#edited bc it sounded like the last paragraph was referring to involution

[elancholia]

@oligopsoriasis I don't know if you're still interested in the farming thing, but, regarding your land efficiency vs. energy-efficiency thing:

My impression is that, when designing an agricultural system, the basic trade-off is labor against land area, i.e. you can reduce labor inputs by using more land and reduce your land footprint by sinking more labor into it.

In this framing, I think industrial row-crop monocultures are extensive rather than intensive, i.e. they sacrifice land to save labor as well as/rather than energy to save land. Sustainability and higher absolute production might well not mean using more land.

A lot of the articles and papers that talk about modern sustainable systems trumpet them as Actually Much More Efficient than “industrial” agriculture, when, really, they’re just opting for the other end of the ancient trade-off -- they lead with productivity statistics calculated entirely on land use, and quietly note somewhere down below that “of course, this takes vastly more work, and is devilishly complicated to maintain...”

But that doesn’t mean they aren’t a better bet! The point is, there are trade-offs to be made other than technology-i.e.-what-we-have-now/primitivism. It means we’d need more greenhouse-minders and algae-scrapers, yes, maybe even more people growing beans in raised beds, but that’s Jobs, not a return to peasant agriculture.

(I’m not really considering the original thing about hunting, meat just doesn’t seem likely to ever be efficient, except on marginal lands, where it couldn’t support modern population densities, alligators or no.)

[some rambling speculation about historical intensive systems:]

Anyway, historically, intensive, labor-heavy, small-land-footprint systems make sense if you have a lot of labor and not a lot of land, and include the various clever Native American polyculture systems (the chinampa, the three sisters), but also potato-farming (Ireland, before the famine, being prototypically labor-rich and area-poor: a densely-populated, highly fertile area in which people had to subsist on glorified garden-plots), modern Dutch-style greenhouse fruit/veg/cash-crop cultivation, maybe what the Cubans do. Wet rice cultivation and terrace-farms are possibly in this category. “Vertical farming”, if it’s not a nothingburger, probably will be too (multistory buildings are capital, capital is dead labor, lotta walking up stairs, etc.).

(Classic Geertzian involution is when you can’t get any more intensive, so you have to sink more people, more bodies, more hours into it, without hope of improving productivity per head.)

My conjecture is that intensive systems make more sense when you don’t have draft animals to give you access to a larger area and incentivize more drivable open layouts and planting/harvesting techniques.