You ever heard of economies of scale? Big businesses are inherently more efficient in many industries because of this. A good example as it relates to farming is the ability to use larger pieces of heavy equipment across more land- rather than the alternative, many smaller tractors, that independent farmers would each own.

Also- the ability to specialize. There are lots of different jobs on a farm- on smaller farms you see fewer laborers doing more jobs. On a larger farm- you can specialize labor and increase productivity in that manner.

Again, efficient in what context? Yes, it's absolutely amazing how fast we produce obscene amounts of t-shirts to sell to everyone. And those t-shirts last a few wears and wash cycles and then you need another. So you need to grow more cotton, produce more dye, extract more labour from poor Bangladeshi mothers and their children, so you can get more dollars per year from all the t-shirts etc. That sounds to me like it's really efficient at making a few people really rich, really efficiently using up lots of land and resources and peoples' time to make shit I don't really need. All I want is a few t-shirts and trousers that last and to let everyone spend more time doing fun things like playing games and making art. But we really aren't good at doing that, are we?

I understand that it's foolish for all of us to start growing our own rice and potatoes -- and yes, I think that's because of "economies of scale" and the benefits of specialisation -- I wouldn't really advocate for that radical a shift. But there is certainly something that is more sensible than the insanity of overconsumption and waste that we are engaging in right now, and that applies to the food industry too.

Economies of scale in food production are really complicated. Yes, to first order, you can make more food with bigger machines over larger land masses, but at what cost? And for how long? We can already see a lot of fallout from overuse of land, overuse of synthetic fertilisers, destruction of ecodiversity. This is not to mention that agribusiness has massive crop losses calculated into the cost, crop losses that occur exactly because of the monocultural practices. Permaculture is harder to scale because it is more complex, it takes local ecosystem dynamics and microclimates into account and works with them to be more productive per acre and less destructive in the long term. So it's actually more efficient in many ways.

While everyone talking about specialisation and scale sure may feel that they are smarter than the person asking for a return to a more "simple" approach, I really believe they are the ones offering the more simplistic and erroneous solutions...

You could make a good analogy with "technical debt". Climate change and irreversible environmental damage (e.g. corral reef death) is like the technical debt of industrialisation finally rearing its head because we didn't account for it while scaling. It turns out we should have scaled our food production etc. in a more sustainable way so now we will be paying the price. With a LOT of interest.

I think you're confusing multiple separate issues here. Efficiency in production and total amount of production are separate concerns. You don't aim to lower total production numbers by decreasing the efficiency of production.

It sounds like you're unhappy with how much we produce. Not the point of the conversation. Looks like you're just shoe-horning your political agenda into a conversation which is barely tangential.

The bare minimum amount of food we could produce without starving is still more than enough to need very large farms to capture economies of scale.

I don't think I am confused but maybe I wasn't clear enough for you. It's not just the quantity but the methods of production and the negative side effects of those methods. Just because we can scale output with these methods doesn't make them efficient in every sense. When you have to kill whole populations of birds and bats and other important participants of an ecosystem, across massive geographic regions, even if it's just to grow enough to keep from starving, then you are introducing a lot of problems that have so far gone unaccounted for. In fact, they will eventually lead to extreme decreases in production as the land withers.

This is not a matter of shoe-horning an agenda, this is just the consequences of our trajectory as a society which are generally recognised by any relevant experts (but also pretty obvious to anyone who takes the time to think it through). I don't know why you seem to be unwilling to account for these factors and rather stick to your simplistic argument of "production efficiency by any means = good". It would seem that you are actually the one who is clinging to a political agenda, whether you are aware of it or not.