I suspect there's trade-offs that aren't being thoroughly considered in this equation. That's the case in every full-on 'everything we're doing is wrong, and there's a perfect solution' claim.
In large farms, seeds are mass produced, engineered, and go through a QA and testing process to prevent certain diseases. There are many good reasons, BTW, why farms don't grow perennials and engage in mono-cropping, or use herbicides and genetically engineered crops instead of no-till. The trade-off in abandoning these practices almost always involves sacrificing yields and the mechanization of labor.
Or how about vineyards?
> There are many good reasons, BTW, why farms don't grow perennials and engage in mono-cropping, or use herbicides and genetically engineered crops instead of no-till.
But sometimes the pests and disease are caused by these same practices, right? Like, I'm aware the Cavendish banana we all eat is very susceptible to a fungal disease that is slowly spreading around the world. Because we produce so much of a single variety, where all plants are clones, a single disease can be highly disruptive. If production was evenly distributed over many varieties, and if plantations had banana plants separated by other useful crops, the whole system might be more resilient.
> The trade-off in abandoning these practices almost always involves sacrificing yields and the mechanization of labor.
The problem (that cannot be escaped) is longevity. Any system of agriculture that does not increase over time soil fertility and volume/mass is doomed.
Systems of agriculture that deplete [various measures of biological health] over time are akin to mining. Once the underlying resources are exhausted the story ends (the resources in question could be water, or biodiversity, or climate stability, etc...)
Even if we compensate with technology, we are substituting our managed system for a automatic system that has been (meta-)stable for billions of years. We should proceed carefully. The billions of people who owe their lives to the Haber-Bosch process (and other innovations) may come to rue it if we crash due to environmental destruction. By some scientific estimates this is the decade when our biomass and the biomass of our agriculture outweighs naturally occurring biomass. For better or worse the world has become our farm.
That's why Gabe Brown (et. al.) seems so important to me: he is integrating modern practices with new (scientifically-validated) regenerative practices and his farm is both profitable and healthier year after year.
It turns out that when we understand what the plants and animals are doing in detail (through science) we can arrange them in time and space in ways that are vastly more efficient than what we've been doing these last ~12k years.
Think about it, if it wasn't so that would mean that our ancestors discovered optimal farming in antiquity, eh?
Just think: we used to burn chaff rather than composting it. It turns out that that is not a good idea. It's that sort of thing that I'm thinking of when I call ag "the dumbest way" to grow food.
Farming has undergone several fundamental changes throughout history after that though, notably in medieval times and then everything industrialization brought
Can you name some that can't be reduced to "but on a [insert new machine]"? The only one I can think of is artificial fertilizer, which isn't a sustainable practice in the long run either.
Compared to that every other revolution in farming was insignificant.
It may take years for new practices to be widespread and accepted, but I assure you, if you can make that chart continue to go up, ~every grain farmer in the US will happily be on board.
There is a certain world-view and a romanticizing to farming, but at the end of the day, farmers are businessmen who just want to grow as much food as possible, as cheaply as possible. They may grumble as much as a software developer when forced to learn new tools, and they won't drop everything for an unproven promise, but they'll happily abandon their old ways in favor of new ones once they're proven.
This assumes both systems are optimizing for the same thing.
We know that evolution is optimizing for continuation or duration (technically "evolution" isn't a thing, it's a non-volitional chemical tautology with no purpose or intrinsic meaning so "it" cannot optimize, however, in practice, life is optimizing for more and continued life, overcoming radiation, impacts, and it's own consequences (like the advent of oxygen and aerobic metabolism)) so what is the other system optimizing for?
(As an aside, is "life is optimizing for more and continued life" a definition for "life"?)