If the Chinese government can pull this off effectively, without doing anything too stupid (splitting up families, letting people starve to death, destroying their inner city economies), then I would see this as a good thing. The most efficient farming and food-production systems today produce a unit of food using far fewer resources (people, labor, energy, etc) than were required in previous decades.
The people who continue to live in rural areas should focus on farming efficiently for large populations rather than for subsistence. If you can move the subsistence farmers into cities, and if (this is a big "if") they can work and earn a decent wage without obliterating the current economy, then they will more than likely be better off personally, and will consume fewer resources globally.
I happen to think that this is a very difficult thing to do, and that their timeline is probably way too optimistic, but I don't think China should be criticized for trying. They stand to gain tremendously if they can pull it off.
I don't mean to diminish the concerns you are raising, which are serious, but until the modern era China was beset by regular famine, and civilizations of the past did not necessarily farm in a more sustainable way -- it just doesn't matter if you're doing slash-and-burn agriculture with a small enough population relative to the land at your disposal.
To be fair, it's never been tried. At the time the only country that could do it was Germany. Now, most of the Western world would probably work. China couldn't meet the requirements so they hacked the ideas to fit an agrarian system and nearly killed them selves in the process. Perhaps they should try now.
Second, yes, by definition regenerative agriculture is scalable.
It might require as much as double the labor requirements (so 3% of the population rather than 1.5%) but it's likely that automation will amortize that.
See "How is China able to provide enough food to feed over 1B people?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20537409 which describes some aspects of China's agriculture that are regenerative.
Just to mention one (gross) example: It's a little-known fact that Eisenia fetida worms will devour "night soil" (#2's) and produce clean-smelling castings, while doubling in biomass in approximately 40-50 days. This could easily be scaled to handle urban sewage densities, returning that matter directly to the ecosystem without expensive treatment/chemicals etc.
What is it about the world that you think can't support that? It's new territory, and it may "disrupt" the US (to some extent) over the coming decades, but China has been bootstrapping itself out of farming for quite a while already. It's mainly the internet industry that lagged the US by a few years, but has caught up or surpassed it now.
It's a description of how China does farming at scale. Some interesting points: seafood farms (floating in the sea) instead of fishing, sensible sustainable (or "sustainable") cycles (e.g. fish -> fertilizer -> mulberry trees -> silkworm -> fish) (they also need aerators so the fish don't suffocate, and solar panels to power the aerators), massive amounts of greenhouses (including in places where it was previously impossible to grow vegetables due to climate), drip irrigation (Israeli technology for growing vegetables in the desert, saves a lot of water), returning farmland to the forest (to prevent mudslides).
That sounds great in theory, but it will take decades to make significant improvements in agricultural productivity (mostly for political reasons) and preventing mass starvation in the mean time is also important.
If it was sustainable, I would applaud. But the reality is that young people don't want to take over the farms and rural population decreases rapidly. Even with incentives, new people don't want to take over farms because investment needed to modernize them is too important.
I really don't think this is viable. I grew up on a mostly self sustaining farm. I've seen how inefficient and unpredictable it is at small scale.
There are simply too many of us to revert back to an agrarian society. We have to create food at a very large scale. Which means we have to become better at sharing it.
I'm sorry but I think that would be very dangerous to attempt until after the population declines (naturally, per current modeling).
I am all for trying to maximize technology advancement / alienating division of labor. (This is why I spend so much time on https://github.com/nixos/nixpkgs/ to untangle our great open source commons and make even in it's totality it graspable!), but "everyone gets to be a farmer too" is like the hardest-to-achieve form of that, and a failed attempt could easily wipe out what nature remains.
I would much prefer to abolish all non-highly-intense agriculture and try to return as much and to parkland as possible. IMO it's no coincidence California, Korea, and Japan are all prosperous. Mountains containing developing to smaller areas greatly improve things. We need the political will to do same thing in the flat areas by fiat.
Anyone that have lived in China or India knows how much people those places have.
There is already a tremendous pressure from the food those countries demand on the world. Chinese fishing fleet just obliterates anywhere they go, and they are destroying the Amazon forest in Brazil and Argentina with soya(proteins for pigs) plantations and equatorial jungles for Palm Oil.
Anything is inefficient at first, including agriculture itself. Wheat and corn grains were super small at first. At first, solar panels did cost hundreds of times more than what it does today.
Technology will improve and the future will be better.
I think OP is right suggesting this could be possible. But (my addition) only within scope of deconstructing the entire agriculture system as-is (and was for decades), and replacing it with something else. IMO this will be forced upon us (read: our children) anyhow. So better start early.
I don't really think they will be self-sustainable, even on a small scale, but I think they can (and will) do much more than they are doing now with high-rise factory farming. Detroit, for example, has some empty places to start with. Also, these sorts of things can be done right outside of a city using smaller amounts of land - until we have more ecological transportation, that's a good start.
Once we are able to grow the protein (cuts of beef, chicken, etc) in labs, it wil get much closer. Hopefully that is better for the environment than live animals.
But then again, I do not believe people actually want self-sustainability with foodstuffs, nor do I think we should be growing everything in a self-contained community. A lot of folks in Western countries eat a wide variety of foods and spices that aren't best grown in their climates and I think it would take much more energy to grow them where they simply don't thrive. If we get far enough with GMO's, this could be solved.
Ok, this is very cool, but it looks like as of now it requires orders of magnitude more manual labor than existing agriculture. This means increase of produce price to about the same extent. Unless a huge paradigm shift will happen (which takes decades without a major disaster), I don't see this as feasible any time soon.
There are two different senses of "efficiency" in farming (or other production). One is the amount of food you get per unit of human labor input. Supporting a fully urbanized population requires this metric to be high.
But the other sense is the amount of food you get per unit of land input. A society that maximizes this metric will produce more food and have a higher population than a society maximizing the first one. But most of those people will be subsistence farmers who don't earn much more than the marginal extra food they provide by intensively caring for the land. This is why historically most of the population -- anywhere -- was rural peasants.
The grotesquely inefficient capitalist who uses a workforce of 10 people and 300 acres of land to produce the yield of 50 acres of land is part of a "wealthy" society -- everyone else has more food because of his very low need for labor. But it's also a very low-population society. In a more traditional society, all the land would be farmed efficiently and the population would be much larger, but non-farmers would have much less surplus to capture.
The land consumption is enormous, hence why I mentioned it (farming of livestock). There are different opportunities for optimizations here. But I don't think it falls in line with cultures of industrialization.
Yes. I suppose the other way of looking at it is smartly run and managed farms feeding dense cities is a solution for a world where politicians, countries and corporations are doing something substantive about climate change. A world where the supply chains won't break, and the little people won't bear the brunt.
In the world we actually occupy, moving to some rural high ground with a few acres, and as off-grid as possible, to weather a possible Mad Max future looks less and less idiotic.
The people who continue to live in rural areas should focus on farming efficiently for large populations rather than for subsistence. If you can move the subsistence farmers into cities, and if (this is a big "if") they can work and earn a decent wage without obliterating the current economy, then they will more than likely be better off personally, and will consume fewer resources globally.
I happen to think that this is a very difficult thing to do, and that their timeline is probably way too optimistic, but I don't think China should be criticized for trying. They stand to gain tremendously if they can pull it off.
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