The mess of traditional farming - with its scattered plots, mixed crops, and local varieties adapted to every microclimate - was too complicated to tax and control, so they (that Xe talks about, *they*, the ones who stand to profit) bulldozed millennia of accumulated agricultural wisdom and replaced it with neat geometric fields of single crops that any bureaucrat could count from his desk. This wasn't just an ecological disaster waiting to happen (and it did happen - you not knowing about it doesn't mean that it didn't; maybe in the end you'll notice when our last species of corn dies out), it was also an epistemic catastrophe, a murder of local knowledge that understood why you plant these three things together here but those two things there, replacing it with the kind of simplified, one-size-fits-all stupidity that makes perfect sense in a government report and absolutely none in actual soil where actual plants have to actually grow.

Anyway, I recommend Seeing Like a State by James C. Scott.