The future of resilient food production—Current challenges and future opportunities

The climate crisis is heating up, storms and droughts are hitting harder, deserts are growing, fertile land is fading, pollution is everywhere, and resources are running out—sparking mass migration and creating some of the biggest challenges of our time. Literature on vertical/indoor farming and Digital Agriculture and advanced Food Production Units (FPUs) as an integral, layered conceptual model—unifying containerized controlled-environment agriculture with IoT/CPS/AI capabilities and user-facing human–machine interfaces has been synthesized into a descriptive model. This model has been used to organize requirements and define a literature-informed technology readiness (TRL) diagnostic that quantifies research gaps and identifies future research directions. FPUs are envisioned to decouple production from variable external conditions and to operate where conventional agriculture is constrained. Key design considerations should include transportability (ISO container form factor), modular scalability, energy self-sufficiency via renewables and storage, local resource collection, closed-loop water and nutrient cycles with waste-to-food pathways, and the potential inclusion of animal-based foods (e.g., insects). Shown synthesis highlights current limitations and defines research gaps in state-of-the-art systems. Most notably, the emphasis on low-calorie crops, limited crop commutability, interoperability and automation challenges, and energy/economic constraints. Framed through the FPU model, the authors outline how expanding toward calorie-dense species, integrating sensing/automation/decision-making, and deploying user-centric HMIs could help address these gaps. TRL assessments were provided across physical, digital, and user layers to quantify readiness and research needs; these are diagnostic summaries derived from the literature and do not validate any single architecture. Priority directions include: open datasets for high-calorie crops; cultivation and control strategies for longer-cycle species; sustainable AI and edge computing; robust, modular energy and storage architectures; interoperability standards; and HMIs usable by non-experts in low-resource settings. Overall, FPUs were presented as one possible pathway to guide research and translational efforts toward resilient, adaptable food production in adverse and humanitarian contexts. The presented work is a scoping review coupled with a perspective paper that utilizes targeted literature searches to synthesize and structure the field rather than to exhaustively identify all studies. The presented TRL mapping is a literature-informed diagnostic to highlight maturity and research gaps, not a validation of a specific FPU architecture.