People look at a state like Montana and think that the vast stretches of land are undeveloped, but in reality, unless you went in with a lot of investment and care, the soil would just lift off and you'd end up with another dust bowl.

If Canadian farmers are like farmers in most of the western world, they're great at filling forms, exploiting bureacracy, getting paid to not grow sugar beet or whatever the latest scheme is, then yakking about how it breaks their cowboy hearts that the state can't just let them be free.

My general feeling is that a good field is usually the product of generations of work: where I grew up, you had to put drainage channels every two meters, giant ditches, endless effort to get rid of weeds, etc. It wasn't the case you could just move into unmaintained soil, especially virgin soil with shrub on it, and expect it to start producing wheat without a hell of a lot of labour.

That's compounded by the fact that farmers are basically soil-seeking missiles, and always have been. If there's a patch of really good farming land, that's probably been a lot of competition for it in the preceding centuries. If there aren't any farmers on it, there's almost always a reason.

Sure there would be crop losses to animals in such fields, but those animals also fertilize the soil and keep the microbiome diverse.

For analogy -- what is so special about Klondike and gold, why can't a different place do it?

Corrections to my post:

- 20% of world supply actually

- K, not Ka

„Regulation“ and „compliance“ are the same, more or less. It’s just florist to keep repeating both.

Taxes rarely prevent some business from existing since almost all taxes are tied to profits, not revenues.

Do you have any examples of regulation in farming that make it so much harder for the 1,000,000 $ farm than one 10 x the size? And, if that is so, why aren’t these large companies making the gains in efficiency you are promising?

* Does one need capital for growth (more tractors, more people)? How do taxes affect the process of saving the capital, do they increase or decrease the pace?

* Having multiple ways to invest someone's capital, would a person prefer the enterprise with higher net profits?

Of course industry have made progress, nourishing cows with grains/cereals etc make them grow more, more quickly, taste better etc, irrigation make fields more productive just to stay basic, but most effective technique also pollute, especially those for agriculture than those for animal husbandry.

Yes, there is room to expand productions and ways to do so in less polluting manners, but there is a big issue in the middle: mass distribution is incompatible with a distributed farming model, witch means on one side some big&powerful bodies will fight against such move, and more practically that food prices will jump anyway and food variety will fall much since many long-distance imported products can't be imported at an acceptable cost without mass distribution.

In a way or another, even just for changing to a more sustainable system we face huger, and we the "westerns" face the little impact, populations of vast part of the world face far bigger disasters and very probably will not get them without reacting. Between them there are poor from central Asia that can't really do much but there are also big powers like China that desperately need food for an enormous population having a polluted and industrialized land + no fertile ground around to invade. They need to reach South America to find enough food, and South America is already a feud of USA who will not like having less big but still big food supply problems in the meantime South Americans do not like much nourish nor Chinese nor USA while starving... That means some kind of war, perhaps with proxies to avoid a full scale nuclear conflict, and actually war have side effects, one between them is crushing various productions, food included...

Unless you're high in the grievance hierarchy; then you can burn shit down, and get the Prime Minister to literally kneel before you.