One of the potentially greatest breathroughs in low input high tech agriculture is no-till farming. I say "potentially" because in practice it is often used as an execuse to pour on huge amounds of Roundup, and other herbicides.
But it has been demonstrated that if you do no-till farming with a multi-crop rotation, you can drastically reduce pesticides, herbicides and artificial fertilizers. The trick is to rotate a a fiber criop, a grain, a green manure and a legume. (For example, kenaf, grain, rye+hairy vetch, soybeans). The fiber crop pretty much outcompetes the weeds with few or no herbicides, clearing the field for the grain. The grain takes up the excess nitorgen that was added to the soil by the last round of green manure and legumes. The green manure and legume of course both add nitrogen. Note that three of the four crops are harvested for human use. The green manure is planted during the part of the season where the soil would be left fallow in any case.
full at --
<http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/pipermail/lbo-talk/Week-of-Mon-20050822/018144.html>
=============
This is very interesting and I need to learn more about it.
Although I won't pretend I'm competent -- at this point -- to evaluate the pros and cons of the technique you're describing (though it does have the ring of truth to me, for what that's worth), I note my failure to imagine, before you brought it up, even the possibility of a middle ground: a method that retains whatever virtues are found within big ag while producing our food in a less wasteful and destructive way.
As Doug stated, there appears to be a tendency on the left (imprecisely defined? yes, but what can you do? we're often forced into generalities by various constraints - cognitive, time and space related) to dismiss the accomplishments of capitalism as all "damage" and yearn for a pre-capital moment of simple beauty. Curiously, the debating choices appear to boil down to a defense of the technosphere as-is or an argument that it all should be tossed away in favor of the lost past; as if this was really possible.
This is particularly ironic when you remember Marx's rhapsodies about capitalism as feudal world smasher in the Manifesto and elsewhere. Yes, it's true, most lefties aren't Marxists but the old fellow's words and ideas hang in the air like the seductive scent of newly baked bread, influencing (if only in a distant and inaccurate form) even if not directly tasted.
The urge to fly from modern systems, instead of moving through them to even greater, fairer things is, I think, an indication of deep weariness and confusion.
.d.