Perhaps because overuse of the soil leads to desertification and a downward spiral where each individual tries to produce more and more leading to faster desertification?
Are you saying paying companies to remain idle is an ideal resource management solution for certain scenarios?
Reading the Wikipedia on the "Dust Bowl" seems to indicate it was solved by financing soil conservation techniques such as tree planting combined with researching and educating business owners on better practices called "Dryland farming" - which the early farmers seem to have been unfamiliar with in <1930s America. Basically farming evolved to take into consideration the unique environment they were operating in which every business and property owner would naturally be incentivized to follow (something that is not always the case for environment related externalities)... I don't see how farm centralization played any role in solving this problem.
"Are you saying paying companies to remain idle is an ideal resource management solution for certain scenarios?"
Yes. And how is farm centralization the same as paying farmers to not plant?
As prices for a good fall, the producers try to make up for it on volume. This is a feature of capitalism. Everyone acting in their own interest leads to a downward spiral. As a result, there is an exacerbation of harm to an ecosystem.
If you don't believe me, model it on a computer. It's the tragedy of the unmanaged commons. And Capitalism also has this effect under normal circumstances. Look at how much deforestation and desertificaton and extinction of species has happened in the last 50 years.
Half of all deforestation in the last 10,000 years happened during the last 50 years.
It's not just the bees - the rate of extinction of species has increased massively in the last 100 years and biodiversity is plummeting around the world. We are turning our ecosystems into farms.
The largest concentrations of CO2 in millions of years are in the last 50 years, and increasing.
This is not scary to many ideological conservatives in love with Capitalism. They wave it off and believe in human ingenuity of the future.
Navel gazing at the nice things Capitalism produces doesn't mean that there are no negative externalities. Everyone is incetivized to sell more and more stuff at the expense of natural ecosystems, third world countries and future generations. Look at lake Baikal as a random but serious example.
See: The Dust Bowl.