> The economy of the scale favors monoculture I mean it does, until it doesn't and you loose all your crops/soil/water. Monocultures degrade the soil, and you

> The economy of the scale favors monoculture I mean it does, until it doesn't and you loose all your crops/soil/water. Monocultures degrade the soil, and you need to put more and more input in to make sure grow. Because there is no ground cover between crops, wind takes away your soil. If you mess up/mistime your pesticide/herbicide input, you'll loose all your crop. The more you grow, the more the soil turns to sand, requiring more fertiliser input, which mean more costs. If you take the yield per m2 of an allotment, and compare it to a really high quality agricultural field (ie Lincolnshire fens, or some prime land in the USA.) the allotment will have a much higher yield with less input. I don't have the figures on hand, but you'll need to turn to the bearded hippies at the henry doubleday to get precise numbers. If, through automation, you could have three or four crops in the same field, providing cover all year round. you could then start to keep your soil, because the wind cant get at it (crop dependant). you can grow sacrificial crops for pest control, meaning less pesticide input. This means more worm, which will stop flash flooding (more water permeability without ploughing) But all that requires high speed "pick and place" weeding/harvesting machines. Those are going to be complex and expensive until scale kicks in (think how complex tractors were, or threshing machines)