Yeah sure permaculture is ridiculous, but something like no till? There is nothing that prevents mechanization of it and it has seen significant success compared to conventional agriculture. The thing is, tilling resets your soil, so once you start tilling, there is not much you can do about soil health. In fact, tillage backs you into a corner where the only option is to spray back what you have destroyed through industrially produced synthetics. That also includes all the artificial fertilizer you're spraying. Once you till it, all the money you spent on the fertilizer is wasted. Once you stop tilling, there are actually ways to improve soil health that shouldn't be impossible to scale up. The biggest problem is that every soil is different and you need a complex "cocktail" of two dozen cover crops and another set of mycorrhizal fungi that is uniquely suited for your soil. Yes this does reduce yields, especially in the short term when you are building up soil health but conventional agriculture tends to reduce yields over the long term. This is ultimately a battle between "farm - regenerate - repeat" vs "farm until exhaustion - regenerate". It's not implausible that conventional agriculture is worse in the long run but we might not know it until it is too late, because it takes 20 to 30 years for soil to become useless.