Colour me cynical, but it sounds like yet another academic making noise and not living in the real world. Mosaic farming is the traditional "family farm". It's not new. It's been around for thousands of years. It's not cost effective for broadacre production. That's why broadacre farms exist in the first place. Farmers already know the soils on their properties. They already have highly detailed maps in their heads. I wonder if the good Professor thought to simply ask the farmers about this. Farmers accept that some areas will have lower production value than others. You've not going to increase yields from high productivity areas using this idea. In less fertile areas, lower production is better than no production so they plant it anyway.