Doesn't that just depend on whether income can pay for the 50 employees, and that you can find 50 people willing to work the job?

This is framing premises so that only this conclusion appear relevant.

It's not a predefined unavoidable destiny that is to go through, that is all about what policies are chose with which agenda in mind.

Unemployment didn't reach 0% anywhere last time I checked, and as it was already mentioned, no actor out there is playing without some public subsidiaries.

This is all political decisions. Local short term optimisation of plutocrate revenues is one possibility. Perennial national sustainability is an other one. These two agendas however probably don't overlap much.

Many of the practices proposed to reduce the impact on the environment are nonstarters because of low land yields (and indeed might actually be worse on the environment because you need to convert more land to farmland).

If this method has equal land yields and less environmental impact but is highly labor intensive, perhaps there is scope for mechanization to make it competitive.