Thanks for such a thoughful reply, @anotherjoe. Please keep tagging with gardening, especially for those posts that easily translate to the smaller scale. Folks with chickens and other animals will probably appreciate your upcoming post on fencing. And your comment here is the basis for a really great post - or several - on how to apply larger-scale concepts to the smaller scale.
I enjoy reading your posts for the larger-scale, although they are more for ranching and sustainable agriculture. The situation with soil in this country (and elsewhere) is really a problem. So much erosion. I see the return of road-edge to road-edge farming where I grew up in Kansas and cringe.