Food diversity is much much less than it was 100 years ago. Nutritional content of food is down significant levels from 30 years ago.
Source: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/soil-depletion-an...
> Currently, however, this promotes large-scale monoculture.
This can be good or bad, depending on what is produced in a large scale, I guess(?) Especially at this point in time we should focus on foods that don't mess with the environment/don't fuel climate change.
A new parasite or disease could easily destroy enough of a years harvest (or more) and now the nation has a food shortage. Because so much of our food is derived from or reliant on the monoculture it would have cascading effects. It would be a disaster on many levels.
Of course this is preventable but who has the courage to stand up for something that could happen when the political capital is won dealing with the cleanup. Food diversity isn’t just a “feels good” thing or an “ought to be” thing - it’s very much important in creating a resilient food supply which in my opinion is a matter of national security.
But everything you're describing is with monocultures, not with consolidated farming. If a particular crop breed is the most efficient I don't see why a diverse group of farmers wouldn't all go with that.
Standardization is a hallmark of efficiency and humanity has lots of mouths to feed. I'm not sure you can really do it any other way.
While it certainly reduces on-farm biodiversity, higher yields also let us leave more land completely un-farmed. For example I think maybe 10% of France has returned to forest in the last 40 years, and more since 1900, but I can't seem to find a great link...
E.g., we spend 14 million acres on non-food corn ethanol, and 80+ million acres of corn is fed to livestock at terrible feed conversion ratios. We'd get the same amount of net calories on our plates for 8 million acres if we ate the corn.
https://www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/charts/58267/farms_fig01_45...
It would decline faster if we didn't subsidize stupid stuff like corn ethanol, for sure.
Edit, a maybe a better graph:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-land-area-used-f...
For just one small but hot-button current example, see Napa. For a historical example, see Silicon Valley, which was once orchards.
It's hard to reconcile this point with the strong trends over the last century of more monoculture, more production, and much lower prices.
You are welcome to think what you want, but everything I have read about agricultural ecology suggests that nature is stronger than our science. Pests evolve (perhaps slowly, but faster than the science we stole from nature). Naturally enriched soil is more fertile.
Small farmers and big farmers both use monocultures.
Any 20th C machine. If we do get good enough at robotics that we can switch from herbicides to weeding by AI, that might allow all sorts of interesting things.
It seems overwhelmingly true that for most people, their food has improved drastically over 70 years.
That's a false base for your argument. You can find traditionally grown vegs from villages today. Then you can grab a tomato from your super-cheap super market and test those two side by side. The traditionaly grown veg isn't old per say, but it is surely way closer to the old qualities. So if you find a difference between those two products you must surely conclude there is a difference between old - modern crops.
The age of the variety is a red herring, it's the industrialization of farming that's important. Our access to food has improved significantly, but anyone with a small garden and some seeds from an online shop knows that the "quality" of everything from modern tomatoes to berries is suspect.
Small, undercapitalized, under-industrialized farms were an issue for a long time... in some/many times and places this was the bottleneck on the green revolution.
That doesn't (necessarily) mean it's the case here. IE, the economies of scale when going from a $100k farm to a $10m may not apply to a move from $10m to $1bn. I think this is ultimately the question: Are there real economies of scale edriving this.
If/where the current transition is being driven by finance, it's a different kettle of fish. IE, If it's just cheaper/easier to finance megafarms... which I think is the case, it's not real economies of scale. It's securitisation.
As the article mentions, extreme scale and centralization has some serious side effects.
Industrial farming is the story of several centuries. It has major triumphs, like the feeding an extraordinary human population. It also has major dark spots. Slavery, and centuries of moral failures of the colonial "plantation" model. But it also caused several famines and other such collapses.
For an old analogy from the early days... Agribusiness that the British East India Company could profit from was often at odds with producing food.
Douglas Adams has a fantastic essay (section) about Dutch agricultural industrialization reforms in Bali.
If nothing else, there's a major "eggs in one basket" problem... an even bigger problem when it comes to ecosystems and biology than elsewhere.
You sure you want a handful of multinational conglomerates growing all of our food?
I don't think comparing agribusiness to other industries is going to help. Yes, factory farming is more efficient, which makes it cheaper. But the price we pay doesn't necessarily reflect the actual costs to our health and the environment.
Additionally, large farms seemingly are more well suited for polyculture (i.e. small farms are more predisposed to do monoculture farming given their smaller scale).
A recent narrative
https://fic.tufts.edu/publication-item/somalian-famine-narra...
As Gandhi said at a religious conference with global elites, it’s fine to be pontificating with well-fed faces, but to the majority of Indians, God looks like a loaf of bread.
India is at the forefront of addressing the complexities of modernization. They also have the greatest need to do so, with 200M malnourished in Southern Asia.
http://www.fao.org/3/ca9692en/online/ca9692en.html#chapter-1...
Some articles on pros and cons of modernization:
https://www.futurefarming.com/Smart-farmers/Articles/2020/4/...
https://www.dw.com/en/why-indian-farmers-are-angry-over-agri...
https://www.gisreportsonline.com/as-indian-agriculture-expan...
I am skeptical that is the case - but I might be wrong... I would like to see the output figures in any case.
Our economic and technological systems generally pursue what is approximately analogous to a greedy algorithm. This effect worsens as any sector becomes centralized. A small pool of large farmers is in the long run more likely to get stuck at suboptimal efficiencies than a large pool of small farmers.
But more concerning than that is continually optimizing any system for efficiency makes it more fragile. Some number of small farmers are more likely to survive system shocks than a large farmers. A system dominated by a few highly efficient large farmers is a system in extreme danger from systemic shocks and black swan events. That is, catastrophic drops in the food supply are much more likely with a few large farmers, not many small farmers.
If industrial production of smartphones collapses, who cares. Life will go on. We can forego many industries, if we really have to, so as long as we take care of the externalities (which we aren't doing with smartphones, but whatever), no big deal if they're oversized and over-optimized. This is not the case with food. People have to eat.
Industrial agriculture is phenomenal, and a miracle of the 20th century. But at the same time, the negative externalities (to borrow a fifty cent phrase) have basically caught up with us. Monocultures are environmentally costly, and land use change is a major driver of climate change.
Personally I’d love to see a patchwork of local, regional farms supplementing an ever larger share of the food supply. There’s appetite for this type of produce — wealthy suburbanites are more and more willing to spend extra for “organic”, as flawed as that term may be.