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Modern farming isn't suitable for Africa for two reasons. First, the poor people cannot afford expensive modern equipment (but there are a few rich farmers who can and in some cases the governments have stepped up to buy modern equipment to be shared, though only time will tell if this is real efforts or just a publicity stunt) , and many governments lack rule of the law such that you can invest in something better and get a return (if there is another revolution you lose the land and all your effort to make it better are lost).

Note that both of these are political problems at the core. The first will be solved (or not) as people decide living in a city is better leaving more land for the rest to get rich from. Education is a major factor here, and things have improved a lot in many countries. However political problems threaten to take this away.

Political problems are hard. I don't know how to get stable governments and rules so that farmers can trust some investment in better farming is worth making. Nobody else does either, but you will see lots of people proposing something.

> many governments lack rule of the law such that you can invest in something better and get a return (if there is another revolution you lose the land and all your effort to make it better are lost).

It's not revolutions. If you as an ordinary not politically connected person are doing well, one of the government's henchmen will just take your property off you, and you (or your surviving family members) have no recourse.

It's easy to see how this dis-incentivizes investment in improvements.

Secure property tenure is probably the key problem to crack.

> What are the "obvious limitations"? There are many problems with today's industrialized agriculture, but I wouldn't call the limitations obvious. The article says it doesn't work well in Africa for instance, and I believe it, but isn't it just because we don't have the proper GMOs/fertilizers/pesticides for this kind of soil due to a lack of interest? Is there some "obvious limitation" that makes it impossible.

Basically pollution, resource destruction, and expense; from the OP:

> But today, the downsides of that kind of farming are becoming all too painful. Excess nitrogen fertilizer runs down watersheds to create vast dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico and elsewhere around the world. The rich soils of the U.S. Midwest or Ukraine, grown over thousands of years by billions of grazing animals, are almost gone, damaged by relentless plowing, blown away by the wind or washed away by storms.

> Everywhere, farmland is becoming increasingly acidic, demanding additional liming. Vast monoculture plantations act like an open bar to pests and diseases, forcing farmers to spend more and more on pesticides. Aquifers are being sucked dry, raising the cost of irrigation as new wells must be dug ever deeper. Industrial farming is engaged in a vicious circle of ever more inputs at ever greater expense to try to keep up with the challenges it creates.

> And often, it fails. About a third of the planet’s farmland has already been abandoned because of soil degradation.

20% of the African population is dependent on food aid. There are now more Africans living in Poverty than at any time in history.

How much of our agricultural bounty is sent as food aid, and serves to create only more hungry mouths?

Disabling all food aid, and requiring (/forcing) recipient populations to develop self-sufficiency, is a necessary step to fundamentally improving our agricultural systems. We can assist by providing education and family planning to Women in poverty-stricken countries.

http://www.fao.org/3/X0262E/x0262e21.htm

https://www.brookings.edu/blog/africa-in-focus/2018/11/21/fi...

> 20% of the African population is dependent on food aid. There are now more Africans living in Poverty than at any time in history.

> How much of our agricultural bounty is sent as food aid, and serves to create only more hungry mouths?

Also, I've read that such aid basically kneecaps the local economies. A large fraction of the local population is employed in food or clothing production, and the aid ends up just undercutting them and increasing unemployment (and even more dependence on aid).

"However, they are like closed systems, everything that is produced by the forest is used by the forest."

No, they are not. It depends on the type of forest of course, but in general forests produces excess. We get oxygen out of them. Wood. Meat. Mushrooms. Berries. Herbs .. and recreation.

Also forests grow with the right conditions and they can even create the right conditions to grow, if not bulldozed down, or dried up, or set on fire.

But I agree very much with the point, that it is a very annoying idea, to suddenly be able to feed all the people of the earth with ancient methods, that were not at all able to feed so much people.

(my bet is on highly automated intensive greenhouses, btw.)

With the exception of oxygen (where a forest is definitely not a closed system, since the light from the sin and the co2 we breathe go back to the forest), the amount that we remove from forests through foraging and hunting is trivial compared to the amount of resources we demand from agricultural land. And when we continually harvest wood, well, forests don't do well. Managed forests are basically just farms. Nutrient cycles are pretty slow - as we remove minerals amd nutrients from a forest (and dump those nutrients into oceans via sewage) - we are depleting forests. Forests can't produce excess minerals.

"the amount that we remove from forests through foraging and hunting is trivial compared to the amount of resources we demand from agricultural land."

Sure thing. I just debated the "closed system" point. Forests are mostly a cycle in themself (called ecosystem), but not enclosed.

we get little oxygen from the mature forests.

The obvious limitation is that conventional agriculture can't scale endlessly. This isn't controversial, even among conventional farmers. It's a known issue that the 'next green revolution' is needed to feed the ever expanding billions of people on the planet. Conventional agriculture, while a modern miracle in many ways, is just inefficient – in space, resources, etc.

One also can't just hand-wave over the negative externalities of modern farming. Pesticides, soil-carbon loss, and the energy requirements are completely unsustainable.

It is true that there's an enormous difference between a 'food forest' and a natural one. A lot of the research suggests that to adequately address climate change, we can't simply convert farmland to food-forests and call it a day. We actually need to return a significant portion of land back into natural forests.

1: http://carbonfarmingsolution.com

That is the exact opposite of the truth - conventional agriculture is conventional because it scales so well that rural unemployment is a massive problem and that picking up the end product is in many cases the biggest economic problem.

There are problems but to deny the merits is delusional and dooms failure any insane strategy where a small shepard and veteran slinger believes himself the strongest and tries to wrestle Goliath instead of just slinging a rock at his head.

I stand by what I said. It has worked. Has. It will not scale indefinitely. This is not a controversial statement. This is precisely the motivation behind genetic modification and continued research. It is why conventional agriculture talks about looking for the next green revolution.