, the framework explicitly positioned against six established sustainability, food-system, food-environment, One Health, safe-and-sustainable-by-design, and food-system indicator frameworks. A risk-based microbiome monitoring protocol and a digital-governance module covering IoT, machine learning, computer vision, robotics, predictive analytics and digital twins are also specified.
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DOI: 10.3389/fsufs.2026.1920989
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