Mark Shepard's system has been reproduced/used as inspiration in many other places, I could name at least a few here in Germany from the top of my head, all of

Mark Shepard's system has been reproduced/used as inspiration in many other places, I could name at least a few here in Germany from the top of my head, all of them commercially successful (tough I admittedly do not have calorie production figures for those and am not sure if they exist). But I'm not sure why the example of his farm warrants so much skepticism. He isn't in a special location, on the contrary: his soils were a corn farm previously, degraded and according to the generally accepted advice at the time unusable for Walnuts, one of his main crops. He didn't use any special technology, etc. > It's the reality of farming in a free-market society. But farming is not a free-market enterprise in "modern" societies. It is the most subsidized and among the most regulated among all enterprises in industrialized economies. German farmers derive half their income and all their profits from government (mostly EU) subsidies. I don't know the figures for the US, but I'd bet that they are similar. Farming, by who and how farming is practiced is basically entirely defined by political priorities, which at this time are mostly still based on the technological and scientific developments of the 1930s-1970s, which have created some very well established commercial interest groups (chem-ag concerns, farmers unions, etc.).