He's nailed it, Tom. The incentives are often the opposite of what you describe in an ideal world. What counts is relative cost and the desire for immediate profit over delayed profit. "Net present value" in accounting means that a buck is worth more today than tomorrow, and there's a fundamental bias in business to value short-term profit over long-term development, and go for the instant gratification of a get-rich-quick scheme over the tedious work of building a sustainable economic enterprise.

I think it's no more legitimate to romanticize farmers as thoughtful stewards of the land, than to romanticize American Indians. Both have a history of horrific ecological mistakes, painful lessons learned, and restraints on individual excesses imposed through culture and law.

The Dust Bowl of the 30s wasn't just the weather, it was the confluence of the drought and years of mismanagement of the soil by farmers. They overfarmed, depleted the soil of nutrients and ground cover that held it in place, and when it couldn't produce anymore they walked away, leaving barren fields waiting to take to air in the next wind.

The Farm Bureau system was established to teach farmers about crop rotation and soil conservation. They weren't born knowing about that stuff. Further, part of our system of farm subsidies includes paying farmers to keep fields fallow for several years so that the soil can recover; why would that be necessary if farmers were practicing soil conservation on their own? The subsidy overcomes the natural incentive to extract profit as rapidly as possible from the soil and abandon it when it's used up.

How did farmers clear all that land in the first place? Most of what's farmland today, everywhere in the world, used to be forest land. Farmers didn't move the trees, they burnt them down or cut them down and burned some of the wood for heat, left the rest to compost back into the soil. Farmers traditionally rarerly considered the consequences of erosion and siltation, let alone how they damaged an existing ecosystem in ways that subsequently undermined their own efforts--too often farmers have had to put back nutrients and reintroduce helpful fauna that they themselves destroyed setting up the farm. And that is a sad irony indeed.