[sjogress]

It seems to me like this is a different problem than the one the OP was discussing.

I believe we need to make sure food production is not impacted by the current pandemic in the short term (next few months/years). The tools we have are tests, quarantines, and maybe a pay hike to insentivize people to keep at it.

In the longer term I believe that you are right. We should probably automate more, to ensure efficiency, and decentralize more to ensure sustainability and redundancy. However it would probably be incredibly difficult to do this during a pandemic. Though, i guess decentralization could be achieved in a way by people replacing their lawns with food producing gardens.