The Economist has an interesting article about data-driven farming. Tuning crop planting by nanoclimate seems, at first blush, to be an obvious admission that the land must determine the crop. However, it is very likely that the practical constraints of harvesting require single-species planting, if not single-variety anymore.
Perhaps we are beginning to bring the machines to the milpas. Or perhaps we will find this merely another step towards the grave of modern farming. It seemed from the article that the only variable of interest is still yield per acre. But we are not Japan or Taiwan. We have lots of acreage. Maybe we should start looking for a better metric.
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