You are not making an argument you think you are making. We switched from one set of problems to another set of problems that didn't exist before industrial agriculture: soil erosion, pest explosion, entire harvests wiped out by disease because genetic uniformity, which means one pathogen can destroy everything - think Irish potato famine but now it's scientific and modern.

The mess of traditional farming - with its scattered plots, mixed crops, and local varieties adapted to every microclimate - was too complicated to tax and control, so they (that Xe talks about, *they*, the ones who stand to profit) bulldozed millennia of accumulated agricultural wisdom and replaced it with neat geometric fields of single crops that any bureaucrat could count from his desk. This wasn't just an ecological disaster waiting to happen (and it did happen - you not knowing about it doesn't mean that it didn't; maybe in the end you'll notice when our last species of corn dies out), it was also an epistemic catastrophe, a murder of local knowledge that understood why you plant these three things together here but those two things there, replacing it with the kind of simplified, one-size-fits-all stupidity that makes perfect sense in a government report and absolutely none in actual soil where actual plants have to actually grow.

Anyway, I recommend Seeing Like a State by James C. Scott.

I find that 38 hours per acre for corn figure a bit inflated as someone who use to plant 2 acres of corn each year using a 1901 corn planter and harvesting it by hand with my father. It never took the two of us more than a day to harvest the entirety of the corn, store it in our corn crib, and bundle all the corn stalks, while working at a fairly leisured pace. Tilling, fertilizing, and planting only took a day and only required one person for the first two, granted we did use a 1940 farmall tractor, but like I said its not like we were working at any real speed trying to get it done as if we needed it to survive. It was just a cheap and easy way to get corn to fatten up a cow or two before slaughter. It is also an absolutely miniscule amount of work compared to the amount of food it produced. Using 1900 corn yields (we didnt actualy weigh our own yields), it was over 3,000 pounds of corn, and it was likely much higher growing a more modern variety. Going by bulk grain corn prices at the local Tractor Supply the value rivals or exceeds the average local wage, and if it was sweet corn would surpass local wages multiple times over, so doesn't seem like a bad deal at all.

I was directly replying to the poster above me's own arguments in favor of "doing nothing". At no time did I denigrate inexpensive food, only highlighted that their own perspective that food production is unprofitable when it is in fact necessary for every human to survive, should horrify them.

That being said, if you're going to get on your data soapbox and try to tear down an argument I didn't make in the first place, then I will challenge you to "square the circle" between OPs argument that food production is not profitable; the fact 200 million children (and half a billion people globally) are malnourished; and that these stats are somehow acceptable in a world that collectively throws out a billion meals per day.