We can safely assume there is a relationship between land-use and total water and pesticide usage.

Can we? Vertical farms are starting to be a thing, and they use water way beyond what you'd expect for the area.

No one is using vertical farms for the kind of calorie dense food that would replace meat, and certainly not at any kind of scale.

I've seen a number of reports of large farms being planned in places like the middle east.

Dubai opened one about 6 months ago capable of producing over a million kg of leafy greens a year, the largest vertical farm in the world by some margin, and that's just a pilot project.

A million kg of the most calorie dense leafy green (parsnip or kale at 50-60 kcal/100 grams) would be equivalent to about 167,000 kg of wheat (~360 kcal/100 grams). A bushel of wheat is about 27kg and the US produces about 50 bushels per acre [1] or 1,350 kg of wheat per acre. To produce the caloric equivalent of a million kg of leafy greens you would need about 130 acres (167,000/1350) of wheat. The average farm in the US is over 400 acres in size [2].

The “largest vertical farm in the world by some margin” produces less calories than a tiny family farm that can barely afford its own tractor. The largest wheat farm in Canada is over 35,000 acres which means it produces just as much food per day as the largest vertical farm produces per year. That wheat farm isn’t even in the list of top 10 largest farms in North America.

We’re comparing pebbles to continents.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/190356/wheat-yield-per-h...

[2] https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/ag-and-food-statistic...

Can’t grow wheat in the Middle East, though. In fact, Dubai can’t grow any of their own food outdoors.

The industry is growing at 25-30% YoY…. That’s gonna snowball fast.

Wheat was first grown in Mesopotamia, literally in the middle of the Middle East!

> The industry is growing at 25-30% YoY…. That’s gonna snowball fast.

Pure fantasy. We’ve had vertical farming for thousands of years already - first built by the same Babylonians that grew wheat in Mesopotamia! When’s it going to start snowballing?

There will still be a relation, `more vertical farms => more use of water and pesticides`. Now, the factor between those might change. But I fail to see why vertical farming would change the dynamics fundamentally.

You could have a tall vertical farm using 100x more resources per acre than traditional farming.

correct, which is even more reason to try to reduce animal consumption as they make up a massive proportion agriculture required just for their feed