I have long been interested in permaculture, but I have recently been coming around to your point of view. People give modern farmers a lot of crap, but overal

I have long been interested in permaculture, but I have recently been coming around to your point of view. People give modern farmers a lot of crap, but overall they are very interested in taking care of their land, and using as few fertilizers and pesticides as possible, if for no other motive than the profit one. As universities discover new best practices for regenerative ag, crop rotation and the like, farmers are overall very quick to adopt them, and the ones who don't go out of business. For instance, a lot of farmers have already adopted practices like no-till farming, cover cropping, and double cropping. Another example, a soil scientist YouTuber named GardeningInCanada explained how the 'tilling' that farmers do with their giant machines is actually just slicing a cut a few mm deep in the soil with a disk, dropping in new seeds, then pushing the soil back over the cuts with another implement. I think growing your own food is certainly more valuable than just having a giant turf lawn, but if you really wish to provide the most positive ecological impact, I think you should look into things like rain gardens or bioswales that filter rainwater runoff (helping fix the 'dead zones' that high nitrogen creates in our waterways and oceans), and growing a large diversity of plants native to your region that support the greatest number of specialist pollinators, which in turn will feed other life forms. The way I see it now, there is already an overabundance of food for humans in the world, but there is too little food for insects, birds, reptiles, other mammals, etc. In other words, there are plenty of grocery stores for people around but I want my yard to be a giant grocery store full of food for pollinators. If you are in North America, you can grow some native food plants like American persimmon, paw paw, American blueberries, and wild strawberries. But most high-calorie crops are not native (even corn, beans, and squash came from Mexico iirc) and even the ones that were here before European colonization are genetically very different than the native plants that they came from and do not really support any wildlife.