> I mean, I know what the author is getting at here, but that's...really not true at all as written.

It's also possible that you are both correct, depending on the context.

Can a single person be more efficient in their backyard than an industrial farmer in Nebraska farming potatoes? No. Can they grow vegetables more sustainably than an industrial farmer? Yes.

Can a farmer in Kosovo get better efficiency per square foot in a greenhouse than a vegetable farmer in open fields in Nebraska? Yes. [1] Can a farmer in a rural area with no roads or modern infrastructure apply the methods used in Kosovo? No.

Can a farmer using traditional practices add topsoil, improve soil health, create better products, all without the downsides of splitting cattle and cropping into separate industrial processes? Yes. [2] Can they do it without any modern farm equipment? No way.

Eliminating all modern industrial processes is not the answer, nor is turning everyone into a laborer with only hand tools. Huge farms can produce potatoes and micro farms can produce vegetables. We need sustainable planning with sensible automation, customized for variables including access to infrastructure, climate, and local demand for products.

> large agribusiness and monocropping and industrial farms exist because they are stupidly efficient

This is not necessarily the case, considering the vast portion of cropland in the midwest is shipped to concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs). CAFOs are toxic for the animals that live there. Their manure, which would be cheap fertilizer at a smaller scale on a farm, is toxic. The chemical inputs that are now required back at the cropland are usually toxic. The fuel needed to get all of these resources to their destination is toxic. The topsoil gets thinner every year. The climate gets more unpredictable every year. If you consider time outside the scale of the financial quarter, this is not efficient or sustainable.

One major problem is that the tools pushed by equipment manufacturers are targeted for a certain market, usually massive industrial farms. Until recently, ideas like no-till, cover crops, and traditional rotation of cattle and chickens were scoffed at by agricultural schools and by the self interest of corporations who want to lock people in to a certain style of production.

Thankfully, farmers are incredibly resourceful, and they are tired of getting pushed into a corner by self-terminating seeds and endless inputs pushing them to bankruptcy. They're sharing ideas and coming up with new solutions, often based on the knowledge of hundreds of generations of farmers before them. What they need from us is the political will to subsidize sustainable farming instead of the strictly industrial practices that are carbon inefficient, pollute our water systems, and lead to things like vast acres of manure pools in poor rural areas.

We have the technology, the labor, the land to produce food sustainably that is somewhere between monocropping/CAFO and backyard organic.

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On a more general note, sweeping generalities and false dichotomies are destroying our politics and our ability to solve problems. I am not pointing fingers here -- I'm as guilty as anyone. I would love to see more targeted constructive criticism, or even better, a statement of goals instead a statement of problems of "the other side".

[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/326836113_Evaluatin...

[2] http://www.renewablefarming.com/images/2015Images/2015PDF/Ga...