> Industrialized farming is only so efficient because we sacrifice everything from ecological sustainability to taste to get that efficiency. Agreed. That's a

> Industrialized farming is only so efficient because we sacrifice everything from ecological sustainability to taste to get that efficiency. Agreed. That's a point I touched on with my comment about industrial farming being, if anything, too efficient. There's concerns about water use, fertiliser use, carbon emissions, biodiversity, monocropping. Industrial farming is about the most efficient use of resources possible (ignoring any negative externalities; if it's not priced in - like, eg, the potential harm of fertiliser runoff to marine life - it's ignored). > They are not ecologically efficient ....well, no. That's just not true. Subject to the caveats above about exernalities (and the fix there would be better regulation, carbon taxes, etc.), industrial farming is about being efficient with everything. Yes, in many ways small scale agriculture is just as efficient; in others it's significantly less efficient. But there is no way it's more efficient. And keep in mind one of the most important ecological resources is land, and industrial farming is very land efficient. (Unused land is critical for regulating carbon, among other things. We need forests! There's a reason people get so wound up about Brazil.) Example: Organic farming (which is, these days, generally highly industrialised, but still a step closer to what you have in mind, I imagine) yields less food per acre - or to put it another way, uses more land per unit of food. Studies have shown a 20-40% gap between organic and conventional farming in practice. Worse, they show that the carbon footprint is the same; the lower carbon intensity is fully cancelled out by the lower efficiency. (See, eg, https://www.acsh.org/news/2017/05/26/organic-farms-use-more-land-and-dont-decrease-carbon-footprint-11338 https://www.acsh.org/news/2017/05/26/organic-farms-use-more-...) > Yes, it's "inefficient" by some arbitrary measure that makes no sense now that we're past 400 PPM. No, it's just inefficient. And it's inefficient that is more important in a high carbon world. The planet is not going to be saved by cutting down forests so we can grow food less efficiently. Even if we really, really wish it would be. You can't say "but carbon" and then push a solution that isn't any lower carbon. If we really care about the environment, we're talking about a shift to largely vegetarian diets, with the bulk of our calories grown in dense, super efficient ways. There's X billion people, we need Y trillion calories per day, how can we achieve this with the least amount of land, water, fertiliser, carbon, and labour? That probably looks a lot like massive industrial farms in places with good climates and spare water, being shipped to places with lots of people and little land and water.