> The real problem is properly accounting for all costs incurred by a given farming technique, which is difficult as the farming lobby seems to be one of the most effective ones in the world (at least judging from a European perspective).

I think this a good moment to side-track a bit into agricultural history. While I'm generally not a fan of Great Man history, Sicco Mansholt seems to be a very interesting focal point in this case:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sicco_Mansholt

Mansholt, a former farmer himself, and politically so left he would be labelled a communist had he been in the US, was one of the founding fathers of the EU, specifically it's commissioner of agriculture. He created the Common Agricultural Policy in 1962. In 1972, near the end of his political career, he had an affair with Petra Kelly while she was still a member of the Social Democrats. He greatly influenced her line of thinking surrounding sustainability. Kelly left the SPD in 1979 to found the German Green Party, which was the first major green party in Europe.

Here's a documentary about him, but it's only in Dutch without subtitles, sadly, so I'll summarise it below:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-AniIokCHtk

After WWII, a big worry was creating a stable food supply to feed everyone. One major problem was that farmers were not paid enough to sustain themselves. It was clear this wouldn't change, because the only way to fix it was to raise food prices, which would have all kinds of negative consequences. The solution seemed to be a mix of subsidies, and having less farmers take care of larger areas of land. The idea was that the same amount of money would go to agriculture, but since it would be divided among fewer farmers they would be able to eke out a decent living.

Mansholt was originally a farmer himself, and also had a personal stake in this: after the famines in the war he wanted to prevent this from ever happening again, and he was aware about population growth. And he also did not want to have ten million farmers living in abject poverty - better to have half of them switch professions in that case.

Just some context: his policies suggested that farms should be at least 100 hectares. Back then it was very common for farms to be one, two hectares.

So Mansholt was one of the main architects of this Common European Agricultural Policy within the European Commission (the precursor to the EU). There obviously were lots of protests by farmers, Mansholt was threatened, etc, but in the end he got his policies through. In 1962 the CAP was first implemented[0]. Ever heard of "get big or get out"? That was a phrase used by Earl Butz, US Secretary of Agriculture from 1971 to 1976. A decade later.

Funny enough, Butz did this thing around the same time the Club of Rome came out with "The Limits To Growth", in 1972. Mansholt was one of the early converts, going against his own earlier policies. The huge problems he saw with unexpected surpluses of food (in the Netherlands we even have words like "boterbergen" and "melkplassen" (buttermountains and milklakes) to describe this), grown unsustainably, were probably also a part of this.

He saw the error of his ways and started lobbying for sustainable practices. Which, btw, did not align with the typical organic farming practices this article rails against. To make things even more complicated, he fell in love with a 39 years younger German politician, Petra Kelly[2], who was then a member of the German Social Democrats. They had a two year affair, and in all likelihood they greatly influenced each other's thinking. In 1979 Kelly left the SPD and become one of the founding members of Die Grünen.

I find it very interesting to see how drastically agricultural practices have changed in the last century. While we talk about farming lobbies, it's easy to forget how big of a hand governments themselves had in creating these big farms. The story of Mansholt shows how hard it is to reverse the trend too: even the former chief architect of the policies that stimulated modernisation did not have enough political clout to get people to become more sustainable.

Having said all of that, I really hope the type of organic farming described in this article will take off. We'll need to find a way around the existing power structures though.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Agricultural_Policy

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petra_Kelly