Most of corn and other staple crops large yields have more to do with the excessive usage of fossil fuel derived fertilizer. There have been some gains in GMO t

Most of corn and other staple crops large yields have more to do with the excessive usage of fossil fuel derived fertilizer. There have been some gains in GMO to get slightly more efficient yields, but we already spent a few thousand years doing that by hand selection so any extra gains are pretty difficult. What we have largely been focusing on is making the plants resistant to pesticides so that the inevitable infection doesn't occur while you are dumping on crazy amounts of freely available energy as fertilizer. Basically we are turning natural gas into food, 60% of the worlds total crop yield in fact exists because of natural gas derived fertilizer, and when nature tries to take it's share of that free energy, we dump anything we can on it to prevent it from infecting our crops. Pump and dump the soil like that for 20 years until it is garbage, sell it off, buy out some poor struggling farmer that is doing sustainable practices, start over again with fresh 50-100 year maintained topsoil.