I'm so surprised! I don't think this is news on account of this being the stuff my mother babbled about 26 years ago when she was re-schooling into botany.

It's why people talk about small scale agriculture and permacultures.

Any time I see this, it's always read in his voice and accent, and today is no exception.

There is the elephant in the room; the majority of land dedicated to agriculture, that's both land for grazing and land for growing food, is dedicated to raising and feeding animals. I think the number is around 80%, with the amount of land dedicated to growing food is somewhere around 45%?

We're wasteful with vegetables and the like already, when we are wasteful with meat, we're also throwing away all the input that went into the chain prior to it.

I don't like to dictate what people should eat. I was born and raised a lacto-ovo vegetarian, and nowadays I'm almost entirely plant based. Switching over to a plant based diet was easy for me, there wasn't much to switch out. I also in general loathe when people try to fuss over others food, I was on the receiving end of that all the time as a kid and it's incredibly tiring.

That said, reducing our dependence on animal agriculture would be a boon to the world.

So, I'm a software developer and what knowledge I have of this is primarily due to just being a kid of a botanist who deeply cared about the subject, and spending lots and lots of time out growing food because we were poor and needed to eat. When your life depends on something, you learn as much as you can about it.

Breeding plants to be larger and consume more is probably a factor. Mistreating the soil is probably a bigger factor than people expect, though.

It's easy to think of soil as just a substrate, since we can't really see it or navigate it it's hard to properly visualise it. It consists of several strata, all with different properties. Healthy soil is full of bacteria, fungi, and little insects that live and die in it. All their activity help bring about nutrients and process the soil, aerate it. A lot of people are shocked to discover that the roots of plants also need air.

Industrial agriculture focuses a lot on big monocultures. As much as possible you want a field to have a single crop and nothing else. Herbicides are used to kill off anything that isn't the wanted crop, pesticides are used to kill off whatever might want to feast on the crop, fungicides... etc. Then we spread loads of nutrients over the field in the hope of replenishing whatever the crops drain from the soil.

It works to an extent. A lot of nutrients just run off into surrounding areas and waters, it's one of the reasons the Baltic Sea is basically dead.

Different plants have different properties. We mostly just see the top of plants, but like ice bergs a significant portion of them exists underground. Different plants have different root systems, some spread wide in the topsoil and help bind it together, preventing runoff and erosion. Some have really long roots (tap roots, like dandelion), reaching deep into the soil, pulling up minerals (nutrients) from the far reaches and eventually when they die, they get dispersed among the topsoil. Some fix nitrogen from the atmosphere, and bind it into the soil when they die and break down.

With big industrial monocultures, you lose all of that. There's nothing to hold the soil in place, there's nothing to pull nutrients across strata, there's no ecosystem to constantly process and enrich the soil for you.

The plants all evolved together, and just like animals they competed for different niches. Some animals eat vegetable matter on the ground, some evolved tall statures and long necks to reach further up. Some plants evolved wide root networks to absorb nutrients from a large area, some evolved long roots to penetrate deeper into the earth where other plants can't reach.

There's also fungi and bacteria everywhere, they live in the root systems, doing their work and helping the plants out, similarly to how we have bacteria in our guts.