… have been reading about window farming and ran across the following link:

dutch-plantlab-revolutionizes-farming

It seems like the major inputs for this type of farming would be: energy and water—using FF and desalination, both are cheap.

Now, it’s also true that FF would transform traditional farming—farming is very energy intensive—so why switch to … let’s call it “warehouse farming”?

Well there are a few reasons:
1) vegetables that don’t have to be designed with a long shelf life just taste better.
2) world population is expanding—many places already don’t have enough farrm land / proper climate and must import food
3) depletion of top soil at existing farms
4) the world is eating up pristine forest for farm land, that’s a terrible trade off
5) the run-offs from traditional farming are creating vast dead zones in the oceans

The problem is that once you start living off aeroculture or aquaculture food, your population will develop significant deficiencies. You need mineral soil for … minerals, amongst other things. Magnesium, calcium, there’s a reason they’re called alkaline earth metals. And once you think of adding something to the water, there will probably be something else you haven’t thought of.

1) with more energy, transport the vegetables around more frequently and you don’t need the long shelf life. (Or irradiation)

3) is caused by cutting down trees, very unfortunate and short-sighted practice by farmers, which re-regulation needs to prevent. Nothing a private individual can do about that, it’s a political issue. Cutting the trees also causes podsolisation which causes earthworms to die off, destroying soil fertility. Leading to the need for more chemicals…
The only way, outside of direct regulations, that this is going to be changed, is if there were a widespread return to small-scale high-quality agriculture with less emphasis on spatial economies of scale.

4) Yes, it truly is terrible but hopefully kicking biofuels in the bin should make a big difference.

5) Organic arable farming doesn’t create these runoffs. Again largely a political issue, especially since animal farming is being heavily subsidised by the taxpayer in many places, and this includes factory farms which are amongst the worst polluters.
http://www.pcrm.org/media/news/usdas-new-myplate-icon-at-odds-with-federal
Factory farming, in turn, means that there is then less food to go around for humans, because it takes a lot more arable land to feed up an animal. Traditional pastoral farming was exactly that – pastures on marginal land, not having a big impact on the human food supply.

Of course, the person that said you get 40% less yield from organic rather than chemical arable farming is right, the yield is somewhat less, as anyone knows who has tried both ways. In the short term (until organic gets going properly) the difference can be even greater. But globally there isn’t a shortage of arable land just to feed humans – it’s biofuels and factory farms that we can’t afford.

2) is the rub – nothing wrong in principle with importing food if you have something to export. Nobel prize winner Amartya Sen wrote extensively about how shortage of funds, rather than shortage of food, is the real reason for food poverty. Can focus fusion impact the distribution of wealth between countries? How much can it impact it?