There's the classic variety which uses per-industrial practices to farm. This is indeed cute but hopelessly ineffective. And there's the modern variety which uses data and science driven approaches to farm while minimizing resources. E.g. watering and fertilizing based on drone observed growth patterns and other readings means you can use a lot less. Managing the soil in sane way that preserves it rather than destroys it gives you better yields and also improves water retention. Fighting parasites and pests is a lot easier if you understand the dynamics of their ecosystems and e.g. use predatory insects to counter that. Teaching small farmers some basics about how stuff works might help them improve their yields and put a stop to really destructive practices like burning forests to create land that is briefly usable for farming before it turns into desert.

Things are definitely changing. 'Modern' mono-cultures are based on the state of the art fifty years ago when it was acceptable to just blindly plow, fertilize, and spray many acres of land without even bothering to measure the impact. It works, for a while, but it is not long term sustainable and there is a lot of farm land turning into barren desert world wide due to decades of mismanagement, abuse, and exploitation. The notion that you need to spend a lot on fertilizers, misc. poisons, genetically modified seeds and machines to plow (aka. destroy the soil) your land in order to farm is maybe a bit outdated.

In the US, stopping corn subsidies would do wonders. Most corn farmers would probably adapt to more profitable and less damaging crops. Less corn-syrup in the food chain would be a good thing. Outside the US this is not a common ingredient at all. Also, ethanol is a scam. Abusing farmland for fuel production is insane. Pull the subsidies on that and it that whole market will collapse.

If you are interested, a few interesting videos:
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpTHi7O66pI, Allan Savory on planned grazing as a solution to desertification and a possible new way of cattle farming to feed the planet.
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OC_Y1ZTZXQ4, Regreening the planet
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kV5LAXZ5HHw, Vertical Farming
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18262496, The rise of the Robot Farmer

You can find much more of this stuff using your favorite search engine. Not all of it is tree-hugger propaganda; though some of it obviously is. What I like is that the application of science and out of the box thinking can be seriously disruptive in terms of getting really awesome results with modest means. Assuming the way we farm today is peak human capability is both fatalistic and depressing. We can do way better; and we should.

Planned grazing in particular is a bit of a mind fuck if you like eating meat. But in a good way. No need to feed cows corn when we could be using them to turn desert back into fertile grasslands while restoring the soil and capturing more C02 that way than is produced by the cattle or the corn farming. Basically the premise of this is that planned grazing fertilizes barren lands and prunes dead vegetation suffocating it thus allowing fresh growth and soil restoration. Healthy soil captures CO2 and retains water. Barren soil releases CO2 and has poor water retention. By doing this systematically, you can turn arid lands back into healthy soil with vegetation, carbon capture, and potential for actually growing some produce. It think of this as terraforming earth. No need to go to Mars for that; we have plenty of human created desert that we can fix before going there.