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Comment by dbingham | Hacker News Reader

Actually, the farming trend is being reversed. We've realized that the compromises we have to make in order to produce enough to feed us with only 2% of the population results in food that is actually killing us and generating super pests.

The trend is now headed back to more farmers working on smaller less efficient farms with out machines (or with fewer machines) or chemicals. So don't base your argument on the example of farming.

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> less efficient farms with out machines (or with fewer machines) or chemicals

As far as I know, this is mostly about avoiding monocultures, about chemicals and about genetic manipulation. And maybe animal welfare. It never occured to me that this is about machines. Am I missing something?

Most of the machines used on a farm have to do with harvesting, planting or spraying chemicals. They require plants to be planted in monocultures in straight clean rows in order to work. If you move away from chemicals and row based monoculture you can't really use most farm equipment anymore.

But there will be an opportunity to use newer better machines / robots, that can cope with more complicated structures than monoculture.

It doesn't seem fair to put all the blame on automatization. I've read here that high fructose corn syrup is suspect of contributing to obesity and some other diseases. But is automatization responsible or USA regulations and subsides?

In general, I'd say that the main factor is that the change of having cheap and abundant food is not followed by a change in diet. It takes some pain and a couple generations (in the best case) to adapt.

Automation is not the cause, but an increase in farmers per capita increases resistance to unhealthful or immoral food production practices (crowded, drugged, chemicalled animals; GMO crops, nutrient-depleted vegetables, corn-raised cattle, raw milk bans).

More people getting into farming could really help turn around American food

The saddest part of the high fructose corn syrup story is that that syrup is actually only cheaper than sugar in the US, because of subsidies and tariffs.

Even if there's a (small) current trend in the opposite direction for farming, we're not going to go back to the level of productivity of the 1800s, or the 1900s, or even the 1950s. The overall trend over the past 200 years in farming has overwhelming toward increasing yield.

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