My default assumption is that "don't try to engineer things to be better" is the wrong answer. If we don't understand it well enough yet, just experiment more until we do. The awesome thing about indoor farming at scale is that it becomes really easy to do lots of experimenting and zero in on exactly what things each plant requires to thrive.
So let's do the opposite thing. Get serious about industrialising farming. No more below-minimum-wage labour, no more flooding pesticides that drain into rivers, no more guessing about what happens because the weather is random. Figure out how to do it cheaply, space-efficiently, and near to the demand so that we aren't driving trucks all over the place (burning a lot of petrol) to ship from middle-of-nowhere farms to urban centres. Just because we haven't got solutions to all these problems today shouldn't stop us from trying to find those solutions.
The problem is that engineering will, like capitalism, prefer at most two or three different varieties (those who were the best performers to begin with). Everything other will vanish and that's not a world I want to live in.
We already see this with Cavendish bananas and the TR4 virus. We're doomed when something similar appears for common food like rice, wheat or livestock.
if you go to a farmer and say "this variety is more rare, but this other variety is a more safer bet", they will probably pick the latter, regardless of capitalism, or science, or engineering.
And its not like science can't produce /new/ varieties either, STEM isn't that much of a monoculture!
Engineering will favour whatever you want it to (Diversity, tastiness, colour, shape.). It's natural selection that will apply only one selection criterium: Most surviving offsprings.
How do you think we got this diversity in grain and vegetables?
For example rutabaga, turnips, kohlrabi, cabbage, collard greens, cauliflower, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cabbage, mustard seeds, and rapeseeds were all created though engineering from the mustard plant.
Same goes for all grain that you eat today, they were engineered from a few shitty grass species.
As for tomatoes, good luck finding a non engineered one that isn't poisonous. Same goes for almonds.
Have you seen undomesticated banana btw? Go buy some Musa balbisiana. I hope you like large pits and bitterness.
Or dogs? How much diversity have you seen in wolves? How many crazy fucking dog breeds are there?
Engineering =!= monoculture. We all agree that monoculture is shit.
But going full hippy "let's only eat what mother nature provides" is as far removed from reality as possible. Mother nature provides bitter poisonous shit, that is full of seeds, so that you don't eat it and so that it can reproduce.
It is up to man to take that and make it so that survival of the fittest means survival of the tastiest.
First of all capitalism doesn't apply to home grown diy stuff, so even if your argument was validity it would still be irrelevant here.
Secondly, even though I am very much in favour of a social state, so I am not arguing for capitalism in general here,
capitalism is pretty much a unregulated market economy.
How would you describe most societies of the last few hundred thousand years?
Socialism and everything related to it is a very modern concept. That was only made possible through the abundance of modern industrialisation.
If anything, the communist states that claimed to be defenders of socialism (I wouldn't call them socialist in any way but, meh), have shown that they were the biggest proponents of monoculture.
How do you feed a billion people through state organised agriculture? Through fields that are hundreds of miles long, so that they can be harvested easily and efficiently by a single machine.
You can still see the industrial agriculture wastelands of this philosophy in east germany today. Wind that would normally be broken by vegetation and the borders of smaller fields can erode the top soil and leaves nothing but unusable desert.
Way to project, not sure how you extrapolated all that from my comment. My point is that when a bottom line is involved, you will see only a few options come to dominance once the dust settles. And while home grown efforts do bear fruit, they very very seldom become mainstream.
A quick glance at the world of software engineering would seem to disprove this as a claim about engineering. We have the opposite problem.
Perhaps you mean that people don't want much variety and the market responds to this? Better engineering is also the answer there: the more we improve the process and reduce the costs, the easier it becomes for people to service niche markets with more obscure products. Again you can look to the software engineering world for parallels.
In a world of well-engineered food, your personal "farm" is a box in the corner, which you put seed in once a week and it spits out finished produce. The coffee machine of the farming world, if you like.
So let's do the opposite thing. Get serious about industrialising farming. No more below-minimum-wage labour, no more flooding pesticides that drain into rivers, no more guessing about what happens because the weather is random. Figure out how to do it cheaply, space-efficiently, and near to the demand so that we aren't driving trucks all over the place (burning a lot of petrol) to ship from middle-of-nowhere farms to urban centres. Just because we haven't got solutions to all these problems today shouldn't stop us from trying to find those solutions.
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