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Notes -
As has been pointed out below, my metric is actually energy returned on energy invested, i.e. input vs output on an energetic level. To the best of my knowledge this is actually what people usually mean when they use the term "efficient" and I'm not trying to play any language games here. Organic farming turns 1 calorie of input into 10 calories of output, petroleum/modern agriculture turns 10 calories of input into 1 calorie of output. To go back to slavery, slavery might even be incredibly inefficient, but the slaveowner doesn't care because he's using other people's resources without compensating them - slavery isn't really about efficiency.
As for changing economic incentives, I think there's actually a very substantial chance of that changing over the next few decades - go look at a chart showing conventional oil discoveries over time (you can look at the non-conventional discoveries too, but they need to be accounted for differently due to depletion rates etc). Modern industrial agriculture relies on petroleum and there are no substitutes, so expect economic incentives to change dramatically as oil's price changes.
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