“We are kind of at the beginning of a revolution,” Per Pinstrup-Andersen, a graduate-school professor at Cornell University’s College of Human Ecology, told me. “We’re at the beginning of a very rapid development in the use of indoor controlled facilities for producing vegetables and some fruits,” he said. “No matter what happens with climate change, you still have your controlled environment.”

The technology used for these farms has been around for decades. In fact, Marques began studying it in the 1990s after learning that NASA used it to grow plants in space. But only in the last several years has interest in using the technology for urban, commercial-scale agriculture picked up. Indoor farms have recently sprouted up in old warehouses, shipping containers, and small skyscrapers in New Jersey, South Korea, Germany, India, and Dubai—places where traditional farming is either difficult or impossible due to climate, population density, or the land itself. In Houston, sprawling commercial and residential developments were built on top of a swamp, making large-scale outdoor farming virtually impossible.

Marques and I hopped in his minivan and headed about a mile away from his garden to the site of the Moonflower Farms expansion, where men in hard hats were surveying the land. The new facility doesn’t look like much yet—just a large elevated mound of dirt with metal poles sticking out of it. But by the time it’s operational, Marques plans to have a 20,000-square-foot greenhouse that he expects will churn out 1,000 pounds of produce per day—compared with the 20 pounds that his tiny facility produces now. He currently sells to a couple dozen restaurants but plans to expand to regional and national distributors and local grocers once the new facility is up and running.

The elimination of long, cross-country transports to get the produce to grocery stores means consumers wind up with fresher food. Right now, Marques said, the time from harvest to table is sometimes only a matter of hours, which means that produce arrives in better shape and then lasts longer both in the store and in people’s homes. “If we can make this work in the city of Houston and produce 1,000 pounds a day or more of product—high-quality product that has three times the shelf life—then we have a good model that we can pretty much [take] to any city in the world and replicate,” Marques said.

The new greenhouse will operate like a research-and-development facility, helping Marques perfect a prototype that interested farmers around the world can use as a template. He already knows that he’ll need to make some changes. For starters, he’s not going to rely exclusively on LED lighting as he does now; instead he will mostly use sunlight, plugging in energy-efficient lighting as a supplement—a measure that will cut costs significantly. Marques said he has already had inquiries about this model from a food distributor in Cairo, where the arid climate and heavy reliance on imported crops make the food supply unpredictable. Marques says he has also talked to strawberry growers in Norway, where thousands of metric tons of strawberries are imported every year due to the short growing season. And he has heard from cattle farmers in Brazil, where the shrinking availability of pastureland and prohibitions on razing rainforests mean that some farmers may need to import grass to feed their cows.

Cutting the costs of building and maintaining the systems themselves will be crucial as vertical farms continue to evolve, according to Henry Gordon-Smith, the co-founder of the international Association for Vertical Farming and a consultant at the New York–based firm Agritecture. As a result of high costs, Gordon-Smith said, several vertical farms in North America have failed in recent years. That’s what happened at LocalGarden, a rooftop vertical farm in Vancouver that went bankrupt in 2014, and at PodPonics, a shipping-container vertical farm in Atlanta, where high labor and technology costs were consistently undermining return on investment.