The right way to farm is to work with other plants and the weeds themselves to regenerate the soil. The idea that weeds are pests that need to be eliminated at all costs is antithetical to proper regenerative farming. Anything that enables or propagates industrial farming is genuinely a bad thing that we should not support as technologists, it is not at all orthogonal! "A little bit less of a bad thing" still leaves us in a bad place.

Yup, agreed. Speaking to others listening in: some weeds are edible, and other functions as part of ecological succession. We could be using farming practices that goes with that, rather than against it. Instead, industrial farming is optimized to produce single crops conforming to consumer expectations, cost-efficient harvesting, and durability for long transports and storage. Industrial farming is not optimized for nutritional value, freshness, and resilience against environmental stressors. The system by which 8 billion people are fed resembles a Ponzi scheme in which we are borrowing against future generations ... and with the increased variability in weather and water rights wars, it is only going to get more, not less, fragile.

Example is the dandelion. Besides having culinary and medicinal value, it acts as a pioneer species for depleted soil. Killing it with more roundup or zapping it with a laser, and then contaminating the land with more fertilizer will just encourage more dandelion growth. The land and ecosystem is signaling a fertility issue, and our present practices work against it.

I say this even though the common mallow is the bane of my existence here in the lower Sanoren ;-)