[alextheparrot]

The phrase "It builds forests" is so powerfully, simply descriptive.

I think that framing agriculture's transition (hopefully) away from mono-culture into a more ecosystem focused idea seems like a tractable optimization problem. If we look at the reasons for mono-culture, I would argue part of the reason is that traditionally bigger yield is linked to bigger tools -- tractors are much larger than horses, spraying a chemical is easier when only one thing needs to survive. Monoculture makes it easy to apply big things, harvesting one row of corn is easy to scale to ten rows of corn just by making the combine harvester wider -- the harvester's problem statement is generic and scaleable in this way.

The hard problem, that you raised at the end, is how do we scale harvesting non-mono-cultures. The constraining variables are quite different when we need to perform a set of ten actions with no locality guarantees (Monoculture just guarantees locality of similar actions). I think one natural perspective is to look at how we do things non-locally at scale, which effectively reduces down to a distributed systems problem.

edit: few small changes

[Spooky23]

It’s pretty amazing what the land can do if you’re clever. I have a friend from college who makes a decent living as a flower farmer who also does horse boarding, etc.

When he slows down for retirement, he has a few million bucks worth of hardwoods that he planted right out of college on land that wasn’t good for other purposes. Mostly black walnut and maple, which he also produces syrup with and may start making booze with!

[alextheparrot]

I grew up in a scenario more similar to this, though my parents didn't have the foresight to plant hardwoods for harvest (Though we did chop firewood to keep the house warm in the winter from our woods). My father still sends a supply of maple syrup each year, which is important because the syrups sold in stores are pretty questionable (The texture is too thick and the sweetness is one-dimensional).

Definitely a tension I've found in life between working in an urban software world and a more bucolic, fostering atmosphere of a farm. I hope more people find a balance in life like your friend, seems they have found the best of a couple worlds.

It is still hard, though, to scale this approach in the way that modern factory farms (Or even small family farms, to be honest - harvesting 400 acres is still non-trivial compared to the average of 150 acres in the 30s [1]) have done with the monoculture.

I would probably assume your friend has a small family style farm, which is what 90% of the farms in the US are [2]. Total farm output has tripled [3], a top of the line tractor costs nearly half a million, it really makes the equation of making an integrated farm a much more complex scenario. If I start doing a more bespoke culture, these tools are probably much less effective - that's the core challenge I think that needs to be solved, how do we increase output of heterogenous cultures.

If I had to bet (And I don't go to Vegas often for a reason), there's likely an inflection point where micro-technologies come to farming in a more direct way, possibly supplanting the way we do a lot of things today. I hate the appeal to nature, but it does seem prescient, in that a bunch of small organisms (Bees, butterflies, and birds) contribute so much to the overall health and harvest of an ecosystem. Maybe there is some, excuse me, cross-pollination to be found between that world and the one we've constructed.

Postnote:

Interesting history of farming I found https://www.thoughtco.com/history-of-american-agriculture-fa....

[1] http://usda.mannlib.cornell.edu/usda/AgCensusImages/1969/02/...

[2] https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2017/march/large-family...

[3] https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/chart-gallery/gallery...

[quantified]

Keeping the soil productive with more fertilizer costs a lot in some ways- fertilizer production is a big energy consumer. Basically attempting to accelerate using fossil or nuclear what the sun or things that eat organic matter do more slowly.