We don't actually know if profits in real farms rise as much as agricultural tech sellers say they do. Bayer and Monsanto could just have really good sales teams. (They obviously do).

Like with medicine, we'd expect the effects measured in lab of new pesticides on yields to be larger than their real impact in the wild. It just receives considerably less scrutiny than medicine, so really, it's hard to cut through all the bullshit.

Despite what anyone's feel good story may bring up in rebuttal, there really isn't that much talent going into the buy-side of agricultural technology.

So what if it turns out that industrial monoculture techniques are vastly oversold (they almost certainly are), and that the real math shows a slight benefit, but not one that outweighs environmental costs?