It's amazing what they accomplished in such an arid location with minimal input. I worked on Geoff's farm in Australia and it's also a very impressive project!
If giant techno-farms are more economically efficient they will win out over more ecologically efficient forms, despite being fundamentally less desirable, unless there's some other countervailing "force" or "pressure" (I don't mean physical force).
(Ideally economic and ecologic efficiency would be unified, but we're not quite there yet. Remember that life is four-billion-year-old self-improving nanotechnology, eh?)