Industrial Agriculture is Unsustainable
Industrial-scale agriculture took off after World War II with the need to find ways of feeding impoverished communities at scale, utilising post-war chemical processes which switched from the making of chemical explosives to nitrogen-based fertilisers.
It has taken several generations to appreciate that this form of farming is unsustainable. Depending on the data source, somewhere between 30 and 50% of all carbon that has been added to the atmosphere, and which is now implicated in the anthropogenic component of global warming, is derived from soil due to these practices. Recent estimates put the loss of carbon in soil across the United States prairies by farming as croplands as high as 60%.
