The real problem with farms is that they're so... well, agricultural.  How much better it would be if they could be replaced with something more overtly technological; a factory farm, if you will.

That idea has been around ever since Hugo Gernsback published his 1911 novel Ralph 124c41+,  wherein he conceived of the farms of 600 years in the future as gigantic hothouses covering several square miles wherein crops are grown with artificial heat via geothermal wells, chemical fertilisers and electrical stimulation.  And forget ploughs, tractors and hordes of farm hands.  Cultivation and harvesting are achieved with only twenty men by way of all manner of machinery built right into the building's walls and ceiling like some sort of agrarian assembly line that increases efficiency to the point where five crops a year are brought in instead of one or two. 

Nor are we talking about hothouse tomatoes or strawberries.  We mean wheat, oats, rye and all the other staples of life.

Indeed, some farm factory advocates even went so far as to say that even giant hothouses smacked too much of sod busting and that the purest way to go was to build farms in tremendous underground vaults  with vast fields of corn wafting in the ventilation draughts.

All in all, about as bucolic as a salt mine.

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