[ruffrey]

For those interested in farming and inputs to farming, I recommend looking into "No-Till" farming and other regenerative soil building practices. What is being rediscovered is how much cheaper it is to build soil health, which in a few years brings yields up to conventional ag. Methods such as increased soil organic matter through cover crops, reduced tillage to keep mycorrhizal fungi, microbes, and earth worm trails intact. These practices are being shown by ag research universities in the US to greatly reduce the need for inputs (fertilizer) almost entirely in many cases. That is because the bioavailability of nutrients is far higher when plants work with beneficial microbes to acquire nutrients - the way plants evolved was not in tilled soil. And tilled soil becomes hardened and erodes, while untilled or lightly subsoiled earth allows moisture retention and deeper water penetration. While not a rejection of modern ag practices, no-till does take aim at some of the conventional expensive "wisdom" (namely, tillage, heavy fertilizer use, heavy pesticide+herbicide use).

[bluGill]

Modern ag is all no-till and low-till and has been since the 1980s. The old fashioned plow is non-existent anymore. Even when a farmer does till, it is a with a tool that is rarely even called a plow (there are several types of tillage tools in common use with different properties, but none turn the soil over or exchange soil layers)

Modern ag can build topsoil - sometimes at rates as high as 1mm/year!