This is actually the big insight big time agriculture lacks about agriculture. They are obsessed with volumes and consider their farms to be large spread out factories making commodities and the tons of commodities produced to be the only metric that matters.
There are big wins to be had in making better food -- both healthier and better tasting. Most food in America tastes kind of bad and is very bad for you, so there is huge room for improvement. US agriculture is very efficient at making bad quality food. There is also a sub-industry of US agriculture-- organic farming -- who are very inefficient at making good quality food. Furthermore, there is a relatively large wealthy class in the world which have realized that health and a long life is the only thing that they cannot outright buy and every opportunity where you can trade money for some extra bit of health is worth taking. So there definitely is a market for good quality food.
There are other issues that are not considered critical yet but very soon will be. These are quality of soil and water. You can get good improvements if you make land that was previously unfarmable farmable.
But arable land is mostly a function of rainfall and flatness.
You can turn almost any flat land into arable land given enough effort.
Terraced farming cannot be mechanised economically because you need very small combines that need to be transported up or down and building the terrace with excavators etc disrupts the soil which means you have to build it up which means hardly any productivity in the first decade. You got a huge equipment, logistics and construction problem which requires massive amounts of upfront capital for basically no cash flow during the most important years. We would need huge advances in agricultural robotics for this to be cost effective.
What makes you say the organic market is so inefficient? And what room for improvement is there outside of the kinds of tactics that would make the food non-organic?
For the first question, one answer is the high price of organics. For your second question, there are many options. One promising option is targeted pest and weed control using cameras and image recognition and maybe even lasers. A system like that was actually mentioned on HN a couple of weeks ago.
Another is using biochemistry to make pesticides that degrade and disappear before the food gets to market.
Another is to bury seeds individually in the soil without plowing the soil, thus protecting the seeds from pests and giving them advantage over weeds whose seeds have to start on top of the soil.
There are big wins to be had in making better food -- both healthier and better tasting. Most food in America tastes kind of bad and is very bad for you, so there is huge room for improvement. US agriculture is very efficient at making bad quality food. There is also a sub-industry of US agriculture-- organic farming -- who are very inefficient at making good quality food. Furthermore, there is a relatively large wealthy class in the world which have realized that health and a long life is the only thing that they cannot outright buy and every opportunity where you can trade money for some extra bit of health is worth taking. So there definitely is a market for good quality food.
There are other issues that are not considered critical yet but very soon will be. These are quality of soil and water. You can get good improvements if you make land that was previously unfarmable farmable.