Look at the Netherlands. Tiny country (slightly bigger than MA), basically underwater, and the second largest exporter of agriculture in the world. Denmark is similar although at a far smaller scaled.
The reason the US is inefficient is because it has massive scale. Huge country, basically no-one lives there in population density terms (tbf, Australia is the same size and even less dense though...so not an outlier). The future will be about doing more with less, and the US is an example of doing less with more.
Simple. The room for innovation is still huge.
Saying vertical farming is overhyped is probably correct too. But that ignores the fact that this is essentially what Netherlands has been doing for two decades. Their ag research programmes have focused on minimising resource use for a long, long time. And it does work...it is working already, and has been for a long time. Call it overhyped or whatever but it is happening already (the level of hype is correlated to funding or whatever...this just works).
US agriculture is one of the most advanced in the world, its agricultural incentives and economics however ... are not. Subsidy to certain crops over others and do not even want to get into the health impact aspects.
Yep, I left that out and it is definitely a huge factor.
Europe definitely has the same issue with subsidies but the CAP program actually works on the volume planted, so Netherlands gets royally screwed (and the big inefficient producers in France/Spain and, more recently, Eastern Europe...where there is huge corruption in CAP...get the lion's share) because they minimise resources (and don't have many to begin with).
I understand a certain level of subsidy to boost security...but the unintended consequences are huge.
I think you should note this is export, not production. The Netherlands has a very small population so they export what they grow. Clearly they're not capable of producing anything on the scale of the USA, China etc.
The reason the US is inefficient is because it has massive scale. Huge country, basically no-one lives there in population density terms (tbf, Australia is the same size and even less dense though...so not an outlier). The future will be about doing more with less, and the US is an example of doing less with more.
Simple. The room for innovation is still huge.
Saying vertical farming is overhyped is probably correct too. But that ignores the fact that this is essentially what Netherlands has been doing for two decades. Their ag research programmes have focused on minimising resource use for a long, long time. And it does work...it is working already, and has been for a long time. Call it overhyped or whatever but it is happening already (the level of hype is correlated to funding or whatever...this just works).