No? Well not in a way that wouldn't be stretching an owl over a globe. But Carolina Jessamine is toxic to honeybees and not natives (or at least there exist native bees who have adapted to not slurp on it if it is toxic to them). That doesn't stop people from spreading the lie that Carolina Jessamine "hurts bees". It hurts some species of bees. To transfer this concept to the human population, you'd have to start arguing that there are different species of humans or, again, construct a stretching-an-owl-over-a-globe argument.
And people can't mention every caveat in every discussion, sorry. You've really just constructed a strawman.
In a 40-minute discussion with someone like Doug Tallamy, both the issue of invasive honeybees and pesticides will come up. The venn diagram of people who care about both things is very close to a circle.
Also, as to your edit - that honeybees rely on humans doesn't change their impact on native bee populations, which is they outcompete native bees.
There's nothing weird about correcting the popular ignorant assumption that the only pollinator that matters is honeybees.
And assuming you get around this via grow lights, surely the energy and material cost goes up too much for high-volume crops to make economical sense.
In my part of Ohio, we have lots of farmland -- and plenty of water that just falls out of the sky. We've got reasonably-long, generally-hot days during our growing season and we get some serious crop production done here while it lasts.
The rest of the year? The days are short. It's dark and cold outside; frozen, even. We can't grow crops outside here in the winter.
But vertical farms (eg, fancy greenhouses) can just keep going. With artificial light and/or supplemental heat, they're still producing even in the depths of winter.
Thus, I can go to the grocery store near my house and buy a locally-grown tomato in February. It's expensive to get this done, but the alternatives include paying someone to drive it up here from thousands of miles away or just going without a tomato until after things have warmed up again and stayed that way for awhile.
Or simply put, can wild animals eat tomatoes safely(on evolutionary timescale) in winter if they don't normally grow in winter.
The tomato is native to places like Peru and Ecuador, and eventually was moved to [what is now known as] Mexico as we kept bringing it further north.
The tomato is Ohio's state fruit[1], but it does not belong in Ohio. The only reason we have tomatoes growing in Ohio is humans; nature has nothing to do with it. They wouldn't be here without people dilly-whacking with things.
(And I'm glad they did so. Tomatoes are delicious.)
[1]: Seems weird but it be that way anyhow. Ohio also has a native state fruit, which is the paw paw.
I recently did some research, and there are multiple local greenhouses around many large Canadian cities for just this reason. They are competitive in the winter, and sell to local supermarkets. The cost of the greenhouses vs shipping + loss.
And there is a loss in nutrition, when you harvest green and it takes weeks to hit the table, vs something picked yesterday and picked when actually ripe.
Of course, these are large warehouses, not typical greenouses.
So I guess the answer is, it can make sense in certain circumstances. A warmer place where you can grow fruit outside year round, not so much.
I think the bigger difference is the Canadian attitude about the "commons" nature of electricity and so profiting excessively on power is frowned upon.
Regenerative farming and/or permaculture offer ways to run industrial-scale agriculture without the monoculture. See i.e. https://peercommunityjournal.org/articles/10.24072/pcjournal...
Another innovation I see is the use of "crop tunnels" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polytunnel) to greatly extend the growing season in colder climates (another poster mentioned "Ohio"), and/or better control evaporation.
If you're growing extreme-value crops - marijuana, or maybe exotic salad greens for Michelin-starred restaurants - that can actually work.
Otherwise, you're trying to compete with millions of square miles of naturally sun-lit dirt, and extremely efficient modern agro-tech stacks. Bankruptcy awaits.
> just technologist delusions of mine?
I'd bet you've read several articles about techno-utopians setting up vertical farms, and their grand dreams. Which always hand-wave the "how can this massively expensive setup complete with dirt?" part.
Farming sun-lit dirt does not magically require monoculture, nor poor farming practices. The problems is monoculture's appeal to certain human cultures - especially profit-maximizing "big ag" capitalists - and the agricultural policies enacted by naive politicians.
You're begging the question with this statement. Indoor growing is used when you don't have access to this kind of resource. There are many locations where access to land or suitable conditions is restricted.
CEA has been used profitably for a long time, and the most valuable crops are mushrooms and leafy greens, not exotic or illegal plants.
These days, "don't have access" is a micro-market. Everywhere else, indoor growing has to compete with the cost & delay of importing. Last I heard, even Antarctic bases are only growing a few fresh veggies - 99% of their food is imported. (Well, plant-based food. They might do a fair bit of fishing.)
> CEA has been used ...
My comment was replying to magemaster's "large scale vertical farms ... just technologist delusions".* Vs. greenhouses - which can be little more than plastic sheeting over light wooden framing over sunlit dirt - yes, those have far saner economics. Mushrooms - which can be grown in dark caves without dirt using prehistoric technology - are also a very different thing.
*To quote Wikipedia - "The modern concept of vertical farming was proposed in 1999 by Dickson Despommier, professor of Public and Environmental Health at Columbia University.[2] Despommier and his students came up with a design of a skyscraper farm that could feed 50,000 people."