This article feels intellectually dishonest. > According to a recent U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) report, family farms produce over three-quart

This article feels intellectually dishonest. > According to a recent U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) report, family farms produce over three-quarters of the world’s food. Here's a bunch of data [1]. You see some obvious patterns. Firstly, large farms dominate the developed world. Developing farms dominate the developing world. The reason for this should be obvious: labour cost is the driving factor. Labor is cheap in the developed world. This makes farming machinery really expensive in labour terms. In the developed world, this isn't the case. Mechanized agriculture favors large farms so here you are. I'm not sure we should be celebrating that a large amount of the world's population is growing and tending food by hand. > Conventional farming practices that degrade soil health undermine humanity’s ability to continue feeding everyone over the long run. So this I somewhat agree with. It used to be (or at least it feels like this is the case?) that in years past there was a more conscious effort to rotate crops to rehab the soil whereas now it seems like we bridge this gap chemically. I don't think "healthy soil" is the key here however. The bigger factor is energy cost. Want to make more soil? You can do that... with sufficient energy. Want fresh water? You can desalinate if you have to. The limiting factor is... energy. Want to improve land usage with so-called "vertical farming"? The limiting factor there is, you guessed it, energy. I actually look forward to a future with sufficient automation and cheap energy such that very few humans are actually required for food production. [1]: https://ourworldindata.org/farm-size https://ourworldindata.org/farm-size