Gabe Brown says he uses cover crops, pastured poultry, and managed grazing on the same land as his primary crop and gets more calories per acre than monoculture farms, but also he has no chemical inputs, his soil is getting richer, and there's far less impact on the environment. And it's not like he doesn't have large farming equipment to do the work with. There's a learning curve and a risk factor in switching, but the alternative is to be dependent on variable fertilizer costs and government subsidies forever while the soil is depleted.

A lot of this is not about increased yield, but healthier more nutritious plants, a healthier soil that binds more carbon, a more diverse farmland supporting a more diverse set of insects and animals and so forth.

The monocropped modern agriculture is not only producing dead soil, farmers that become reliant upon exterior input supplied by global conglomerates (i.e. ther margins don't go to the person doing the farming, but everyone suppling the stuff the farmer needs), and causes a lot of damage to local ecosystems.