industrial=mechanized=inefficient?

i was on the loose this morning and beyond a trip to campus to visit the pgp and the iuncg i went out to the soybean field that was the source of my volunteer corn photos to see what it looked like only to find the field harvested…so i wandered out into it and made some discoveries…i knew mechanical harvesters were inefficient and missed some of the crop…that was what i supposed led to volunteer corn in the first place…but i had no real idea how inefficient until i took a closer look at that field…you can see the ruts the harvester left behind which seems to indicate it was working fairly low to the ground, but when i walked down the row a bit i saw some soybeans laying in the growth medium ( is the chemically sterilized stuff really soil? ) and a bit further down the row i found thirty soybeans laying in an area not more than six inches square…extrapolate that out to the entire field and then take that and extrapolate for every field out there and that would seem to amount to a large number of awol bushels of beans…true there may be a system to glean the tailings…and i will be researching that…but it seems to me that not only is the industrial food system poisoning large swathes of acreage with nitrates and herbicides which end up in ground water in the wells and as runoff in the rivers but it is also more grossly inefficient in it reaping of the harvest than i had imagined…a work life revolving around industrial machinery has taught me that no machine is even remotely perfect ( all that stuff you see on those “how it’s made” programs are the machines between breakdowns ) and it shouldn’t be a surprise that farm machinery is prone to the same sorts of failings … the usda has just upped its estimate of the size of the soybean harvest this year to 2.68 billion bushels of beans…i have to wonder how many bushels the lonely, loose beans in that field would add to that....the only method i have found that is used for gleaning the fields is to let the livestock loose in them after harvest to eat what's left over...leaving aside the fact that cows are ruminants that have evolved to eat grass and that too much grain makes the acidotic ( which is one of the reasons cattle are fed so many antibiotics ) i don't know if that's a practical approach fro this field since it's inside a city's limits and there may be some statute about livestock ( like the chickens i cannot keep in my back yard, much less a goat or a cow )...i am inclined to think this field will go ungleaned.