> I find the aversion to ... control inherently suspicious.

Interesting. Could you please expand on that? Personally, I find the desire to control inherently suspicious.

No one is saying don't measure things. Fertilizer doesn't come from mysticism and homepathy but from science - make a guess (hypothesis) and test to see if it works. The issue is that we've focused on volume of output from a field, rather than mineral content of vegetables, which is far harder to measure.

The problem with how you're framing this is that the scientific methods that go into such developments don't take into account certain "externalities". Measurement and control can only be exercised inasmuch as you can understand the totality of the system. In this case: broader effects on human health and ecosystems. As someone with a strong scientific background, it sometimes seems to me that the science and engineering of the past couple centuries has been so focused on the intricacies of specific problems that they haven't left their practitioners enough leeway to consider their place in the constellation of human activity. I'm not saying that there would have been another way to accomplish these feats, but that the problems are so difficult that it's left to other (sometimes non-scientific) people to evaluate their value to society.

The problem is one of underestimating the vastness of what we don't yet understand. We know extensively (nearly completely) about physics and basic chemistry at the unit level. As we increase the complexity, we know less and less. Protein folding, hormone interactions, DNA, getting there but lots of unknowns. Go up another few levels and you get to entire organisms like yeasts, which we can model reasonably well. Plants and their soil environment is several levels of magnitude more complex yet.

Using shit will get you an outcome you can count on. Trying to formulate things otherwise is sure to get whatever you are testing for, but likely to miss something important that we won't understand for years to come. That's happened more times than I'd care to count.

The idea being that Nature (more specifically evolution/natural selection) has demonstrated a remarkable tendency to converge on closed-cycle ecosystems when left to her/their own devices.

An idiom about never taking down a fence one knows not the provenance or reason for comes to mind.

Not that I'm saying I entirely agree with the viewpoint myself, but the rate of catastrophic unintended consequences we facilitate (I.e biodiversity crisis, creation of superbugs, introduction of invasive species) through artificial selection pressures tends to elicit pause at the suggestion we just "toss some minerals in and be done with it".