People have put up with a lot of shit -- literal and metaphorical -- over the last ten thousand years. I don't understand the assumption that it simply must be better than anything chemistry has to offer, and I find the aversion to measurement and control inherently suspicious.
The problem with how you're framing this is that the scientific methods that go into such developments don't take into account certain "externalities". Measurement and control can only be exercised inasmuch as you can understand the totality of the system. In this case: broader effects on human health and ecosystems. As someone with a strong scientific background, it sometimes seems to me that the science and engineering of the past couple centuries has been so focused on the intricacies of specific problems that they haven't left their practitioners enough leeway to consider their place in the constellation of human activity. I'm not saying that there would have been another way to accomplish these feats, but that the problems are so difficult that it's left to other (sometimes non-scientific) people to evaluate their value to society.
Of course. I'd never suggest that soil science is complete or perfect -- but it's at least falsifiable. It can be meaningfully discussed, debated, compared, reproduced (or not), and improved. Insofar as alternative strategies can be held to that minimal standard, I absolutely agree that we should welcome them.
However, there's a lot of non-falsifiable marketing woo out there, and it needs to be held accountable for that deficiency. If we don't, the woo wins every time, because it can't be held accountable for its problems, and we lose our ability to collectively learn and improve.
No one is saying don't measure things. Fertilizer doesn't come from mysticism and homepathy but from science - make a guess (hypothesis) and test to see if it works. The issue is that we've focused on volume of output from a field, rather than mineral content of vegetables, which is far harder to measure.
The problem is one of underestimating the vastness of what we don't yet understand. We know extensively (nearly completely) about physics and basic chemistry at the unit level. As we increase the complexity, we know less and less. Protein folding, hormone interactions, DNA, getting there but lots of unknowns. Go up another few levels and you get to entire organisms like yeasts, which we can model reasonably well. Plants and their soil environment is several levels of magnitude more complex yet.
Using shit will get you an outcome you can count on. Trying to formulate things otherwise is sure to get whatever you are testing for, but likely to miss something important that we won't understand for years to come. That's happened more times than I'd care to count.
The idea being that Nature (more specifically evolution/natural selection) has demonstrated a remarkable tendency to converge on closed-cycle ecosystems when left to her/their own devices.
An idiom about never taking down a fence one knows not the provenance or reason for comes to mind.
Not that I'm saying I entirely agree with the viewpoint myself, but the rate of catastrophic unintended consequences we facilitate (I.e biodiversity crisis, creation of superbugs, introduction of invasive species) through artificial selection pressures tends to elicit pause at the suggestion we just "toss some minerals in and be done with it".
Merriam Webster says that meaning (definition 1a) of the word "control" is archaic, but I still hear it used from time to time. It's commonly used in a number of European languages.
For what it's worth, I totally agree. Without artificial fertilizer, half the world would starve. I don't think that kind of process makes sense within the context of capitalism, though. One obvious driver in the downward nutritional trend is the fact that faster-growing, larger, longer-lasting vegetables are better products, even if they taste worse and do less for the body. The problem with products is they're optimized for sale, not for use. Adding in extra nutrients is unlikely to improve the product, since it would increase costs.
> faster-growing, larger, longer-lasting vegetables are better product
Whatever product fits into the economies of scale, and selective commoditization solely for the sake of profit concentration not nutrition or environment.
But back to the idea of measuring everything. These are the counterpoints I can think about regarding measuring and controling:
* Measuring and controlling cost resources, some less, some more. E.g. It is easier to measure yields than to measure nutrition.
* There is imperfect knowledge on how to respond (control) after a given measurement, or even what measurements are important. E.g. Premature optimization, Goodhart's law, lack of certainty regarding nutrition.
* There are conflicting interests on what the result of controlling should be. E.g. more profits or more nutrition?
* Under appropriate circumstances systems can respond to variability or keep functioning without human control or input. This is resilience. E.g. Pollinating insects, edible weeds.
