In France, there's the agronomist René Dumont, who travelled the world to discover and study different agricultural practices. At the end of the Second World War, he took a dim view of the arrival of the US petrochemical industry in French fields. He was already describing the destruction of soil fauna, reducing productivity in the long term. He was the first presidential candidate to run under an ecologist banner, in the 1970s. I wasn't aware of any other authors talking about this before.