Farming methods are getting a lot more efficient but one thing to consider is that the primary advantage of industrial agriculture is that a few people can work extremely large amounts of land. Permaculture/indigenous agriculture uses land more efficiently and is better for the environment. Using these techniques mostly means that slightly more people will need to be employed in agriculture, but working these kinds of farms is super cool and plenty of people would be happy to do it.
The main thing that industrial ag seems to do better is mass production of cereals but honestly most of those just go to feeding livestock. So cutting those animal ag subsidies and having better animal welfare laws will drastically cut the amount of cereals that we need to produce.
My point is that with some changes we could meet all of our food needs with what are essentially modern takes on indigenous agriculture. We can always make ag more efficient but these practices are enough as is. There are tons of regular ass american farmers who are ditching soy and corn fields for low imput integrated agriculture where they will typically mix livestock with several different kinds of crops and small orchards. They make so much more money off of the same land by using these techniques. Honestly its kinda about returning to peasant farming, which if you've read your mao or minh, which I haven't, you'll know they can become class conscious in a hurry.
I'd be super interested in that video though, I absolutely love this topic. Andrew Millison has this really cool video about about chinampas, a farming technique that turns shallow lakes into farming canals. Applying this technique to other shallow lakes or wetlands could be super cool.
Farming methods are getting a lot more efficient but one thing to consider is that the primary advantage of industrial agriculture is that a few people can work extremely large amounts of land. Permaculture/indigenous agriculture uses land more efficiently and is better for the environment. Using these techniques mostly means that slightly more people will need to be employed in agriculture, but working these kinds of farms is super cool and plenty of people would be happy to do it.
The main thing that industrial ag seems to do better is mass production of cereals but honestly most of those just go to feeding livestock. So cutting those animal ag subsidies and having better animal welfare laws will drastically cut the amount of cereals that we need to produce.
My point is that with some changes we could meet all of our food needs with what are essentially modern takes on indigenous agriculture. We can always make ag more efficient but these practices are enough as is. There are tons of regular ass american farmers who are ditching soy and corn fields for low imput integrated agriculture where they will typically mix livestock with several different kinds of crops and small orchards. They make so much more money off of the same land by using these techniques. Honestly its kinda about returning to peasant farming, which if you've read your mao or minh, which I haven't, you'll know they can become class conscious in a hurry.
I'd be super interested in that video though, I absolutely love this topic. Andrew Millison has this really cool video about about chinampas, a farming technique that turns shallow lakes into farming canals. Applying this technique to other shallow lakes or wetlands could be super cool.