Organic agriculture is where it belong. Mom and pop farms sold in stores where it costs 3x as much for no particular increase in nutritional value. Fertilizers are tangentially bad for the environment but not directly, only in that it causes algal blooms in water bodies. Pesticides are bad yes but the research should concentrate on finding pesticides that work well with the environment. We got close with glyphosate but we’re finding out that we didn’t.
The nutrients in soil are a non-renewable resource. You can’t grow on the same piece of land and expect a bumper crop every year if you don’t use fertilizers.
Plants grown in healthy soil that does not require short term synthetic inputs are more resistant to pests. The organic fertilizers and composts that build up suitable topsoil are literally the "pesticides that with well with the environment" that you are looking for.
No one is expecting bumper crops without any nutrient inputs. Synthetic fertilizers are not the only possible nutrient inputs.
>The nutrients in soil are a non-renewable resource.
I'm sorry but they actually are. Every time you do tillage you start from scratch. Hence you run out of nutrients much faster than if you used no till. Most of the fertilizer in tillage operations just gets washed away during rain which results in an over application of fertilizer and the runoff results in algae blooms.
If you use fertilizers and expect a bumper crop every harvest, eventually the soil gets fucked to a point where amendments to make it viable are too expensive, getting to a point where the soil loses integrity and is unusable.
To keep land arable in the longer term, you need to do crop/usage rotation, no-till farming, etc.
> only in that it causes algal blooms in water bodies
...which results in water that's so clogged it can't support fish, aquatic arthropods and so on.
Perhaps that doesn't matter, if the river rolling past your window is the Mississippi; but in this country, our longest rivers are only 100 miles or so.
The nutrients in soil are a non-renewable resource. You can’t grow on the same piece of land and expect a bumper crop every year if you don’t use fertilizers.