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UN report calls for an end to industrial agriculture
(www.euractiv.com)
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this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2022
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What most people don't realize is that industrialized agriculture produces less food per acre than small scale farming. This is counter-intuitive to a lot of people, but the trade-off is that small scale farms are much more labor-intensive. Essentially, if you have someone who knows what they're doing manage the plants by hand, you'll get better results for a given acre than if you just run over everything with a machine and then spray it with pesticides. It's just that the machine can cover a much larger area in the same time.
As the global population grows, the demand for food will increase while the supply of land remains constant, so it will start to make sense to convert some of the land used for industrialized agriculture into small scale farms. Land reform would create a lot of new jobs and provide people with self-sufficiency and economic independence, but ofc that's not going to happen anytime soon. In the US, small scale farms essentially don't exist outside of hobby projects, and most of what the government counts as "farms" are just rich people's big lawns where they grow nothing but grass. But that has more to do with US policy than inherent economic viability, and I believe there are places where small scale farms exist and do fine.
One consequence of this is that, regarding the theoretical limits of the carrying capacity of the earth, food is not as much of a limiting factor as people think. We haven't hit that limit and it's a long way off. The main issues with food are not physical, but economic: can we provide access to the land (and education/training/tools) to people looking for work, and can we ensure that the food needs of the global poor are not overlooked just because they don't have money?
The reason industrialized agriculture was such a big advance was that it allowed larger areas to be used for food production and freed up labor for other sectors of the economy. But that doesn't mean that it's more efficient in every way or that reducing our reliance on it would entail mass starvation.