There are unspoken beliefs working behind the scenes, steering the debate's direction.
Doug, Wojtek and others have mentioned the back breaking character of less machine intensive agriculture; Joanna's replied that this needn't be an issue if the work is more fairly distributed.
Wojtek added that a high percentage of people engaged in agriculture (30 percent is the figure we've been using) would not contribute significantly to "the economy". "What is the economy?" Joanna asked, and how does any of this tell me about the quality of food available or the levels of hunger tolerated by a society?
Lurking underneath this back and forth are two competing views.
One, that the industrialization of agriculture, for all its faults, has been a benefit to humanity because it has freed a large segment of the population from the iron requirement of farming to eat (and eased and expanded the lives of farmers too, just about all of whom are literate, quite skilled people these days). The worlds of scientific and academic research, art and culture would suffer if we returned to a societal model in which huge numbers of people were required to farm.
The counter-view -- the one I believe Joanna's implicitly expressing -- is that industrialization was not as much a triumph as most think. Our food is less appetizing and nutritious, synthetics, used to increase yield and ward off insects and other competitors, are poisoning us, the problem of hunger has not been solved and there are other, less measurable issues (i.e. our divorcement from 'the land').
As is often the case, I see merit in both points of view as well as problems created by taking their central ideas to logical conclusions.
Industrialization has produced benefits, only the most stubborn 'natural is best' advocate would deny that.
However.
Farming that uses fewer people and more machines does inevitably, it seems to me, inspire a tendency towards complex and, at times, extreme techniques (genetic engineering, heavy pesticide use, other big tech measures) because it's necessary to get the most out of the smaller work force dedicated to the task. Machinery, chemicals and biotech manipulation are logical consequences of a small labor footprint style of agriculture designed to feed hundreds of millions of people. Of course, the fact this happens within a Capitalist frame also determines how things happen. That's a huge topic though and beyond my scope of on-hand knowledge.
'Traditional' forms of agriculture possess all the benefits Joanna states such as high food quality.
However.
If upwards of 30 percent of a society are engaged in this sort of agriculture (and the high percentage would be required, it seems, by the removal, for the most part, of machine/chem/bio techniques from the mix of tools) work demands would take a serious toll on their health, educational opportunities and available leisure time. Spreading the work around more fairly might alleviate some or most of these burdens (following the principle of no one is 'too good' to farm) but we've yet to witness a society in which people move, in some orderly way, from job to job based upon larger societal needs -- one month Professor of Anthropology, next month corn harvester.
It's a sure bet that the 30 or 40 percent would be permanently farming without much assistance from the non-farm sector. The work wouldn't be fairly distributed in the sense of becoming the duty of every able bodied citizen (unless we want to use coercion and, I'm guessing no). The farm sector in this scenario (unlike actual farmers today) probably wouldn't be enjoying the sort of comprehensive education people attending, for example, Texas A&M (a US based university with an emphasis on ag sciences). do today.
On the other hand, perhaps they might through a system of shared knowledge within the farm sector in which people are, as I mentioned earlier, professors one month and field workers the next.
An intriguing projection but it's difficult to see how we'd get there from our current jumping off point.
.d.
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"Give me an underground laboratory, half a dozen atom-smashers, and a girl in a diaphanous veil waiting to be turned into a chimpanzee, and I care not who writes the nation's laws."
S.J. Perelman