Probably rice cultivation with an understanding of irrigation

You'd be surprised but the "landraces" e.g. historic geographically constrained cultivars tend to do better than modern cultivars in certain geographical regions. A modern even GMO cultivar might have a couple of beneficial traits introduced over the course of a few decades of work. Whereas a landrace might have been selected for yield in that area for a thousand years or more, maybe 100x or more as many generations under selection. As such there is a huge interest among a subset of biologists today to catalog all of these remaining landrace crops and the genetic diversity they contain before they are lost, either due to changing climate wiping out their native environment or the modern farmer replacing these cultivars with ones you can buy in bulk quantities from your seed supplier and have more of an export market (some landrace crops aren't fit for export shipping due to fragility of the crop unlike more modern cultivars; bananas are a good example where there are 1000 types grown but only 1 single varietal particularly fit for overseas shipping hits the supermarket).

It doesn't take many generations for selective breeding to show improvements in landraces. Even just making sure that volunteers from seeds that were thrown out as food waste were given a chance to fruit and seed starts that process.

One of the more interesting sources of landraces can be found in local seed saving programs, such as ones hosted by local libraries. They are more likely to be viable seeds that is adapting to the local conditions.

What is farmed in this country is land compatible with american farming practices not fertile land. E.G. any mountainous farm region in the U.S. will see basically only farming on the valley bottoms. Whereas many civilizations in the past and present developed terrace farms to make use of the entire hilly region not just the convenient bottoms. It isn't really done in the U.S. due to the cost and the availability of vast quantities of flat farmable land well beyond market need.

It goes full circle: where does the carbon in the biofuel come from? The plant. Where does the carbon in the plant come from? The air. This is why biofuels are carbon neutral in theory at least. There is of course loss in process like in most things.

In terms of a use of money it is a good way to subsidize the american corn farmer. Whether you believe that is worthwhile depends on your views of WWIII.

The devil is in the details. Where did the land used to plant it came from? What was there before? Deforestation emits a lot of CO2. Fertilizer needs fossil fuels to be manufactured, tractors and harvesters burn diesel, et cetera.

We could also just feed the food to people who want to kill us and maybe they'll want to kill us less.

You have a back door as well for the gut that tends to open at least once a day. We know fecal matter is in the air in most bathrooms. It wouldn't surprise me if you got an infusion of community fecal biome right into your anus every time you used a restroom that isn't your own.

Yes but usually when the back door opens things are exiting the gut rather then going in. So I don’t think that counts.

There are cases where things do enter the back door but I think that’s just humans getting creative and it wasn’t designed for entry.

Its not like there is positive air flow keeping any microbes in the air out and away. If something lands on there it can probably colonize then spread to the inside slipping through the sphincter.

I'm not sure how many probiotics will make it through the stomach acid. One would think suppository would be vastly more effective: parachute directly onto the battlefield.

That isn't a problem because no one speaks of these suppositions in terms of "just so" but in terms of "could be due to." If you want to prove something as just so you have to do a lot more work describing a mechanism of action and that involves reaching into a different toolbox.

I think it is a huge reach to assume the lettuce head isn't suffering when you pluck it. It is pure anthropomorphising at its finest where you can use some in built cognitive dissonance to see a plant as some other not worthy of life whereas something that bleeds red fills one with dread. I hazard a guess that if most people didn't spend a childhood ripping leaves off trees and throwing sticks at plants that they would have similar feelings towards the harvest process of most crops when exposed to the first time like they might with the harvest process for animal crops.

If there are opportunities to do things with more respect and dignity, for either plants or animals, they should be done. But at the same time we shouldn't feel so morose about the reality of the situation of life on this planet where literally everything eats something else, usually in a very brutal manner.

True, it's a huge reach, but do I have a better way of evaluating it?

“I'ma eat you, coz I am more entitled to live that you are” is the default position for every animal out there on earth, fwiw. Would you call a harbor seal pure evil because they play with their prey and kill them brutally and slowly? Fish like Tuna are brutal killers and even kill eachother. When you study it, nature is brutal, unsavory, cold, and cruel. A human pig farmer on the other hand is remarkably benevolent a predator. They will hire a veterinarian if a pig is sick after all. They won't rip the pig apart alive limb for limb. They won't slowly kill it over the course of days.

Nice question.

I would not call animals who kill other animals for evil. They don't have a choice. It is their nature.

Humans, by virtue of their empathy (which can be extended beyond their own species) and intelligence (however we decide to evaluate that), do have a choice.

The main issue with AI I think is that it is exposing slop in the process people have handwaved away for some time. If the issue is you ask an AI for a prompt and it issues a function that doesn't work as expected, and this breaks your workflow, then the issue is your workflow. A junior dev or anyone else really could write a function that doesn't work as expected. Your workflow shouldn't go down to its knees in response, it should have tests and other debugging surrounding the putative function call to ensure that its output is as expected and it is not causing downstream issues in the stack.

This is why a stack overflow copy paster and a gen ai cruch wielder are both the same kind of bad. Both don't understand the context of the code hence grasping for "please solve this for me someone/thing" tooling instead of the underlying documentation that explains every thing for someone with knowledge to apply. Both require the same care to either not hire or to disempower such that one stupid bug pushed on friday isn't going to bring down the stack on the weekend, that it can be reviewed by people with an understanding of what is happening.