I never said modern farmers don’t know what they’re doing. They’re very good at maximizing revenue (via crop uniformity and yield, marketable plant attributes,

I never said modern farmers don’t know what they’re doing. They’re very good at maximizing revenue (via crop uniformity and yield, marketable plant attributes, intense land use, efficient distribution, maximizing government subsidies, etc...) while minimizing input costs (especially labor). This has been fantastic at reducing the number of people required to work in agriculture, and at producing more food than ever before on the same amount of land. It’s fair to say that our current world population would be entirely unsustainable without industrial agriculture. There are big systemic risks and unaccounted external costs though (to farms and ranches, to the local environment, to people living nearby, and to the planet), in e.g. using water from aquifers at above-replacement rate; topsoil erosion at faster than replacement rate; large-scale use of a tiny number of plant varieties; widespread use of pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers which run off into local waterways; promoting crops with less nutritional value because they have improved size or durability or prettier appearance; feeding animals large quantities of antibiotics and potentially breeding resistant bacteria; et cetera. (P.S. we owe an awful lot to hundreds of generations of Mexican peasant farmers. Corn, tomatoes, squash, pinto beans, chilies, avocados, chocolate, tobacco, ... they ate a substantially healthier diet than most people in Europe at the time and supported larger cities and higher population density, despite the lack of draft animals.)