[fromthestart]

Land usage and pollution. No pesticide/fertilizer runoff and no need to clear forest, much less land used per pound of food. Plus you can theoretically grow in cities-add a couple floors in skyscrapers and your cities become a little more self sustaining.

You're also not tied to variations in weather, meaning more consistent yields and substantially smaller likelihood of crop failure. And you're saving labor of tilling/planting, as well as the significant equipment/fuel costs and associated outages that go with outdoor farming.

There might also be automation benefits, easier to design an assembly line around your indoor grow setup with consistent lighting conditions for visual processing, but I'm not sure about this one.

[kragen]

I'm not convinced; couldn't you get the same benefits by turning on LEDs in your greenhouse on cloudy days and while running the harvesting robots at night?