I'd like to know how your studies account for the steady increase of yield per acre for the past 100 years. If Amish farming practices were superior no one would have switched to tractors.

I pick up milk from Amish farms. I know I've posted this elsewhere but I figure you would be interested in seeing it too just to understand my background in this.



Those are milk cans. I worked in that plant for about 5 years. I also had my own milk route I operated for a while but now work for someone else who has a route. Any way a cow at a typical Amish farm produces about 40 pounds of milk. Some are much lower. Compare this to right around 60 for most farms. There are some dairy farms that can get 80-90 pounds per cow. This is without hormones, just good genetics and good farming practices. Keep in mind horses need to eat too. It takes at least 5 acres per horse to be self sufficient for feed. Most Amish have 4 horses which is approximately 20 acres of land. Also there is a lot of human power to feed too. It takes a lot more land to provide the energy needs for an Amish farm versus the typical farm.

Also the cans themselves are much more inefficient. A truck typically gets about 7-8 mpg on a route. Even the largest can trucks can only haul about 20,000 pounds worth of milk. A bulk tanker can go up to 55,000 pounds of milk. Fuel per pound of milk transported is no where near as efficient. The quality of the milk is much lower as well which has to do mainly with not being able to properly refrigerate the milk. Milking into buckets is not very sanitary, when a cow urinates or defecates some of those waste products invariably wind up in the milk. This typically does not happen very often when using milkers and a pipeline. This is why can milk is the lowest grade milk out there.

It takes a lot more land to produce food the way the Amish do it. Oil is like having a bunch of man hours in a bottle. The work you can do by yourself with a gallon of fuel makes you more productive not less. Also the Amish are not fuel free, more like fuel light. They still have some stationary engines for certain task like loading silo or threshing.

Labor is key here. It's pretty obvious why the USA used to be an agrarian society versus what we have now. It simply took a lot more people to produce food. Labor in the past was free (children) but we can not have large farm families with the population we have now. That leaves having to pay a lot of people. Food will be very expensive. The other option is to have some mechanization that is ran on fuels grown on the farm or bio mass (such as a gasifier). Instead of growing food for draft animals who eat 365 days a year one could grow fuel (or scavenge bio-mass) for a tractor/rotor tiller that only "eats" a week or two out of the year.

Agreed.