Nature does have decent pest control, but the way we do farming does basically everything to circumvent it.

If you were actively trying to encourage the development of new forms of highly specialized pests, setting up a continent-scale monoculture with low genetic diversity is pretty much the best way to do it. It's also largely how modern farming works.

If nature wouldn't have great pest control, there wouldn't be any nature. The whole point of evolution is for living things to get better at resisting pests (also avoid being eaten and mate more successfully).

Industrialized agriculture has exchanged the reliance on natural resistance and pest management with energy expenditure (i.e. chemical fertilizers and herbicides/pesticides). That is a choice, not an inevitability. Regenerative approaches to agriculture show that there are alternatives that can hold their ground in terms of productivity and economic sustainability (try to google "syntropic agriculture" and "regenerative agroforestry" or "holistic grazing").

> there are alternatives that can hold their ground in terms of productivity and economic sustainability

Much as I like these approaches, unfortunately mostly they are currently a long long way off the productivity of conventional agriculture by any metric (yield/area, yield/animal etc)

If you've got some specific examples of regenerative systems that out-perform conventional in terms of productivity please post some links.

Why out-perform? Wouldn't it be reasonable to have similarly or slightly worse performing system in exchange for using drastically less energy and degrading natural resources less?

A concrete example would be New Forest Farm: about 40 hectares in Wisconsin farmed entirely without chemical fertilizers, pesticides/herbicides or external irrigation for more than two decades. The owner is arguably more commercially successful than the neighboring corn farmers and according to his data, he produces similar amounts of calories/ha with a considerably lower energy input and comparable labour requirements. He has written a couple of good books and you can find plenty of youtube videos of him (Mark Shepard).

> Why out-perform? Wouldn't it be reasonable to have similarly or slightly worse performing system in exchange for using drastically less energy and degrading natural resources less?

Sorry, you mentioned regenerative systems as out-performing conventional.

I'm not aware of a widespread regenerative system that even has similar or slightly worse yield. For operations at any kind of scale I've generally heard 30%-40% less yield from regenerative. In a low-margin high competition business like farming that's the difference between profit and bankruptcy.

Again, if you've links to highly productive _widely deployed_ regenerative systems please post them.

As I've said in another comment Mark Shepard's work is very interesting, but it's an isolated case, a prototype. The trick is replicating it widely - it remains to be seen if that can be done.

>. For operations at any kind of scale I've generally heard 30%-40% less yield from regenerative. In a low-margin high competition business like farming that's the difference between profit and bankruptcy.

No it isn't if you are reducing your industrial input and commercial seed expenses.

The only guy on youtube I know who does regenerative agriculture has better soil quality and higher profits. Also even in scenarios where regenerative agriculture is behind, the difference comes from the fact that the soil has been depleted already and you start from less than zero. If you have been doing it for thirty years, you get higher yields than conventional agriculture.