Going to traditional agriculture or agroforestry would involve a lot more people being involved with food production. Not necessarily a bad thing, but that would inherently raise costs (although it may be paid for some by time not money).

Another alternative is to stop subsidizing absurdly inefficient things like factory farming. If someone is selling beef produced by grazing semi-wild land, great! But intesively cultivating land to harvest it to fed it to cows locked in a pen sucks.

It's obviously not simple to redirect some of that to human food (e.g. wheat with low protein is fed to livestock, high protein is used for bread) but still, worth having the conversation.

> Going to traditional agriculture or agroforestry would involve a lot more people being involved with food production. Not necessarily a bad thing, but that would inherently raise costs (although it may be paid for some by time not money)

But it would also reduce unemployment. I know pre-industrial food production was a massive undertaking, but we don't need to go all the way.

How much lower the crop yields are without all this chemistry?

Hunger has mostly left humankind (any famines are first of all political troubles, not lack of food), but this was made possible by improving yields several fold. It's hardly possible without pretty heavy augmentation like fertilizers and pest control.

Hunger has left the developed world, but is still an issue in poor countries. Our society is so incredibly wasteful with food, there are massive amounts of perfectly edible food send to trash every year. This leads me to believe that even with a massive reduction in the use of fertilizers and pest control exactly nothing would change in the developed world in terms of food supply.

However, to enable that we'd probably have to get away from monocultural agriculture which is not only an issue for agriculture, but for instects and other wildlife as well.

True, but I want to caution people. It doesn't seem possible to me that sustainable agriculture of any form can feed the number of humans alive today. Aside from trying to do something about the number of alive humans, the only shot at reducing agriculture's destructive influence is going more technological not less and I for one want to see bespoke space colonies constructed by automated factories on the moon not genocides.

Compare the livestock vs all other mammal biomass from the first chart in this paper https://www.pnas.org/content/115/25/6506

edit: or just look at google earth and look at the amount of land used for agriculture

This was originally in reply to a now deleted reply, but it is worth calling out an alternative interpretation, we could move away from meat and make more effective usage of land. I think this is true, but still won't get us all the way.

I think even imagining people were willing to give up meat humans still use way too many raw calories for anything like sustainable organic agriculture to be workable. Maybe it would be interesting to know what percentage of the land dedicated to raising meat is for feed vs grazing. Grazing land is usually more marginal than farmland so while overall good to let it go back to nature it won't replace the sort of biodiversity that turning Kansas back to grasslands would

Also I don't trust it as much, but if it's true that humans right now make up more biomass than all land animals before we exploded it seems difficult to imagine us keeping up without continuing to have huge impacts on the planet, better to keep those impacts dense and controlled than everywhere https://www.greenpeace.org/static/planet4-international-stat...

There's lots of labor-intensive ways to boost yields without monocultures, fertilizers, and pesticides, right? Planting complementary crops together, planting trap crops at the edges of fields to catch pests, things like that.

How long till robots can do that sort of work? At that point, you can have super-green-bio gardens (fields) worked and pruned 24/7 at the cost-over-time of the robots (and whoever/whatever oversees them, plus manure I guess).

We already have a version of this- called a combine harvester- but the more sophisticated farming tech gets, the more it can reduce reliance on e.g. pesticides without reducing yields.

Hum, that does seem somewhat possible. I guess my counter is just pointing back at the biomass chart. Maybe labor intensive low fertilizer and pesticide farming can work, but we're talking about a majority of land vertebrate mass being either humans or the things we've grown to eat. There isn't a world in which we keep that up and don't massively distort the rest of the natural world. I think we have to accept that and sort of go on from there and decides what sort of distortions we want. Trading mechanization for pesticides seems great, but we'll still need massive amounts of land dedicated to farming and I definitely see it as a more technical not less solution

> edit: or just look at google earth and look at the amount of land used for agriculture

I also encourage those interested in this topic to do this. Exact percentages are interesting, but it is still abstract. Give yourself and hour and just go look for wilderness using google earth. Our stewardship over the planet, if such a thing ever was, has had a sad outcome.

>I for one want to see bespoke space colonies constructed by automated factories on the moon not genocides.

This is why I come to HN. Beautiful!