The article stresses that the reason the amount of agricultural land is falling is because we're getting more efficient, allowing marginal land to fall out of use.
There's considerably more forest in the United States than there was a hundred years ago, and the same is true for most First World countries.
The wilderness land that's actually under attack is mostly in Third World countries where they practice "traditional", "organic" agriculture of the sort beloved by urban First World environmentalists.
https://panamaupclose.com/2020/05/25/farmers-learn-not-to-sl...
This entire article is about abandoning traditional methods and replacing them with organic agriculture.
You're just creating a straw man to defeat when your original position doesn't even make sense.
Continuous no till, cover cropping, crop rotation, managing mycorrhizal fungi and things like system of rice intensification are hardly traditional and they are also orthogonal whether they are used for organic farming or not but they massively reduce the need for synthetic inputs. This rubs a lot of people proud of conventional agriculture the wrong way because it means their products are really just there to take a shortcut to save money in the short term. The fact that these newer practices are trying to work by understanding the plants and the entire ecosystem you are building rather than treating them as a blackbox which need specific inputs and the recipe is done. Imagine doing something for 30 years and then some new guy comes along and uses a new method that reduces his yields by -10% but saves him expensive inputs and thus results in greater profit while his soil gets better every year and the conventional farmer's soil gets worse. This is particularly annoying to the Bill Gates types who think they are some sort of Messiah because they have a lot of money and push people around.
What you call "ideological stench" others call "facts".
None of these "newer practices" are responsible for the increase in forest cover in the United States over the past century.
None of them are responsible for this:
https://www.agry.purdue.edu/ext/corn/news/timeless/images/US...
Also, facts (such as the one in the image linked immediately above) don't cease being facts just because you mod them down.
Before modern agriculture, just about every area could count on having a famine every few years.
That doesn't happen any more, except in areas where the government is fucked up.
And it wasn't "organic farming" that did it.
The "organic" bullshit is a gigantic scam aimed at extracting money from rich First-Worlders at the expense of raising food prices for the impoverished.
Forest for the trees with these things...
Does anyone who likes beef actually want them to be fed that way? Do the people clearing the rainforests actually want that? Or is it just what will bring them profit in the current system. It's all just a series of poorly applied financial incentives that we are able to change.
Meat in a Net Zero World:
https://wrap.org.uk/sites/default/files/2021-09/Meat-in-a-Ne...
It's "organic", too. Slash and burn doesn't typically use pesticides or artificial fertilizers.
And they are.
That’s a really weird way of framing multinational agriculture’s impacts on indigenous land. Like, none of what you’re saying is specifically wrong at a sub-clause level, the wilderness land under attack is “where they…”, but it’s not under attack by them or what they might practice.
They’re not actually the ones rapidly deforesting or otherwise devastating mostly pristine ecosystems. Cattle farms serving the US and many first world countries certainly are. It’s not a testament to our better farming techniques, it’s a testament to our prowess externalizing the costs of our lifestyle and internalizing the benefits of that. We’ve effectively outsourced imperialism. That’s not yay us, that’s gig genocide.
You're aware that about 90% of the megafauna in the Americas went extinct within a few centuries after the arrival of the early Native Americans?
Yeah, well, it wasn't Archer Daniels Midland or Cargill that did that.
You’ve got a rhetorical style that suggests you’re familiar with sparring on the topic. I’m not interested in that kind of exchange even if I do have energy for it. If that’s how you want to discuss the topic, you may have the last word.
If I’ve mistakenly categorized your reply,
- What happened when natives arrived is as relevant to what their descendants do now, as what happened when europeans arrived characterizes what their descendants do now. I’ll leave that open ended
- Of course businesses which didn’t exist couldn’t have caused things which happened before they existed
- The history of when natives arrived or even whether they migrated is disputed
- All of this historical focus might be interesting from a “how did now come to be?” perspective, but it’s not an analysis of what’s happening now
- Applying a similar historical analysis to euro records doesn’t produce megafauna or any other exculpatory extinction records
Now if we resume conversation, I hope we can agree not to engage such gotcha bullshit.
I'm talking facts.
Someone is bullshitting here, all right, but it's not me.
I agree that this conversation isn't really serving any purpose, though.
Traditional is a bit weird with agriculture, techniques like crop rotation have been around since 6000 BC. There are so many ancient improvements third world countries may not even use.