Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unless they put the farmbot on wheels, you're talking about too small of a square footage to generate any interesting yields. You'll spend WAY more time maintaining the bot than you would just planting and mulching. The farmbot development is important, but won't be commercially viable with the current fixed rail system.
Well that is what I'm wondering. One of the big issues is real estate. I wonder if it would be more viable instead of just going 2D to make a more 3D system (ie stack plants ala hydroponics). Obviously the sun is way more efficient and preferred but if you live in an area where the sun isn't exactly available that much of the year it might be worth it for some automated easy to use large indoor like closet system or…
Green houses and hydroponics are great, but they can just as well be done on cheap land.
The biggest difficulty in food production isn't land, water, and sunlight - its management at scale.
This is why the vast majority of everyone's calories comes from large tractor managed commodity crops.
As a metaphor, the easy part of IT is ordering the servers, switches, etc. The setup takes some labor, but the real difficulty is the ongoing management.