The industrial agriculture vs "sustainable" agriculture (whatever that actually is) debate reminds me of ecological adaptation. In a fiercely competitive ecosystem, such as a rain forest, most species become specialist to best and completely exploit a particular niche. They have no choice. If they're not perfectly adapted to do what they do, something else will outcompete them. Industrialised farming is a bit like that. Its a massively overbred greyhound: fit for 1 very specific purpose. But "sustainable/organic/low impact/diversity based" farming is more like a generalist species. In theory this should make it a more robust system. It could cope better with changes in environment because no eggs are in one basket. Presumably farms would be working along agro-ecology lines so exploiting diverse cropping and growing a variety of things and using animal for fertilisation etc. So that system might be more robust than highly specialised industrial, monoculture farm. But I would speculate that you're going to pay a high yield cost. The cost of robustness is yield.

There were some experiments aimed at increasing plant photosynthetic yield in Arabidopsis. Turns out it's possible to do it, as long as you buffer the plants in a cosy greenhouse. The plants can do more efficient photosynthesis OR they can cope with environmental challenges. They can't do both. You have to turn off all their environmental stress coping mechanism to get more photosynthesis out of them. Industrial farming has tried to minimise everything that will interfere with crops producing high yields at the price of making a HIGHLY brittle, unrobust system that won't cope with climate change, salination and the other massive pressures on it. But as I say, I think making a more robust system will be at the price of yields.

Are we prepared to pay that price? Its not like we're terribly egalitarian with what we currently produce.