Use of fire at all emerged about 1.5 million years ago. Homo Sapiens emerged about 300 thousand years ago. First signd of any sort of agriculture are from about 15 thousand years ago. Stone age ended and we got first bronze tools less than 10 thousand years ago.

The only method we have had "for millions of years" is hunter-gathering with stone tools.

I don’t like industrial food. It is killing the planet abs pretty quickly. But it’s not doing it because farmers are evil. It’s because it the cheapest way to produce food. If we as a society want to go to a place where food costs 10-100x as much while availability goes down by about the same amount, let’s figure out how we will prevent mass starvation and population decline. But if the GP expects that farmers will switch to compost abs hand tools, they should probably expect to pay a lot more for a lot less food.

1) desire to eat « fresh » foods out-of-season (greenhouses, air transport, lengthy controlled-atmosphere storage)

2) feeding food to food and getting 1/10th back (feeding corn to a cow)

3) desire for labour-intensive foods. Potatoes can be straightforward harvested from a field by a machine. Alfalfa (or anything in a greenhouse) cannot.

I think the biggest barrier to going back to « the old way » is not having manufactured fertilizer. Nobody cares if the water came by pump instead of by hand. But I supposed over-watered at the end = more water in the product instead of useful matter.

Was an issue in Germany:

https://m.dw.com/en/seasonal-workers-flock-to-germany-for-as...

As with many labour-intensive crops, people want to eat it, but not do the work involved themselves.

One issue that I foresee is that if something needs a very specialized robot, then the market might not be big enough to warrant the development cost. Undoubtedly it makes lot of sense to automate something like wheat or whatnot bulk crop because there is just tons of that around. But asparagus or something might be too niche?

Ah, yes. The best asparagus is hand-picked the day of consumption, and it would be ideal if picked by the people eating it. I grew up in an area that used to have asparagus fields, so asparagus grew "wild" along the fences and ditchbanks. I would occasionally help my parents cut the day's wild asparagus for dinner. I hated it as a kid, but really grew to appreciate how good fresh asparagus is when compared to what has to be mass produced and shipped, because, as you say, nobody wants to do the labor.

But many people are in denial about how much work is needed to grow the food that feeds everyone. Crop yields need to be high and costs low at the grocery store end but farmers often only get around 200 dollars per ton for their hard effort.

Here's an old article from my region: https://www.theguardian.pe.ca/opinion/it-costs-a-pile-to-gro...

* Land $3 to $5 million

* Equipment $1 million

* Storage $1 million (shared/co-op or separate organization)

* Farmer profit ~$20,000 (16 hour days all spring/summer/fall) - other costs and taxes

Working with nature means using natural systems to produce food with less human energy and fossil fuels, and chemicals, and cutting down forests.

A quick quote from the referenced work:

""" The pragmatic and practical approach to the main body of this work largely omits reference to those visions or beliefs classifiable as spiritual or mystical; not because these are not a normal part of human experience, but because they are arrived at as a result of long contemplation or intense involvement with the mysteries that eternally surround us.

We may “dream" understanding, but it is something we cannot demand, define, or teach to others; it is for each of us to develop. There are things that nobody else can help us with, but in a book written to help people make real-life decisions, to build new landscapes, to regenerate damaged forests, and to lighten our load on earth, the present need is for clear and practical approaches. In the preceding chapters, well-tried and common- sense techniques and strategies of earth restoration have been described and figured.

All of this comes to naught if we, as a people, continue to invest in arms and destruction, to permit land abuse, and to fail to tackle the social and political impediments to reclaiming desertified and abused lands, or even to prevent the poisoning of land. Thus, the following sections give strategies for change in the social and economic areas of society.

These strategies may, in fact, be of more assistance to real change than the skills of land management, for society has far more competent farmers and engineers than it has ethical ... """

It requires less input, less labor, less land --- why isn't it already trashing the market by simply being much cheaper?

An imperfect analogy is that legalizing cannabis requires less labor & more funds than keeping it illegal, yet we're still hesitating to do that in many countries.

Humans (and thus most markets) have other incentives than simply having things for cheaper.