In his (freely available) book "Historical Agriculture and Soil Erosion in the Upper Mississippi Valley Hill Country", Stanley Trimble talks about how white settler farmers caused massive environmental damage.
Seems appropriate to think about it today.

taylorfrancis.com/books/oa-mono/… They plowed the prairie, straightened the rivers, cut the trees, drained the wetlands. Use fossil fuel based fertilizers & machinery. Raise an absurd number of livestock in confinement.
There's cause & effect, whether one likes it or not (no, Iowa did/does not feed the world).

The diysfunction of US ag isn’t helped by conflating farm workers and farmers. Their interests are vastly different & policies have consistently helped exploit the former to benefit the latter. For context, some numbers. Tenants are only 6.3% of farmers. Most farmers own land 1/ Most farmers are white - 95.4% in the last census. Only 3.3% are Latinx (the ag census used the old ethnicity/race categorization). The census has not data on it but the vast majority of their land was inherited. By contrast farm workers 2/

I have recovered enough from the nausea caused by reading about the Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities aka USDA throwing your money away under the pretense of climate change mitigation to do a thread. Here are my awards to a few projects in several categories. 1/ Award for most obvious NGO grift 🏆2/

I had not seen this article (thanks @LizMcClure1 for bringing it to my attention). Here's a 🧵on why I think it is incredibly problematic and biased in favor of the industry.
First off the sensationalist title makes it look like this is a sudden change. 1/
latimes.com/world-nation/s… In reality the industry had 3 years to to prepare and respond to consumer demands but instead decided to litigate. 2/

porkbusiness.com/news/ag-policy…

Some thoughts on the persistence of US ag tropes clearly debunked by the science and the evidence - specifically the push for "carbon farming", "feeding the world", "corn ethanol". Many ppl w/ good honest intentions about improving our ag policies still buy into them. Why? 🧵1/ The answer is b/c there's a kernel of truth in the ideas, and they generically appeal to the ppl w/ good intentions. However, in our ag system, given our political economy & our production characteristics, the science is pretty clear there are MUCH better alternatives. 2/