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.
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.
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.
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'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.
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.