[babatuba]

I'm sorry what!? This is how everything works. If you force something to use more ingredients/nutrients/whatever at a faster pace, you will deplete something else in the ecosystem faster than previously.

Plants or otherwise: when you force the balance to tilt one way, you have to be extremely careful not to reach a breaking point.

Just want to add that I think the technology could be really beneficial though. For instance, if you planted less high-yield potatoes in smaller area than previously, you could then afford space for alternate crops and then move potatoes to a different location and counter balance with other crops the next season. This could possibly allow for increased production while still preserving nutrients, increasing overall yield efficiency.

[HPsquared]

What matters is the ratio of soil depletion to food production. If the plants produce 50% more food, you don't need to plant as many of them. This might end up actually reducing the environmental footprint.

[idiotsecant]

In practice, this is not how it would work out - the farming entity is incentivized to produce the maximum profit - if you can make 50% more food and sell it for the same price, you will just make 50% more food. Even if you can make 50% more food and sell it for 80% of the price per unit you will still do that because it means more profit.

[bluGill]

You missed something important: demand is not elastic like that ( to some extent people will switch from beans to meat, but eventually you have enough to eat and won't buy more at any price). Thus as farming gets more productive someplace needs to stop growing food. We can allow a bit to go to waste, but eventually someone is going to realize that the price they can get for their crop isn't worth the cost for putting it in the ground and stop farming. Not sell out to a different farmer because no other farmer will invest in that land.

The above happens all the time. It doesn't happen on the most productive land, it happens on the marginal land.