Richard Manning proposes that staples such as wheat, corn and rice are plants that thrive in the type of barren flooded landscape the were the result of the catastrophic melting following the last ice age. Farming, he proposes, is the ‘nuking’ of the landscape, the clearing of the forest.
“Farming is the process of ripping that niche open again and again. It is an annual artificial catastrophe, and it requires the equivalent of three or four tons of TNT per acre for a modern American farm. Iowa’s fields require the energy of 4,000 Nagasaki bombs every year.”
Interesting article, however, the opening points which state that all our energy comes from plants capturing solar energy, ignore geothermal, gravitational and atmosperic energy. As can be demonstrated by the fact that we could theoretically grow plants underground under electric lights powered by the tidal energy from the moon.