The fundamental ineffeciency if farming has always been that crops die at the end of season. This requires huge investments in organic matter removal, tillage, replanting and large quantaties of fertilizer, water and pesticides. The top 25 producing crops in the world are annuals but researchers at the lands institute want to change all that by switching to perrenial crops modelled after prarie grasslands. Grasslands are the most effecient self regulating ecosystems on the planet, requiring little input of materials, with incredible resilence to harms.

Researchers have been able to create stable ecosystems that requires less than 1/100 of the energy and inputs (no pesticides required the plants take care of themselves) with yields comparable to least productive farmland nowadays. The big difference being the land institute farms are sustainable the least productive farmlands exponentially require more resources and are suseptible to collapse.