It’s really not hard to understand why if you think about it just a bit. Industrial farming requires very specific growing conditions (e.g., single crop per row

It’s really not hard to understand why if you think about it just a bit. Industrial farming requires very specific growing conditions (e.g., single crop per row/field and in a spacing that allows mechanized seeding and harvest). Growing by hand allows optimizing the ground space by, for example, under planting one crop to another (e.g., radishes can grow quickly so can be sown between larger plants while those larger are still small and the radishes are harvested before the space is needed by the larger plants). This is all very labor intensive, of course. Another example is starting virtually all seedlings inside and then transplanting, which virtually all market gardens do. That gives a head start to your plantings. But of course again it’s labor intensive. A good summary can be found in page 21 and following of the book How Asia Works (which can be found online: https://delong.typepad.com/files/studwell.pdf https://delong.typepad.com/files/studwell.pdf).