Yup, it is NOT just the pressure/surface area (which does apply to the top layers of the soil), but the total weight supported by the soil (which compacts the also-critical deeper soil layers).
This is just one of the problems of massive monoculture farming.
It is insanely destructive and unsustainable.
On a recent-ish trip to the midwest US, driving away from the airport/city seemed lovely as the landscape turned rural. Then, it started to get really troubling as we'd realize that the fields were so endless and unbroken, creating vast areas with essentially zero habitat for anything other than the farmed crop - from the lowly soil fungi to top predators - nothing. In many ways, far more unnatural than many paved cities.
Elon Musk and his ilk are 100% wrong about the "need" to continue increasing human population. We survive literally by extracting yields from the excess carrying capacity of the biosphere. At some point, we can exceed that capacity, and the result will be collapse.
This will occur like with any other population that outgrows its resources - arriving at a state where the population's needs exceed resources by 10-20% does not result in 10-20% deaths, but 80-90%, because the shortage is spread throughout the entire population - they don't just say "we're 10% over so you 10% take one for the team and die this month, sorry", but everyone is undernourished to the point of unsurvivability.
This is merely one example of how the entire system is unstable.
> "we're 10% over so you 10% take one for the team and die this month, sorry"
While it is indeed not entirely like that, it does come a lot closer to the truth than you would expect (and it has always done that).
In the 18th century when France did not have enough food, almost everybody was worse off, but most people were not actually hungry, they just paid more for the food they ate.
Because inequality is so big and following a power-law (as you go closer to the top, people have exponentially more) the prices go up a little until demand of the top x% is met, and the bottom x% cannot pay and goes hungry until starvation. And because of the exponential difference, the bottom will starve while the top will actually notice very little. There is a group in the middle between those extremes that has trouble paying more and goes undernourished, but it's not actually that large of a group. The larger the inequality is, the smaller the group in the middle.
Think about how many people in the US will go hungry because of the worldwide wheat shortage as compared to some African countries. The small price difference will be barely noticeable in the US, a country which adds on tons of other value by turning the wheat into salmon bagels in a complex process. But these price differences are huge for many African countries, which only grind the wheat and mix it with water.
Yes, inequality does indeed mean that the shortfall is not fully evenly distributed, and the rich and well-off would be fine for quite while.
But I'm not talking about collapses in the range of economics, but more of a collapse of a food chain, with no real replacements. This would behave much more like populations of, for example, deer, when they overbreed substantially past the carrying capacity of their range, and the range is constrained by geographic barriers (so migration is not an option). In that situation, populations often collapse 80%, even with only a technically 10% shortfall, because every individual gets too little to survive for too long, so expires.
Your point about inequality and stored capacity in human economies is well taken and certainly applies in the case of 1-2 year crop failures or events like the Russian assault on Ukraine and its grain production & export capabilities.
If we lose key components of the food web such as pollinators, phytoplankton, forests, etc., economics will play a role, but I doubt we'd get to the point of 'we're 10% short so you 10% starve in the next 50 days and the rest of us are fine'. Sure only about 9% of the world lives in extreme poverty of less than the equivalent of $1.90/day [1], but I'd be astonished if the losses would be constrained to that class. I'd expect it to immediately affect everyone in the 'ordinary poverty' category of $5.50/day, which was 43.5% in 2017 [2]. And frankly, it's probably be a lot more. Sustained famine over 50-80% of the population will kill a lot more than 10-20% of the population, even if the actual shortfall is only 10-20%
This is just one of the problems of massive monoculture farming.
It is insanely destructive and unsustainable.
On a recent-ish trip to the midwest US, driving away from the airport/city seemed lovely as the landscape turned rural. Then, it started to get really troubling as we'd realize that the fields were so endless and unbroken, creating vast areas with essentially zero habitat for anything other than the farmed crop - from the lowly soil fungi to top predators - nothing. In many ways, far more unnatural than many paved cities.
Elon Musk and his ilk are 100% wrong about the "need" to continue increasing human population. We survive literally by extracting yields from the excess carrying capacity of the biosphere. At some point, we can exceed that capacity, and the result will be collapse.
This will occur like with any other population that outgrows its resources - arriving at a state where the population's needs exceed resources by 10-20% does not result in 10-20% deaths, but 80-90%, because the shortage is spread throughout the entire population - they don't just say "we're 10% over so you 10% take one for the team and die this month, sorry", but everyone is undernourished to the point of unsurvivability.
This is merely one example of how the entire system is unstable.