Agriculture: Trading Productivity for Predictability

I've been wrestling with the topic of agriculture for the past couple of years. The idea that agriculture is fundamentally destructive is oddly compelling to me. I've touched on this in several posts, like this one.

In the last ice age, glaciers basically reached just past our current property to practically just my old address in the small town of Chardon, Ohio. Elephant sized animals--mammoths and mastodons lived just south of there. In spite of a wall of ice being just to their north, huge mammals lived in abundance and people lived nearby, also.

Fast forward millenia and the european people who migrated to the same area found it teeming with holocene plants and animals in overflowing abundance.Within a few decades (by 1850), more or less, they'd razed all that to the ground in favor of agricultural fields and grasslands. (It's probably what happened in Europe thousands of years prior.)

It seems almost impossible to believe, but nature unmolested is probably more productive than when managed by people. "Productive" in this sense means the conversion of solar energy into potential food and fuel (e.g. firewood) calories is as efficient as possible over a large area. However, in its natural state, it generally takes more work (energy) to harvest the energy and store it in any given season than in an agriculture system. Mainly just because the distribution of human-useful plants and animals aren't confined to an easily walkable/workable area.

The deer example discussed in an earlier post highlights this. When you raise a herd of cows in my area, it takes a relatively large amount of land and effort to manage them, but in my county much larger numbers of deer than cows just walk around all over the place and require no management and no waste treatment, etc...

The advantage that agriculture seems to have for people is that their plans can succeed. That is, they can attempt to impose a predictable scheme for raising food on a given area of land and can work to make it happen. They have a more or less predictable outcome for their time invested.