>pesticides, fertilizer, and mechanization, a massive majority of the rural population will starve on the land, just like in old times.
>a massive majority of the rural population will starve on the land, just like in old times
>a massive majority
I sometimes want to go down the bizarre rabbit hole that is modernist education on pre-"enlightenment" history, but I fear the brain damage that would likely arise from it. There were very few famines prior to the industrial revolution in advanced nations (i.e. non nigger nations) and almost all of those were the direct result of some natural disaster (e.g. volcanic winter of 536), though you did see some in Asia which were the result of really foolish corvée policies, most of which involved drafting farmers for municipal labor projects or military campaigns. Very few of those famines produced significant amounts of casualties, and of those casualties, most of them were primarily in city centers. A fair number of these famines were conjoined with plagues, which in some cases actually in really fucked up ways helped rural populations. The Antonine plague and famine that went with it absolutely helped shift the power balance in Western Europe towards wealthy farmers. You really didn't see famines primarily affecting rural populations until the post-"enlightenment" era and until well after the industrial revolution, where the power balance shifted towards urban areas and food was just outright stolen from farmers to keep urbanites from becoming disgruntled. The most notable example of this being Holodomor.
Tldr: Overall, if rural populations have to pick between an adversarial urban population, and a non-existent urban population, history has shown they're much better off with the latter.