Speaking as someone who does intensive gardening (as in enough to feed several people vegetables, berries, and such in a 25'x40' area, your answers show you have little experience working with dirt.
1. Farmland is getting expensive but unless you're planning on investing in kevlar or naurto-dodging bullets, rural land is cheaper.
2. You're powering those lights with what, mystical fairy farts? Solar panels or grid power cost a lot of money, though I do use small scale solar for microcontrollers
3. So can any standard greenhouse, and I can arduino control that too... Honestly RasPI4's are massive overkill.
4. Pest management isn't the insane amount of poison that Greenpeace would have you believe. Maintaining your soil ecology is a first step to avoiding most pests.
Growing plants that attract beneficial insects around your garden does a surprising amount to stop pests. For larger rodent pests owl boxes work wonders.
5. fertilizer isn't measured by acre, it's measured by plant consumption. If you're growing less plants then you will use less fertilizer. If you grow more plants you will use more fertilizer. Most plants (I could get into cover cropping here, but choose not to) deplete the soil. Sustainable farming uses a lot of compost, bone meal, blood meal, feather meal, etc. which are waste products from other local farms.
6. you still haven't gotten around the HUGE power bill that comes with vertical farming. Making this approach carbon neutral vs row cropping is non-trivial. Farm equipment is run a lot less and pollutes a lot less than you think vs what is harvested. On most row crop farms a field is cultivated, seeded (sometimes both of these are done in one pass), sprayed, harvested, and tilled in a year. That's 5-6 passes of a tractor over a field in a year. Most large row-crop farms are planting swaths of 40-50' width each pass. This means that with the right equipment a farmer on his tractor can plant, fertilize, or harvest, thousands of acres a day. In exchange for running a diesel engine roughly equivalent to that in a Jeep Grand Cherokee diesel, with better pollution controls, for 14 hours 5 times a year, you get 1000 acres of corn...
Look, I get it, cityfolk are scared of big row crop farms because greenpeace says you need to be scared. Why not go meet a farmer and find out where your food really comes from.
