It feels like we’re in a bit of a nadir, agriculturally, in terms of soil exhaustion and erosion, crop monocultures, and so on, largely because of technology letting you do the same thing to bigger areas more quickly and with fewer people, and we’re reaching the end of the epoch where the cost of this can be blithely externalised.

_However_, it seems like it could also be an inflection point, again because of technology. Imagine if tractors could tow behind them not a spraying trailer but a computer vision + laser system that could identify and zap individual weeds rather than napalming the whole ecosystem chemically, or that had arms that could pick only the correct, or ripe crop, or sub-varietal of crop, on a field planted with a variety of useful plants that balanced out the intensity with which they extracted nutrients from the soil. All of this at the cost/scale required to support the 8 billion (or so) people on the earth now with the agricultural land we have now, but perhaps too with the ability to open up more marginal bits of land to agriculture, and de-intensify the current wrung-to-death expanses of flat that we have to use now to accommodate the limitations of current farm machinery.