An interesting sidelight to this comes from Richard Pearson’s 2011 book Driven to Extinction. Dr. Pearson cites the work of ecologist Blake Suttle in the Angelo Coast Range Reserve of California’s Mendocino county. When he irrigated a patch of land, biodiversity first rose for two years but then declined as grasses took over and reduced the nutrient value per square foot. After five years it was half what it had been.

http://www.chris-winter.com/Erudition/Reviews/Biologee/Pearson_R/Extinction.html

In his 2010 book Eaarth, Bill McKibben touts local communities and the labor-intensive sort of farming that was standard when this nation was formed. It has much to recommend it: not least that in a world where manufacturing jobs are outsourced and automation takes over many others, hands-on farming is one option for gainful employment that will persist.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/gcb.12752

https://www.iucn.org/resources/issues-briefs/conserving-healthy-soils

In general, as the UN Environment Programme has pointed out, human food production and intensive agriculture has had a hugely negative impact on biodiversity. This really should not be hard to understand, as natural ecosystems have been cleared en masse for human food production, and current agricultural practices in many parts of the world rely on heavy uses of fertilizers and pesticides. We are arguably living on a poisoned planet, a legacy of the ‘green revolution’, and its reliance on environmentally destructive practices to wring as much productivity out of the land as possible.

https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/press-release/our-global-food-system-primary-driver-biodiversity-loss

There is little doubt doubt that the plummeting abundance of many birds and other vertebrates and arthropods is due to continued agricultural expansion and attendant reliance on damaging technologies. Where farming has been more extensive, biodiversity has fared better, but industrial-scale agriculture is leaving a very toxic legacy that is exacerbated by other anthropogenic threats including climate change.

I live in Vermont, so my experience of farmland is definitely not mile after mile of soybean fields. But I know that even in a large corn field, the soil is alive with billions of organisms of all stripes; there are insects and other arthropods and birds and mammals and reptiles. Most fields on small farms have windrows which support all sorts of animals. Small farms are banquets of biologic diversity. Same with pasturelands, rangelands, grasslands. Huge mechanized monoculture estates are in the minority of total agricultural land, because arable lands are a minority of total agricultural lands. You see ecosystems diminished; I see diversity on a smaller scale.

No doubt arable cropland is less diverse than what preceded it, but to describe it as an ecological desert is a bit hyperbolic. The ecosystems of farmlands are much more robust than, say, the Mojave, whose ecosystem is ironically considered sacrosanct by people against placing PV there. And again, arable lands are the minority of agricultural lands, and there is a fair amount of diversity even to that subset.

I wonder what time scale Greg is using when he says that ” We will regenerate the massively destructive agricultural landscape”. That landscape is absolutely crucial for the next century or two at least and I have to say that I hope that is not his only characterization of our agricultural lands, because that is a pretty antagonistic perspective.

Completely off-topic but: I had never heard of “depauperated” or its root before. Interesting.

Again, Greg’s description of agricultural landscapes as being ‘massively destructive’, at least in an ecological sense, is absolutely correct. You will not find many ecologists who disagree.

Which is not to say we could not do better. We could mandate windrows, the end of aqeuous manure lagoons, more till-free farming. We could mandate that CAFO manures be incorporated directly into soils, ie, make each CAFO a compost producer.

That scenario you paint with broad brush does not comport with reality. The majority of lands in the US are agricultural, most are not under mechanized agriculture, and even the ones that are are host to robust ecologies.