Turns out those old-fashioned ways of farming were actually pretty smart

[jeff47]

21. No, the papers do not say that.

They say that they produce more crop per energy consumed and water consumed. Not yield per acre on an industrial scale. On a non-industrial scale, they're getting a higher yield, but the "conventional" garden is not treated as an industrial farm treats it's fields.

Your claiming there's a massive labor cost, but there really isn't. Some countries like China would turn to additional labor to get the job done, because they have so damn many people. We're talking about a place that built the three-gorges dam by moving concrete in wheelbarrows.

But if you want to do the same thing in the US, you'd still use mechanization, and that would keep the labor down. For example, your deep digging would be accomplished by a bulldozer or front-end loader. Plant complementary crops? Really not hard to build a plow that plants more than one seed in adjacent, close rows. Yes those costs more than only dragging a 'regular' plow behind a tractor, but it's not nearly the enormous cost you portray.

You are arguing that farmers would make 2-6 times more money with much less than a 2-6x larger labor cost in an industrialized environment. Yet they just aren't doing it. Even the "organic" farmers who would get the greatest benefit, since they can't use chemical fertilizers. That might be a sign that it isn't quite what you portray.