> The benefits of treating the soil as a living organism include increased fertility
This is a pretty interesting (and correct) point, and there's a lot to say about it from a few different perspectives.
You get much higher all-inclusive yields from a unit of land by growing several different crops in the same space. They (can) complement each other, using different resources from the ground and providing resources to each other.
American agriculture is not set up to do this. Instead of optimizing yield as a function of land input, we optimize yield as a function of labor input, because we have tons and tons of fertile land relative to our small-for-the-size-of-the-country population. If you have one person growing food on a thousand acres of land (remember, one acre is originally "the amount of land one man can plow in a day"), it makes more sense to give that one person just one thing to do. There's no way they're going to be able to care for 5 different crops simultaneously, or even adjust their practices to better suit the specifics of individual fields. We prefer to get a lot of land under low-labor cultivation, even though the cultivation isn't very effective, because our tiny population doesn't require high agricultural yields per unit land.
A more traditional model involves starving peasants intensively cultivating scarce land. With cheap and abundant labor inputs, you can get much more from one unit of land. But most of that increase goes to feeding the peasants who provide the labor. This is similar to how models of the effect of immigration on American GDP tend to show large increases in GDP -- the benefits of which, if you account for them, mostly accrue to the new immigrants.
I don't think there's an easy way to combine the ideas of "infinite cheap peasant labor gives us higher agricultural yields" and "a middle-class lifestyle should be in reach for everybody". Americans are rich, from a historical and current-rest-of-the-world perspective, specifically because we use so few people to grow food. One guy with enough food to feed three million people is a huge benefit to the rest of the country, and he's personally stinking rich. Five million peasants in huts who collectively produce enough food to feed 5,100,000 people are all dirt poor, and they produce only a minor benefit to the rest of the country.