I don't have any references for this, just the farmers I have spoken to, so take this with a grain of salt. The massive mono-crop farming apparently have the draw-back of not following some of the recycling processes that old school, small farm farmers did to keep the soil rich and diverse in nutrients. i.e. rotating out crops, bringing in animals to eat old crops, flowers, provide diverse waste product as fertilizer. Now it is all just bags of specific minerals added back in by machine, based on the bare minimum that they are required to by people that test the soil. Depending on who I talk to, I hear that there may be less than 60 harvests left before crops basically have little nutritional value. I've also heard that this is basically already happening, in that, crops have less nutritional value than they did say 50 years ago. But again, I don't have any references so this could all be nonsense.
> small farm farmers did to keep the soil rich and diverse in nutrients
Some old school small farmers did this. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, they famously did not, leading to the dust bowl. That was caused by small farms, not industrial farmers.
But I totally agree that modern industrial agriculture only does the bare minimum to keep nutrient levels up.
It is a bit more complex, old farming methods need to change as well, but not as much as Corp farming. This video explains regenerative farming which restores the soul and captures carbon.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_NtNyvOyRM
Bertrisges law of headlines aside that article is highly suspicious given the sheer number of studies looking for health advantages of organic and finding jack shit concrete. It is a pile of innuendo that doesn't set out to test ita hypothesis.
It could be trivial as a few new virgin test carrot patches vs established farms and get telling results. Yet tellingly they didn't do that simple test for their hypothesis let alone correlaries like by assaying various characteristics like perhaps if slower growth speed has more to do with higher accumulation of nutrients than soil content.
