As long as I can remember, I have been told that modern farming/distribution techniques produce more farm per farmer/acre. This New York Times' article suggests that when measured by energy consumed, output has gone down.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/12/magazine/12policy-t.html?_r=1
But the 20th-century industrialization of agriculture has increased the amount of greenhouse gases emitted by the food system by an order of magnitude; chemical fertilizers (made from natural gas), pesticides (made from petroleum), farm machinery, modern food processing and packaging and transportation have together transformed a system that in 1940 produced 2.3 calories of food energy for every calorie of fossil-fuel energy it used into one that now takes 10 calories of fossil-fuel energy to produce a single calorie of modern supermarket food.
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