The reason people don't do this isn't because they aren't aware of such practices, they don't do it because you have to thread a needle as far as precise management is concerned to simply turn a profit. Not that much room for margin in today's agriculture landscape
In that model there is almost no incentive structure for soil maintenance, environmental stewardship, diversification, etc.
Most landowners here aren't even leasing it for the revenue, which is pretty peanuts for cash cropping on smaller plots, but for the indirect benefit of being able to claim farm tax rate instead of regular residential tax rates.
For many years my vineyard, garden, etc. suffered from herbicide drift from next door -- but there was not a single contact I could go to to talk about this, everyone just points the finger, or you can't find the party involved. Responsibility too distributed, etc.
There needs to be economic incentives for farmers AND landowners to adapt these practices. It WILL cost money. See a link to my blog I posted in a different post. I talk about this in semi-depth.
Solve this problem and you can really change the system.
Don't single out ag please
Food Production is a greater societal need than travel most people would agree.
Food production is a greater societal need and a lot of corn goes into making ethanol for cars to burn instead of food.
We don't have to outlaw ICE cars to make it more expensive to drive them, we just have to make corn ethanol more expensive for gas companies to cut their fuel with, and food corn cheaper for humans.
Also: We need to grow less corn overall. We make way, way more of it than we need and not enough of other better veg.
Yea we need to grow less corn. But we can't outlaw it. You just removed the livelihood for the Midwest. The current economic incentive structure is to grow corn (there literally is no downside). A solution that changes that has to include benefits for farmers, landowners, consumers, and society. It's not going to be easy (or cheap).
https://thinkingagriculture.io/incentivizing-regenerative-ag...
We could be making so many other things instead. A tax on ethanol & cattle feed would do more to shift things than making it illegal. Make it cheap to grow for humans, but allow other forms of food crop to have a fighting chance.
https://thinkingagriculture.io/innovation-efficiency-chemica...
Mark Shepard likes to brag about how he gets less half a harvest of six+ different species in the same field. He's still getting 2-3x as much food out of the space. Most importantly, I believe (and he agrees), when you monocrop you go for broke. If something goes wrong, you have very little to sell at the end of the year. If it's a bumper crop year, prices will be depressed if it's a good year for everybody. In either scenario, the dealer (bank) always wins.
With six crops, the standard deviation between good years and bad years is reduced, which makes farming less of a trip to Vegas. That he gets more out of the same land brings up his average expected income. It's more work, yes, but he points out that many farmers have to take a side job to make ends meet, and he theoretically doesn't (he speaks and consults), so he can invest that time into increasing his farm's productivity.
One of the appeals then of broad spectrum herbicides that you scorch the earth and plant what you want in the space. And despite some very loud protestations of horse owners, people who try to garden with horse manure have to contend with herbicides.
Mechanical pest/weed management is still a very powerful tool. And maybe some day we can have robots do that for us, but we don't have to wait that long to get much of the benefit.
In order to kill a weed, you first have to see the weed. Rather than putting all of this onto a drone, there's plenty of utility to be gained by having a system that looks for these plants and geotags them. Then a centralized identification system (possible, the farmer's eyeballs) can filter down the false positives and they can send someone out to dispatch the weeds by hand, and/or adjust their graze rotation patterns to reduce exposure.
And something organic gardeners learn intimately is that every weed has intervals where they are most expensive to deal with. Seedlings may be too labor intensive. Blooming weeds are priority 1. But depending on soil profile, some weeds are easier to kill once their stalks and roots have become more robust - strong enough that you can grab the stalk and pull.
So on any given day you may be aware of a hundred weeds, but only twenty of them are on the priority queue.