[HN Gopher] No-till no-herbicide farming system in trial since 1981
___________________________________________________________________
No-till no-herbicide farming system in trial since 1981
Author : sudoaza
Score : 470 points
Date : 2020-10-19 12:08 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (rodaleinstitute.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (rodaleinstitute.org)
| aurizon wrote:
| How to they handle grasshoppers in swarm? With a swarm of a few
| million on the move they can graze 12 acres to stubble in an
| hour. Caterpillars can also do great harm. There are natural
| effective insecticides, like natural pyrethrins or nicotines - do
| they work well enough?
|
| Weeds? There are very few natural weed killers - hank pick? Robot
| machine weed picking is getting better and better.
| bagswatchesus wrote:
| The only difference is that people who use manure typically
| (though not always) are more careful about it.
| https://www.mylvbags.co/replica-louis-vuitton-handbags/women...
| avernon wrote:
| There are a lot of clever ideas like this that have started
| getting branded under "regenerative agriculture". It is most in
| use on land that is already pretty degraded, dry, or has
| irregular rainfall. It has also had more popularity with
| animal/grazing systems than row crops. The key is that when you
| have healthier soil you get tons of benefits for free instead of
| spraying, fertilizing, and irrigating.
|
| The listed caveat that it takes years to return to previous
| yields is important. Healthy soil doesn't happen overnight.
| Farmers that already have a lot of debt will struggle to make
| this switch.
|
| "The Call of the Reed Warbler" is a book that has extensive case
| studies and stories about people applying regenerative
| agriculture to their farms. It is especially focused on
| Australia.
| jchook wrote:
| > We have found that organic no-till practices year after year do
| not yield optimal results, so our organic systems utilize reduced
| tillage and the ground is plowed only in alternating years.
|
| So.. by no-till they mean occasional till?
|
| My naive thought on no-till is that, in addition to reducing
| erosion, the soil gains a poorly understood yet very beneficial
| network of information and nutrient sharing that builds over time
| (eg mycelium). Tilling destroys that. Also I read it works best
| with diverse, cooperative planting instead of mono-crop factory
| farming.
| hbosch wrote:
| Based on what you said, seems like tilling is more for
| harvesting than for growing.
| kjs3 wrote:
| Depends on the soil. Down where I live, heavy clay soils
| benefit from tilling to break it up the so water can
| penetrate and plants can develop a decent root system. If you
| were aiming for 'no-till' I suppose you'd look to do this
| once or a small number of times by blending in a ton of soil
| amendments.
| brodouevencode wrote:
| Surprised no one has mentioned Joel Salatin:
| https://www.peakprosperity.com/joel-salatin-we-are-the-solut...
| mc_ wrote:
| There are many graziers to refer to without bolstering the
| racism of Salatin.
|
| Greg Judy and Gabe Brown being some bigger names but Chris from
| Sylvanaqua Farms is a good Black/Indigenous voice to start
| listening too.
| estsauver wrote:
| They're running 72 experiments on 12 acres. That's mostly
| interesting to me because that's an incredibly small area of
| land. US corn agriculture is on about 83 million acres of land.
| Subsaharan African Agriculture also plants about 83 million acres
| of maize. They see yields that are 1/3 to 1/4 of US agricultural
| yields. These yield gaps dramatically close when you start using
| fertilizer and modern agricultural practices. (The One Acre Fund
| puts out some pretty good data on this, the Burke and Lobell lab
| at Stanford have a few good papers on this as well.)
|
| In short, I would just ask people to remember that there are
| quite a few farmers who would _love_ to stop paying for
| fertilizer if it didn 't impact their yields: all of them in
| fact. It's one of their biggest costs generally. When an
| organization says "The Farming Systems Trial was started by Bob
| Rodale, who wanted scientific backing for the recommendations
| being made to the newly forming National Organic Program in the
| 1980s" they've incorporated confirmation bias into their heart.
|
| I'm certainly biased, I'm the CTO of a company that's trying to
| improve agricultural inputs by financing access to smallholders
| in subsaharan Africa (Apollo Agriculture, we're actually a YC F1
| company also,) but it's worth noting that this is research that's
| quite a bit outside the normal recommendations that ag scientists
| believe. I also worked at The Climate Corporation before, to put
| all my potential biases out on the table.
| nanna wrote:
| Trouble is the yields of fertilized crops are unsustainable
| because over time they lead to soil erosion. If your concern is
| /sustainable/ yields, fertilizers are the wrong answer.
| refurb wrote:
| Soil _erosion_? Why is erosion unique to fertilized crops?
|
| Seems like erosion has more to do with farming technique,
| independent of fertilizer use or not.
|
| The soil erosion of the Dust Bowl area was addressed through
| improved technique. Fertilizers were not a key component of
| that.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dryland_farming
| hinkley wrote:
| Because the practices break down soil organic matter which
| help stabilize the soil.
|
| The American Dust Bowl was a combination of things, but the
| frequency of tilling was a big part of it. Farmers now till
| at least one fewer times per year, which makes quite a bit
| of a difference.
|
| It's complex, because our annual crops are almost all
| prairie soil plants, prairie soils are typically bacterial
| dominant anyway, but fungi typically provide a lot of the
| soil stability. Tilling pretty much kills all of the
| fungus, and the bacteria run wild breaking down soil carbon
| (fungal and crop roots).
| ced wrote:
| Since everybody's been using fertilizers for a long (?) time,
| does that mean that farmlands aren't sold for as high a
| price? What happens when all the soil is eroded away?
| mikepurvis wrote:
| The obvious one is that when you conclude your farming
| operation and cease dispensing fertilizer, you leave behind
| a sterile desert where there was once fertile soil. This
| may not bother you if your intention is to farm
| indefinitely, but it's a bit depressing from a land-
| stewardship point of view.
|
| Other things can happen, too, of course:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_Bowl
| bluGill wrote:
| Modern farming doesn't erode soil. There have been decades
| since the dust bowl with less rainfall, but no repeat dust
| bowl because farming has improved.
| asdfasgasdgasdg wrote:
| How long does this process take? Presumably more than a few
| decades as I imagine much of the agricultural land in the US
| has been farmed this way for more than that amount of time.
| mikey_p wrote:
| This doesn't apply to a large amount of farming today, much
| of the issues with erosion have been solved by reducing
| tillage and other improved practices like contour farming,
| adding waterways, cover crops etc. None of this is related to
| fertilizers and their usage.
|
| Also if you want to get the most out of your fertilizer you
| will automatically be trying to reduce erosion. No one wants
| to put investment into soil that is going to disappear or be
| lost.
|
| There is also an increasing amount of regulation around
| controlling runoff of fertilizers in order to control water
| quality in lakes, rivers etc. Follow what is happening in
| Ohio and Lake Erie for example.
| SuoDuanDao wrote:
| This is a fair distinction, but artificial fertiliser still
| requires fossil fuels to produce and so isn't sustainable
| even if it has zero negative impact on the soil's health.
| codeulike wrote:
| They have 72 experimental plots. Thats not 72 experiments.
|
| They have 3 x 2 = 6 different approaches being evaluated
|
| _It is divided into 3 overarching systems: organic manure,
| organic legume, and conventional.
|
| Each system is further divided into two: tillage and no-till,
| for a total of 6 systems. There are a total of 72 experimental
| plots._
|
| It is likely that the 6 main approaches have been divided into
| smaller plots to act as a control for natural soil variations
| within the area, or, e.g. one side of the field being nearer to
| a river than the other. This is normal for agricultural
| experiment design I believe.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| What kind of fertilizer though? I believe this article mentions
| using manure and organic fertilizers.
|
| I'm no expert, but you cannot maintain a healthy soil without
| putting stuff back in it - manure, biomass / mulch, etc.
|
| Anecdotal and incomparable, but my backyard (just a few m2 of
| exposed soil) has had an overhaul in the past year or two; it
| was very sandy and kinda boring, but mixing in mulch / soil
| improver made it a lot better. There's worms in the soil now,
| that kinda thing.
|
| But yeah, you need some kind of fertilizer or the soil will
| just 'die'. Leave the clippings after harvesting, yeet a load
| of other biomass on there in between harvests, let it lie
| fallow, etc.
|
| But I think an issue is that biomass in whatever form is
| actually quite difficult to get in significant quantities, or
| hard to balance, so artificial fertilizer is used instead.
| estsauver wrote:
| There's also the limitations of the nitrogen cycle.
|
| Organic fertilizer is generally cow poop. Cows are fed almost
| exclusively grain corn (and then are admittedly grass
| finished, but generally the manure you could get is from the
| grain feed period.) That grain corn is... made with inorganic
| fertilizer.
|
| To keep making more food, someone has to introduce nitrogen
| into the system. You can use bat guano (which we actually
| used to use before inorganic fertilizer) or you can use
| nitrogen fixing crops (great but typically fix much less
| nitrogen into the soil then people think!) or something that
| comes from inorganic fertilizer, whether it's been green
| washed through a cow's GI tract.
|
| It's also a logistical nightmare as it's much less dense, but
| that's a separate problem. A huge fraction of the problems of
| soil health in rural places are logistical.
| phkahler wrote:
| >> To keep making more food, someone has to introduce
| nitrogen into the system.
|
| Isnt that the job of nitrogen fixing bacteria? You know,
| the microbes that probably dont do so well in modern farm
| soil. Presumably that's part of the reason crops do well in
| the organic plots.
| eppp wrote:
| We run our cows entirely on grass and hay throughout their
| time on our farm. Typically we sell calves at 700lbs. Then
| they may go to feedlots and taste corn for the first time.
| teorema wrote:
| This is partly an aside, but I often feel like homogeneity in
| plant (and animal, I suppose) consumption and production is a
| part of this that is rarely discussed. That is, I think there's
| a lot of unused potential in domestication of native plants for
| agricultural use.
|
| I bring this up mainly because one of my first thoughts in
| discussing, e.g., US corn agriculture versus Subsaharan
| agriculture is whether or not you'd even be able to compare
| them well because the crops optimally suited to each would
| often be entirely different. I think often probably so, but at
| the same time I wonder if things would look different if the
| same volume of money and resources were put into things that
| assume different consumption preferences.
|
| I'm not opposed to conventional agriculture, and don't believe
| in pointing fingers when it comes to food sustainability (in an
| ecological as well as humanistic sense). I do sometimes wonder,
| though, if conventional practices are often driven by
| assumptions or factors that are unwarranted or problematic in
| themselves.
| [deleted]
| bregma wrote:
| > They're running 72 experiments on 12 acres.
|
| I live on a 54 acre property: I can picture 12 acres as about a
| quarter of my property. If I further divide that into 72 plots,
| I end up with a bunch of little gardens.
|
| What works in a small garden plot is usually totally unscalable
| at crop production volumes. My experience (over decades) is I
| couldn't sustain my family for a year on a 1-acre garden plot
| even if I had the time to work it intensively and used nothing
| but recycled organic byproduct (compost and, uh, other stuff)
| as fertilizer. Even if we tried to reproduce the great
| Kampuchean agricultural experiment of the mid-1970s and put
| everyone to work in the fields full time we could not feed the
| world this way.
|
| I don't have a problem with folks idly dallying in this kind of
| research, and I think useful practices could possibly be
| revealed, but scale and practicality need to be taken into
| account when interpreting results.
| voisin wrote:
| > I couldn't sustain my family for a year on a 1-acre garden
| plot even if I had the time to work it intensively and used
| nothing but recycled organic byproduct
|
| Check out "The Market Gardener"[0] if you need help learning
| how to do far, far better than this. We need more, smaller
| farms. Biointensive farming and permaculture can save our
| planet.
|
| [0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18406251
| vram22 wrote:
| Yes, Jean-Martin (JM) Fortier (Quebec) is a good example,
| though there are better / more comprehensive ones, and at
| larger scale too, see below. And JM is not even doing full
| permaculture, e.g. not using multi-height crops (i.e.
| ground covers through plants of a few more different
| heights to top canopy trees, 100 or more feet tall), so as
| to use more of the available sunlight and underground
| nutrients (shrub roots can go deeper than herbs, and trees
| even deeper, and what is brought up from deeper can be
| shared with shallow-rooting plants via compost, chop-and-
| drop, etc.). And he still makes fairly high profits per
| acre / person / year, i.e. overall. He has many videos
| about his work, both the technicals and commercials, on
| YouTube. Search by his name as well as for a great series
| titled Les Fermiers. And some examples higher on the axes
| of land area as well as permaculture and / or regenerative
| agriculture, vs. "just" organic farming, include:
|
| - Gabe Brown, 20+ years at it, 4 or 5000? acres, mixed
| grasses (grains) and broadleaf crops, cover crops,
| livestock (beef, pigs, etc.), land getting better each
| year, saves hugely on synthetic fertilizer and pesticide
| (see a chart in his Treating The Farm as an Ecosystem
| video), profits better too, and higher than his synthetic-
| using and tilling neighbors and state averages (ND, USA),
| and going up the value chain, so getting more of the final
| consumer dollar vs. middlemen. The average take for
| "conventional" US farmers is quite low, he says. Oh, and he
| does not need or take govt. farm subsidies, as many others
| do.
|
| Has many videos too, search for his name. Check the
| comparative stats and photos.
|
| - Richard Perkins, Sweden. Not sure of area, but above a
| few acres at least, maybe 25. Mixed stuff again. High
| profits again. Videos again. Many years' good results
| again.
|
| - Last but one of the best, Geoff Lawton (NSW, AU), long
| time permaculture expert (learned from Bill Mollison),
| doer, 66 acre Zaytuna Farm, is real mixed farm plus
| demonstration site, yearly trains many interns, consultant
| (to small orgs through to countries). Ditto for many of
| above points like axes, diversity, profits, improving over
| time, cost savings, etc. etc.
|
| Edited for typos.
| vram22 wrote:
| Forgot to say:
|
| Gabe runs his operation with only a handful of people,
| maybe 4 total, plus a few interns, who are more of a
| liability than asset, so also say Richard and JM - at
| least initially :)
|
| And Gabe uses some machines for scale, including a few he
| and friends innovated / improvised, IIRC.
| vram22 wrote:
| Also see, very significantly, Elaine Ingham, soil
| (biology) scientist, Ph.D., also founder of startup
| soilfoodweb.com (to consult and get her research applied
| widely).
|
| Almost all the farmers I mentioned above, quote her work
| with respect and apply it in their operations, and
| consider it key to their results. She (along with many
| other researchers, over years, not a sudden thing) has
| come out with some rather startling results that, as I
| said, are being applied by these guys and many others. A
| key result is that it is the quantity and diversity of
| the life in the soil that is as (or more) important to
| soil health and hence farm results (now _and_ long term)
| as the actual levels of plant nutrients in the soil. And
| this is because it is the soil life (they use the term
| "biology" for it, but okay, go with the prevailing term
| the experts use) that makes the chemical nutrients
| _available_ in forms that plants can actually use, via a
| deep symbiosis and mutual helping that happens between
| plants and the soil biology, which includes bacteria,
| fungi, archaea, nematodes, arthropods and small animals.
|
| Another quite surprising / non-intuitive result is her
| saying that _most or all_ soils on earth, already have
| many times more the amounts of nutrients than plants
| need, like 1000x more, including macro (e.g. N, P, K) and
| micro ones (like trace elements), so the limiting factor
| is really the soil biology, which depends a lot on soil
| organic matter content (all those critters need to eat),
| humidity and temperature, all of which are helped by
| organic farming, permaculture and regenerative
| agriculture practices like applying organic fertilizer
| (manure, compost, etc.), mulching, and cover cropping
| (according to her, more for the organic matter than for
| the nutrients per se).
|
| Check her video below in which she talks about all these
| things.
|
| Watch "The Roots of Your Profits - Dr Elaine Ingham, Soil
| Microbiologist, Founder of Soil Foodweb Inc" on YouTube:
|
| https://youtu.be/x2H60ritjag
| dmos62 wrote:
| Thanks a lot for sharing all this. I'm a geek for
| efficient farming and this is great! You've provided
| content for months.
| vram22 wrote:
| Welcome, and glad you think so :)
| vram22 wrote:
| >Search by his name as well as for a great series titled
| Les Fermiers.
|
| I should have said that Les Fermiers is in French -
| Quebec dialect, ha ha, they pronounce oui (French for
| yes) as way instead of wee, for example, but it has
| English subtitles, so English speakers can easily
| understand it.
| kiliantics wrote:
| John Seymour has also been writing books for years on how
| to sustain a whole family on an acre of land.
| jtc331 wrote:
| See also Elliott Coleman's The New Organic Grower; he
| suggests feeding the vegetable needs of 100 people from 2
| acres with year round growing.
| vram22 wrote:
| Yes, JM Fortier (who I and another mention elsewhere in
| this post - the author of The Market Gardener), says that
| Coleman was one of his main inspirations.
| brodouevencode wrote:
| Could it be true that some experiments don't require that
| much land?
| estsauver wrote:
| Many of our farmers do sustain themselves (and often their
| families) on an acre or less in Kenya, so I would suggest
| that you contact your local agricultural extension school for
| some suggestions. :)
| bregma wrote:
| I have a considerably shorter growing season in Canada than
| those fortunate enough to live in Kenya.
| rch wrote:
| The library system is helpful as well. In Colorado (and
| elsewhere, as I understand it) some libraries have seed
| banks, classes on pollinators and nutrition, and
| potentially community gardens.
| Melting_Harps wrote:
| > The library system is helpful as well. In Colorado (and
| elsewhere, as I understand it) some libraries have seed
| banks, classes on pollinators and nutrition, and
| potentially community gardens.
|
| I'm in Boulder county, and many offer(ed) those programs
| and seed banks but access to Community Gardens has always
| been limited here. The wait lists can be pretty long and
| during the pandemic and shortages people ran to local
| farms and bought out their CSA memberships and meat pre-
| sales (happening now actually for most livestock) in
| record timing.
|
| California has it, too. UC Davis is quite involved in
| Biodynamics in the region and offers classes for
| winemaking using the practices. These fires have really
| put a strain on the local economy and programs so I'm not
| sure what it will look like after this, but I hope it
| prevails.
|
| With that said, the results of this study are not really
| that surprising to me and follow my own observations: I
| did a Biodynamic horticulture apprenticeship in Europe
| and managed a Biodynamic farm in Maui.
|
| The issue is with the subsidies that distort the prices
| and perverts the incentives to keep farmers dependent on
| such a vile system, and this is all over the Western
| world, and much of the East, in my experience. We should
| be encouraging our youth that are aware of the climate
| change they will face to get involved in restorative Ag
| and offering them low to no interest loans on land and
| equipment while systematically removing the subsidies for
| corn, soy and other non profitable crops that heavily
| rely on dangerous external inputs which only consolidates
| the Industry more in the hands of large chemical corps.
|
| If I'm honest people should see the transition to
| organic/ biodynamic Ag as one of not just viable Soil
| Biology and ethics but also of Climate Science, Carbon
| sequestration from Ag can make significant in-roads in
| reducing the atmospheric carbon. Hemp is an incredibly
| amazing crop at capturing carbon from the atmosphere and
| building top soil, it sheds most of its foliage
| throughout the season and create a high canopy to reduce
| water requirements after 7-10 weeks after germination
| depending on regions and cultivar. It is a heavy feeder
| and will require crop rotation, but as seen with the
| green-rush of CBD products, these have massive Value
| added Market potential.
|
| While I studied the significance of other plants
| throughout my apprenticeship none captured my attention
| as much as hemp and I mainly went to Europe as hemp was
| legal in the EU and many products were being made from it
| while it was still illegal in the US at the time
| (2011-2014).
|
| With that said, I really hope COVID disrupted the
| paradigm we had been operating for so long and makes
| people look at these problems with solutions that some of
| us had been involved in and advocating for nearly decades
| now.
| [deleted]
| codeulike wrote:
| Its not 72 experiments, its 72 plots. This is normal for
| agricultural research, as a control for soil variations
| within the test area. i.e. you dont compare several big
| plots, you compare lots of little ones to control for natural
| variations accross the field such as proximity to a river.
| [deleted]
| bluGill wrote:
| This is very important. Farmers with thousands of acres
| still divide it all into subfields that are around 2500
| square meters that they manage separately. They are looking
| to go smaller than that, which computers allow them to do.
|
| By manage separately the same tractor crosses over each one
| in a field, but each subsection gets a different amount of
| fertilizer, seed, and other chemical based on all the data
| they can get. Sometimes they even have more than one
| seed/chemical tank so they can apply different amounts of
| each in one pass.
|
| When you have poor and good soil in the same field (all
| fields have this to some extent) you want to put the
| minimum money into the poor areas, while it is worth
| putting more into the productive areas. (People often ask
| about building up the bad soils - this is done too, but you
| can't really change the sand/clay ratio)
| ponker wrote:
| What does labor do for crop yields? What do you actually do
| to change the crop yields?
| bregma wrote:
| Hoeing weeds. Bug picking. Fencing to keep out the
| wildlife. Watering in dry spells. Covering on frosty
| nights. Tilling, planting, soil conditioning, mulching,
| harvesting, processing for storage.
|
| Everything from fungus and nematodes to weevils, mice,
| rabbits, birds, deer, and bears all want what's in my
| garden. I have seen berry and tomato plants completely
| stripped of all leaves in less than a day by caterpillars.
| You can spend a day picking Colorado bugs off your potatoes
| and start again the next day picking off the same number.
|
| There is no end of work that can't be easily and cheaply
| replaced by a tank of chemicals and some petroleum-powered
| equipment to give better yields of better-looking food.
| ponker wrote:
| Interesting, thanks. I wonder how much of this will be
| replaceable by good robots that can use smaller amounts
| of electrical power. Bug picking seems like a good
| candidate, watering too. Fencing not so much, etc.
| peterwwillis wrote:
| I've gotten massive amounts of food out of small raised beds
| with nothing more than compost tea and "plant food". Is it
| really not possible to consistently produce good yields from
| tightly packed beds with crop rotation on a 1 acre plot
| [without pesticides/herbicides]? I know it wouldn't scale up
| with typical large-scale farming monocultures, but for a
| mixed family plot?
|
| Aside: it seems we've long been able to feed the world (in
| terms of meeting caloric and nutritional needs) based on
| American farm capacity alone, it's just that nobody wants to
| pay for it.
| bamboozled wrote:
| In Japan it seems this is how farmers work, on very small
| lots.
| bregma wrote:
| I can get massive harvests of zucchini from two plants but
| it can't sustain a family for a year. Even more than a
| couple of weeks and the only thing it would sustain would
| be a mutiny.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| "I couldn't sustain my family for a year on a 1-acre garden
| plot"
|
| That should give you between 4 tons (for wheat) and 25 tons
| (for potato) of produce. Surely that's enough?
| ChrisLomont wrote:
| Eating only wheat or only potatoes is not going to be very
| healthy. Once you have to mix vegetables, yield will suffer
| dramatically.
|
| Also, US yield for wheat is ~45 bushels per acre, wheat is
| 60 lbs per bushel, for 2700 lbs. This is 1.3 tons, not 4.
|
| And this is done with large scale, high yield processes
| that do not scale down to an acre.
|
| Where did you get 4 tons?
|
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/190356/wheat-yield-
| per-h...
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| Uk Gov. Statistics gives 9 tons per hectar, which is like
| 2.2 acres. Are we measuring different stuff? Surely yield
| in Uk can't be 3 times higher.
|
| As for diet: yield of carrots and many vagetables is
| usually higher than for wheat, but yes getting any real
| variery from that hectar would be unrealistic.
|
| http://www.farmbusiness.co.uk/business/2019-farm-output-
| esti....
| ChrisLomont wrote:
| A hectare is 2.47 acres, almost an 11% difference from
| 2.2. Also the 9 was an abnormally high year (I think the
| highest ever in the UK?). This year is down 40%, which is
| the worst since the 1980s [0].
|
| >Are we measuring different stuff?
|
| Apparently.
|
| Also, why use UK numbers to compare to a story on US
| agriculture, especially without mentioning you switched
| countries? Can I cite numbers from Congo without noting
| it?
|
| >Surely yield in Uk can't be 3 times higher.
|
| Sure it can - variation in wheat production has well over
| a 50x variation among countries. Not every country has
| the UK climate, or even the uniformity that the UK has.
| The climate and rainfall in the UK are very well suited
| to wheat production.
|
| Also, I just posted the values. And here's [1] another
| place you can look. From this place you can select
| countries to compare them. The US is ~1/3 the output. The
| UK has exceptionally high numbers, nearly the highest in
| the world.
|
| Pretty much every source I find is similar.
|
| [0] https://www.allaboutfeed.net/Raw-
| Materials/Articles/2020/8/U... [1]
| https://ourworldindata.org/crop-yields
| falcolas wrote:
| At what cost for fertilizer, water, and labor?
|
| For potatoes, about 1 ton of (commercial) fertilizer would
| be required, and a lot of water (around 2,800m3 of water),
| which is fine if you live in the mid-west with lots of
| rain, less fine in the desert portions of California.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Goodbye goalposts!
| durkie wrote:
| > My experience (over decades) is I couldn't sustain my
| family for a year on a 1-acre garden plot even if I had the
| time to work it intensively and used nothing but recycled
| organic byproduct (compost and, uh, other stuff) as
| fertilizer.
|
| I find this surprising. I help run an Atlanta-area non-profit
| that has a ~1 acre organic farm that donates everything it
| produces. For the year 2020 we have already donated 3120 lb /
| 1415 kg of food.
|
| We're not trying to produce a nutritionally complete output
| on the farm, but that's still ~70 lb / 31.7 kg of food a week
| on average.
| jcampbell1 wrote:
| My guess is your one acre of growing whatever you grow
| would feed about .6 people per year. A human consumes about
| 1M Kcals a year (accounting for meat as waste), and at best
| you can achieve 11M kcals per acre with corn or potatos.
| Beans yield about 6M and wheat 4M. My guess is you are
| growing and giving away about 600k kcals of roughage. 70lbs
| of tomatoes only has about 6000 kcal, so enough for one
| person for half a week.
| f- wrote:
| Well, potato is one of the higher-calorie crops, and one
| pound contains around 350 calories. If you produce 3,120
| lbs a year, that gives you about a million calories.
|
| Now, let's assume a family of three - an average person
| needs around 2,000 kcal a day. That's 2,000 * 365 * 3, or
| around 2,200,000 kcal a year. So, you come quite a bit
| short. And that's on a good year; you're gonna have bad
| years, too.
|
| Also a function of climate and soil. In the 19th century,
| settlers in the plains - Nebraska, Wyoming, etc - often
| couldn't make it work on 640 acres granted by the
| government. In contrast, there are eastern states where 20
| acres would be more than enough.
|
| (Farming in the West is now much more viable thanks to deep
| wells and mechanical irrigation, but that's a capital-
| intensive and resource-intensive approach that works best
| at a scale.)
| bane wrote:
| Potatoes have great yield in terms of calorie per unit
| harvested. Other plants, not so much. Think about how
| much weight you might throw away with a pumpkin or a
| watermelon.
|
| I have some family members who devoted about an acre and
| a half to a mix of crops, squashes mostly as they grow
| the best where they live, and for a family of 5 still had
| to supplement their diet pretty significantly.
|
| At the same time, they ate more healthily than they ever
| had before, and often had too much of certain crops that
| they gave away or sold at the local farmer's market.
| phkahler wrote:
| You math is wrong. Way wrong. 70lb per week is 10 pounds
| per day. I'm not sure its feasible for a person to eat
| that much. Maybe a family could. Maybe.
| James_Henry wrote:
| His math is correct. Also, it's really easy math to
| verify. It's not surprising either. With the stated
| yields, you could feed a person. You'd need more for a
| family.
|
| Of course, the yields could probably be improved in order
| to get the 140 or so lbs needed to feed a family of 3
| commiefornian wrote:
| The math is correct but the calorie count per pound
| potato is way off. It is 350 kcal not 350 cal.
| 1propionyl wrote:
| In the US, 1 Calorie = 1 kcal elsewhere.
|
| We refer to kilocalories with capital-C "Calorie". I
| don't know why.
| Groxx wrote:
| Probably because lower-c calories are meaninglessly small
| for like 99% of the population. It'd be like doing all
| your cooking in milligrams.
| bane wrote:
| When I used to work heavy manual labor I was definitely
| able to easily put down around 7-8 pounds of food per
| day. One of my coworkers was into weight lifting and
| estimated we were burning between 3,000-5,000 calories
| per day depending on the job.
|
| 10 lbs of potatoes is only 3,500 calories. Which, while
| far in excess of a "normal" sedentary lifestyle, is
| completely reasonable for people working heavy labor jobs
| if that's their primary food source.
| nkurz wrote:
| It's frequently claimed that the average Irish male just
| prior to the potato famine ate well over 10 lbs of
| potatoes per day:
|
| _On a typical day in 1844, the average adult Irishman
| ate about 13 pounds of potatoes. At five potatoes to the
| pound, that's 65 potatoes a day. The average for all men,
| women, and children was a more modest 9 pounds, or 45
| potatoes._
|
| https://slate.com/culture/2001/03/putting-all-your-
| potatoes-...
|
| While there are people who doubt these figures, eating 10
| lbs of potatoes per day is definitely more plausible than
| your comment indicates.
| ponker wrote:
| This is kind of inconceivable to me. Is it because I've
| never done enough manual labor to eat 65 potatoes in a
| day? I can't imagine even finding the time to cook and
| eat them.
| silveroriole wrote:
| And if the calorie count upthread is right, that's 4550
| calories per day purely from potato, not counting any
| added butter, milk, beans, meat etc! I know people did
| more manual labour back then, but something seems wrong
| with that figure.
| peterwoerner wrote:
| I used to eat about that much a day when I was running
| twice a day (and I was losing weight while doing so).
| Michael Phelps was known for eating 10,000 calories a
| day.
| vram22 wrote:
| They may not have had access to much of (barely) higher
| end foods. I read somewhere that the English, who had
| conquered them, took away a lot of that sell / use in
| England, including beef.
|
| Update: Found where I read it - Wikipedia:
|
| [ The Celtic grazing lands of ... Ireland had been used
| to pasture cows for centuries. The British colonised ...
| the Irish, transforming much of their countryside into an
| extended grazing land to raise cattle for a hungry
| consumer market at home ... The British taste for beef
| had a devastating impact on the impoverished and
| disenfranchised people of ... Ireland ... pushed off the
| best pasture land and forced to farm smaller plots of
| marginal land, the Irish turned to the potato, a crop
| that could be grown abundantly in less favorable soil.
| Eventually, cows took over much of Ireland, leaving the
| native population virtually dependent on the potato for
| survival.[41] ]
|
| That quote is from the section:
|
| Potato dependency
|
| in:
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)
| vkou wrote:
| Pre-industrial agricultural labour is _incredibly_
| calory-intensive. 4000-6000 calories sounds about right
| for a day of agricultural work.
| 3131s wrote:
| Probably because they weren't getting enough protein.
| It's easy to eat carbs forever if you have nothing else
| because you'll still feel intensely hungry without
| protein.
| nkurz wrote:
| Arguing against the article, 1/5 lb is a pretty small
| potato. I just weighed a baseball sized potato I dug last
| week, and it was 7.5 oz (~1/2 lb, 200 g). So if you are
| picturing an average baked potato, it's probably only 30
| potatoes per day. Which, granted, is still a lot.
|
| Cooking time doesn't strike me as a problem. Boiling 30
| potatoes does take somewhat longer than boiling 1 potato
| because the mass is greater, but it's pretty much boil
| and forget. Also, the boiling can probably be done by one
| of those women or children who are only eating 10
| potatoes a day!
| Vrondi wrote:
| I have lived almost exclusively on potatoes at several
| points in my life, and there's just no way. I've watched
| a bulky manual laborer live almost exclusively on
| potatoes as well, and still not near 10 lbs a day.
| [deleted]
| jjk166 wrote:
| A typical person eats 3 to 5 lbs of food per day, and
| that generally includes some very calorie rich meats,
| dairy, nuts and/or processed foods - not exactly the
| stuff you'll get in your backyard. You might be able to
| feed a family on an acre of beans, but not on an acre of
| generic greens.
| owenversteeg wrote:
| As pointed out downthread, you can indeed feed a family
| on one acre of land, and many people do actually do this.
|
| The problem with your math is that it assumes the 3k lb
| yield from gp comment is for potatoes. Your crop yield
| depends a lot on the crop. Aparently you can get between
| 10-30 tons of potatoes per acre (that range is from
| beginner yields to expert) which would be 7-21 million
| calories per year. Plenty of room, then, to grow a number
| of other crops to eat a balanced diet.
| noir_lord wrote:
| Potatoes (if you eat the skin) and milk would
| theoretically be a balanced diet, supplemented with
| fish/occasional meat it was pretty much the Irish diet
| pre-potato famine.
|
| Boring as hell after a while but it'd keep you alive.
| marzell wrote:
| During the famine, ireland produced way more for/potatoes
| then it required to feed it's people; they were just
| taxed to all hell.
|
| Currently the US produces about twice the calories it
| requires. There are so many calories produced in forms of
| corn that the industry has made huge efforts to find new
| ways to use those calories (hfcs, ethanol, etc) in order
| to justify corn industry practices. The one liner is that
| we need to be able to feed the people, but obesity is at
| an all time high. People need more nutrition, not more
| calories.
| bwilli123 wrote:
| Taxes were not the main contributory factor. "Ireland
| continued to export large quantities of food, primarily
| to Great Britain, during the blight. In cases such as
| livestock and butter, research suggests that exports may
| have actually increased during the Potato Famine. In 1847
| alone, records indicate that commodities such as peas,
| beans, rabbits, fish and honey continued to be exported
| from Ireland, even as the Great Hunger ravaged the
| countryside."
| https://www.history.com/topics/immigration/irish-potato-
| fami...
| marzell wrote:
| Thanks for the clarification. I was actually meaning that
| they were being "taxed" in terms of food sent to the rest
| of the UK and not in terms of money. Even with the
| article you linked, it's not clear to me if "exports"
| means they were forced/taxed into sending food, or if
| they were willingly exporting food for money in lieu of
| eating... Or something else
| bane wrote:
| You can also get pretty complete with potatoes and
| oatmeal.
| davexunit wrote:
| Food resilience can't be found in a few large farms, but many
| little ones.
| jfengel wrote:
| Right now we over-feed the world, especially ourselves in the
| West. We produce an enormous amount of low-quality food, and
| malnutrition is driven more by external interference
| (misgovernment, wars) than by agriculture. Food is, as a
| percentage of people's budgets, cheaper than it has ever
| been.
|
| That suggests that there's a middle ground, where we shift to
| more labor-intensive practices to grow some more expensive
| but better produce that's less hard on the environment,
| without dismantling the entire industrial system. People
| could introduce more fresher foods, while still growing vast
| amounts of highly-processed-maize-and-soybeans for people who
| can only afford that.
|
| There are a lot of dimensions to that. It's not easy to prove
| that eating this way is necessarily healthier or easier on
| the environment. But we do know that the Western diet is bad
| for people's health, and we do know that it's hard on the
| environment, so it's worth considering alternatives.
| searine wrote:
| >Food is, as a percentage of people's budgets, cheaper than
| it has ever been
|
| This is a good thing. Let's not screw it up, but rather
| improve on it.
|
| >where we shift to more labor-intensive practices
|
| Who is going to do the work? We already struggle filling
| these jobs. Those jobs that are filled are unsafe and low-
| paying.
| modo_mario wrote:
| Most of those razer thin margins come from stuff like
| monopsonies they might push down prices on behest of the
| consumer but obviously also will run with as much of the
| profits as they can.
| tastyfreeze wrote:
| Dont forget government subsidies for corn and soybeans
| that drive prices stupid low and trap farmers in corn and
| soybeans. Some farmers would gladly shift to more
| profitable crops but are stuck on corn and soybeans.
| bluGill wrote:
| For most farmers corn and soybeans are the most
| profitable crops. They are easy to farm in large
| quantities, and they store well. Most crops that you
| think of as more profitable are worth more, but not
| always profitable - either because so much labor is
| needed that you cannot scale as far, or because they
| spoil so fast that you can't be sure of selling your
| entire harvest before it rots (Corn can be stored for a
| few years if you need to, lettuce is not edible after a
| week). Also there is the demand problem - even if there
| is more profit in some other crop that doesn't mean there
| is enough demand to sustain adding another farmer without
| prices collapsing.
| jfengel wrote:
| There's no reason we have to make farm work unsafe or
| low-paying. It's a consequence of the state of
| agriculture a century ago, when we were constantly afraid
| of running out of food. We put into place a lot of
| systems to drive down the price of food and increase the
| quantity.
|
| So yes, we should improve it. This is one suggestion for
| how to do so. It costs more money, but we no longer have
| to make price the #1 objective, not in a world where
| people are willing to spend $4 and up on a cup of coffee
| or pay a 50-100% premium for a dubious "organic" label (a
| term that has drifted very, very far from what it meant
| when Rodale coined it).
|
| That makes more money available for farm labor, to
| improve safety and pay workers better. It would take only
| a small increase in costs to make a large increase in
| wages: they receive only a few percent of the final
| consumer cost of the product.
| searine wrote:
| >There's no reason we have to make farm work unsafe or
| low-paying.
|
| Okay. Who is paying for it?
|
| Farming is razor thin margins already. Most people aren't
| on techie salaries that can afford organic food. Raising
| the price is just a tax on the poor.
| Marinlemaignan wrote:
| But, if the price increase is to give a better wage to
| "the poors" working in the farm, because we need more
| people working there to produce the same amount
| organically. Then, they would be able to afford those
| more expensive products right ?
| rrix2 wrote:
| People who shop at neighborhood farmers' markets, as a
| start.
| tastyfreeze wrote:
| Food cost does not need to go up when the cost of farming
| goes down. Regenerative ag does take more farmers which
| means more jobs. The shift to regenerative farming is
| already happening. Gabe Brown was meeting with General
| Mills a couple years ago. Now General Mills is promoting
| pilot programs. https://www.generalmills.com/en/Responsib
| ility/Sustainabilit...
| falcolas wrote:
| > Regenerative ag does take more farmers which means more
| jobs.
|
| More workers (jobs) raises food costs, not lowers. Our
| savings with food crops is found mostly in the scale of
| production and automation.
| tastyfreeze wrote:
| Inputs are drastically reduced or eliminated. That is
| where the cost saving comes in. There is room to pay more
| people when you arent spending the majority of revenue on
| fertilizer.
| [deleted]
| sokoloff wrote:
| Farmers, particularly large ones, are pretty savvy about
| what is more or less profitable for them. If they could
| add labor and save more money on fertilizer than the
| additional labor cost, they'd probably already be doing
| it.
|
| Source: I dated a literal farmer's daughter and talked
| with him a fair bit about the economics of his farm
| (corn, soybeans, and dairy, plus associated by-products)
| and farms larger than his. He was sharp on the numbers in
| addition to being sharp on the biology.
| tastyfreeze wrote:
| From stories that Gabe Brown has shared there are many
| farmers that are afraid to take a leap to an entirely
| different way of farming from one they know well. He
| recommends farmers do a trial field so they can prove to
| themselves that it works.
|
| Watch any of Gabes talks on YouTube. They are usually to
| small crowds of farmers looking to improve their
| operation. People are learning but the easy path is to
| continue doing what you know. Gabe has said he would have
| done the same if he wasnt flat broke when he inherited
| his farm. He simply didnt have the money to buy inputs.
| His choice was find a different way or sell the farm.
| falcolas wrote:
| By how much? Your link don't say anything about how much
| fertilizer usage is reduced. Nor does it mention how much
| formerly crop fields are now being used for ranch land.
|
| The concept of self-sustaining farming and ranching is as
| old as dirt itself, with various implementations
| including crop rotation or fallow fields, but it
| typically means that the are of land dedicated to a
| staple crop (such as oats or wheat for the exemplar GM)
| drops dramatically, as would the profits.
|
| Nothing in the linked literature disagrees with this
| notion or comments on the different costs (other than the
| grants for a farm that's trying it).
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| easytiger wrote:
| I agree to some extent, except that lower cost food means
| access to higher quality lower cost food. That's a good
| thing.
|
| Growing up in the UK in the 80s most people were eating a
| post war inspired limited diet.
|
| > But we do know that the Western diet is bad for people's
| health, and we do know that it's hard on the environment,
| so it's worth considering alternatives.
|
| The western diet is all things to all men. In my circle the
| "Mediterranean" diet is largely what people aspire to on a
| daily basis with everything else enriching their food
| experience on a less frequent basis.
| [deleted]
| kickout wrote:
| Is growing maize the best use of Subsaharan Africa land if
| their productivity is ~33% of 'optimized' regions?
|
| Or is it better to sequester carbon that land? The world is not
| short of maize supply
| rmah wrote:
| It's only the best use for them if they want to continue to
| eat and live.
| drewmol wrote:
| If you are asking: Is it better to somehow repurpose the
| areas of cropland in Sub Saharan Africa that are currently
| growing maize to optimize for emission reduction?
|
| Then the answer is no, not any time soon at least. Plenty of
| other land is available.
|
| - SSA has ~ 1.25B hectares of agricultural land.[0]
|
| - The total harvested area under maize in Africa was around
| 38.7 million hectares in 2018.[1]
|
| - Less than %10 of the Guinea Savannah region (a region where
| crops much more lucrative than maize can be grown, ~600M
| hectares) was farmed as of 2009.[2]
|
| [0]https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/AG.LND.AGRI.K2?end=20
| 16...
|
| [1]https://www.mordorintelligence.com/industry-
| reports/african-...
|
| [2]https://image.slidesharecdn.com/60366271-evolution-
| economic-...
| nicoburns wrote:
| Or indeed grow other crops that might be better suited to the
| environment in that location.
| estsauver wrote:
| Maize ends up being one of the most economically efficient
| and calorically dense crops to grow. If you have very
| little money to invest in your land, it's definitely one of
| your best choices. We're trying to get farmers a bit more
| capital access to be able to move to more productive
| systems, but if you don't have an extra 50$ for fertilizer,
| you definitely are going to struggle to switch to potatoes.
| nicoburns wrote:
| Yes, but it's often less resilient to variations in
| weather than other crops that are native in the region.
| So it's great until you get a drought and then you end up
| with a famine.
| titzer wrote:
| > Subsaharan African Agriculture also plants about 83 million
| acres of maize. They see yields that are 1/3 to 1/4 of US
| agricultural yields. These yield gaps dramatically close when
| you start using fertilizer and modern agricultural practices.
|
| I'd just like to point out that these are two different
| continents with completely different conditions, soils,
| microbiota, seeds, pests, and climate. So apples and oranges.
|
| Also, you count wrong because you don't count the number of
| acres needed to produce fertilizer.
|
| > I'm certainly biased, I'm the CTO of a company that's trying
| to improve agricultural inputs by financing access to
| smallholders
|
| At this point, yeah, your financial incentives pretty much
| color your entire worldview. If you stand to make O(millions)
| and this is your primary line of work, that's a one massive
| grain of salt.
| davexunit wrote:
| Nothing is going to get better until we understand that "yield"
| isn't just the produce harvested. Synthetic fertilizer yields
| the most pounds of produce, but the yields of nutrient-dense
| food, soil microbes, insects, atmospheric carbon sequestration,
| etc. are all abysmal. Farmers farm right up against waterways
| which they then pollute with fertilizer runoff because they
| have to maximize output at all costs. We're systematically
| killing our soils because capitalism allows for nothing else.
| Igelau wrote:
| > Synthetic fertilizer yields the most pounds of produce, but
| the yields of nutrient-dense food, soil microbes, insects,
| atmospheric carbon sequestration, etc. are all abysmal.
|
| Please explain how synthetic fertilizer reduces the yield of
| nutrient dense food. I can't find anything to support this in
| my cursory searches.
| davexunit wrote:
| Along with the synthetic fertilizer comes other interests
| in our industrialized food system: Plant varieties are bred
| and grown for their shelf life, not their nutritional
| density or taste. Here in the US our food comes half way
| across the country (or all the way if it was grown in
| California and you live on the east coast) to get to a
| supermarket so it needs to stay good for a long time. And
| that's why we end up with cheap, flavorless iceberg lettuce
| that has no real nutrition in it. The greens worth eating
| are expensive.
| kickout wrote:
| That's the current incentive structure for better or worse.
| _Someone_ (maybe the USDA, maybe SV) needs to pony up money
| to compete with using that ground for cropland. In an ideal
| scenario, the ground surrounding waterways should be easily
| worth $300 /acre (which enables it to compete with row crop
| rental prices).
|
| Problem is people laugh at that concept and then complain we
| have overproduction, dwindling soil health, and poor water
| quality.
| davexunit wrote:
| I do laugh at the idea that some more capitalism is the
| solution. In an ideal scenario, the ground surrounding
| waterways would be unowned wild riparian buffers that
| prevent erosion and provide long stretches of contiguous
| habitat for animals.
| chordalkeyboard wrote:
| yeah but the people deprived of the opportunity to
| develop that land seem to prefer a system where they have
| opportunities rather than a system where entrenched
| interests use the power of the state to inhibit anyone
| from competing. In an ideal scenario agriculture would
| not have been discovered but once it was then it became
| necessary to compete or be assimilated.
| Game_Ender wrote:
| Using less labor to grow food is what makes society
| productive enough for scientific and medical research.
| Those in turn address common public health issues and
| create more labor saving technologies allowing people to
| do things that they enjoy.
| text70 wrote:
| I used endogenous soil bacteria to effect no-till soil
| gardening while increasing yield and drought resistance in
| tomatoes.
| solotronics wrote:
| https://youtu.be/a-zaAie8UZs
|
| Joel Salatin has been doing no-till, no fertilizer farming at
| scale for years and his videos are really eye opening on what
| is possible. As a layman with a small home garden I do not have
| the expertise to say if this would work for more people but it
| is interesting to read about.
| russnewcomer wrote:
| As an American software engineer who used to work at a small ag
| software company but left after it got acquired in part because
| of business model of the new company, I just want to say that
| what I've seen of Apollo is extremely promising in
| understanding how to improve the lives of smaller-scale farms,
| which I believe is key to the future of agriculture as a
| leveling power across the world. Thanks for working at, and
| please keep at helping small ag!
| sudoaza wrote:
| Where do you get that 1/3 to 1/4 of US yield? In that page they
| claim comparable yields, and particularly "In 2016, our no-till
| organic manure systems produced 200 bushels of corn per acre".
| Average US corn bushels per acre is 176.
| tgb wrote:
| "They" presumably refers to Subsaharan farmers.
| tonyarkles wrote:
| I think the poster is referring to sub-Saharan yields, not
| these test plots.
| estsauver wrote:
| I am!
| sudoaza wrote:
| Ah got it
| Angostura wrote:
| > there are quite a few farmers who would love to stop paying
| for fertilizer if it didn't impact their yields:
|
| I think you are over simplifying here. Of course simply
| stopping artificial fertiliser _will_ hit yields. The question
| is whether other methods can be introduced that will sustain
| yields with fewer detrimental environmental impacts.
| Lazare wrote:
| The linked article suggests that their system will yield
| "competitive" yields and higher profits. I interpret that as
| "yes, just stop paying for fertiliser, do something else
| that's much cheaper than fertiliser, and get the same
| yields!"
|
| Which would be amazing if true, since it basically means
| "hey, free money". But as you say, it feels a little over
| simple.
|
| I'd be curious to know what the catch is.
| kickout wrote:
| The catch is this is like LeBron James saying, 'see it is
| easy to win championships in the NBA' because he's a
| .00001% outlier.
|
| The system like the ones in the linked article are
| complicated, and the stated yields and profits likely
| represent an idealized top 1% percentile.
| ac29 wrote:
| Organic farming uses fertilizer, and this experiment is no
| different. They use manure, so unless one's farm is also a
| dairy and/or ranching operation, the farmer would still be
| buying fertilizer. It'd just be manure instead of synthetic
| fertilizer.
| tastyfreeze wrote:
| The catch is teaching people to farm this way. It requires
| many more farmers but there is money to be made. My hope is
| that some of the unemployed millions will see the dollar
| signs in the soil and start a new generation of farmers.
|
| Most people outside farm country dont even consider farming
| to be a viable career. Just look at the comments here. High
| cost of entry to compete on an industrial scale and razor
| thin margins. Who would want to even try. But a small farm
| run like the article can be very profitable.
| SuoDuanDao wrote:
| Still takes a lot of startup capital to get the first
| plot of land though...
| alex_young wrote:
| Are the plots you mention employing no or low til methods as in
| this study? If not, how is this comparison relevant to this
| research?
|
| I do appreciate you pointing out your previous work with The
| Climate Corporation, but it's probably also useful to point out
| that they are a subsidiary of Monsanto.
| Nicksil wrote:
| >[...] it's probably also useful to point out that they are a
| subsidiary of Monsanto.
|
| Why would that be useful?
| alex_young wrote:
| Monsanto's core business is selling herbicides and seeds
| genetically altered to be herbicide resistant, including
| maize. This work is directly challenged by the sustainable
| practices which are being discussed here.
| kickout wrote:
| No, they don't necessarily challenge sustainable
| practices. They just haven't figured out a way to
| monetization framework. When they do, they'll push it
| harder than Roundup. Until then, sustainability is good
| PR and sustainable practices don't have scale, so no
| threat to their core business IMO.
| carapace wrote:
| > These yield gaps dramatically close when you start using
| fertilizer and modern agricultural practices.
|
| Yes, but only if you start with degraded soil in the first
| place. Adding fertilizer to healthy soil just messes it up.
|
| Even when you start with degraded soil, the fertilizer and
| modern agricultural practices only help up to a point and then
| diminishing returns set in.
|
| Check out what Gabe Brown is doing on his land: "Treating the
| Farm as an Ecosystem with Gabe Brown Part 1, The 5 Tenets of
| Soil Health" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUmIdq0D6-A
| roboben wrote:
| I wouldn't be concerned about scale. If we convert every lawn to
| farm land, we would get three times the amount of current farm
| land on top. Say we replace it completely, we could still farm 3
| times less efficient and would have the same amount of yield.
|
| https://geog.ucsb.edu/the-lawn-is-the-largest-irrigated-crop...
| robocat wrote:
| Your numbers are out by at least an order of magnitude.
|
| "The analysis indicates that turf grasses, occupying about 2%
| of the surface of the continental U.S.,"
|
| "Agricultural land (% of land area) in United States was
| reported at 44.37 % in 2016"
| roboben wrote:
| Where are your numbers from?
| saalweachter wrote:
| The keyword there is "irrigated".
|
| 90 million acres of corn are planted each year but less
| than 10 million are irrigated.
| robocat wrote:
| The 2% is from your linked article. The other number is
| from the first credible result from googling - use google.
| zimbatm wrote:
| Isn't the issue that the arable land gets destroyed using the
| current practices[1]? Borrowing into the future and making
| farmers dependent on chemicals doesn't seem like the best
| strategy in the long term.
|
| [1]: https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-
| states/arab...
| marcinzm wrote:
| I don't see how that plot implies causality onto fertilizers.
| Population in the US has grown significantly and urbanization
| has been a trend for the last century. I'm assuming land
| converted into housing or suburbs or cities is no longer
| classified as arable.
| refurb wrote:
| I'd love someone more knowledgeable to weigh in, but destroyed
| seems like an overstatement. There is land in Canada that's
| been farmed for coming on 150 years. The last 60-80 being
| "modern" farming methods. It's still highly productive land.
|
| In terms of your link, it looks like it's not counted as
| farmland if it's abandoned (no intention to farm it in the
| future). Some of that land may no longer be able to be
| cultivated, but I'd assume that's not the only driver of the
| decrease.
| triyambakam wrote:
| 150 years and even 60-80 is a short time though considering
| plots in e.g. SE Asia being farmed for at least a thousand
| years. What would the long term for conventional farming look
| like?
| bluGill wrote:
| Most people in the US/Canada have no information on what
| was done a few hundred years ago. This is archaeological
| evidence that before Europeans came the natives were
| farmers, but disease (large numbers died) and introduction
| of horses most of the old knowledge of farming was lost
| even before the old farms were force-ably taken away.
| chordalkeyboard wrote:
| Since "conventional" farming wasn't even a thing until ~50
| years ago I'd say about 60 to 80 years sets an upper bound
| on "long term" w.r.t. "conventional" farming.
| searine wrote:
| >Isn't the issue that the arable land gets destroyed using the
| current practices
|
| The changes you are citing are miniscule. A rounding error.
|
| Older methods absolutely destroyed arable land because they had
| no robust method of replacing what the crops took besides
| manure. For example, in the US, as soil east-coast farms were
| depleted by intensive farming in the 1700s and 1800s, people
| struck out west for fresh soil. This culminated in the dust-
| bowl era, and a rethinking of farm management.
|
| With modern fertilizer and testing, farmers can replace and
| renew their soil in detail with the specific macro and
| micronutrients which are lacking. Furthermore, no-till methods
| keep the soil anchored in place while more advanced methods of
| manure and residue use allow for building up organic matter.
|
| There isn't any more land. Farmers are no longer migrant. It is
| in their bests interests to protect the vitality of their soil,
| and they are doing that.
| modo_mario wrote:
| I do wonder tho. Are they retaining enough of the phosphates
| they use with those actions. It still seems like one of those
| issues that's ignored too much because sources drying up
| prices going up is still one of those distant future things
| but i don't know enough bout what's being done.
| bluGill wrote:
| Phosphates are a chemical, easy to add if needed - for a
| price. Many soils have far more than needed, so the farmer
| won't add more. 30 years ago farmers never measured sulfur
| content of their soils - acid rain replenished it - now the
| coal has cleaned up their emissions farmers buy sulfur.
| Farming is still a learning game. When John Deere bought a
| tractor company they wrote a letter (in 1918) to their
| dealers stating more or less that tractors are an
| interesting fad, but the company is well aware that the
| horse drawn plow will forever be the backbone of the
| American farm.
|
| Note that I said for a price. Farmers who buy that stuff
| and let it run off lose money in the long run and go
| bankrupt.
| docPangloss wrote:
| There's a variation of Rodale's approach that is used in gardens.
| I just shared it on HN:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24826386
|
| about Ruth Stout and her no-till garden & farming approach.
|
| Admittedly, during her initial year of the garden, she tilled the
| plot. Subsequent years she used mulch cover (and perhaps some
| strategic cover crops).
| jl2718 wrote:
| They say crop rotation is their primary defense against pests. My
| mother's farm had excellent results with no rotation by mixing in
| a small amount of tobacco. I'd also be interested to see someone
| test an omega-balanced cattle feed permaculture using corn and
| flax, maybe seed hemp too.
| stevehawk wrote:
| mixing into soil/fertilizer or mixing into seed planting?
| jl2718 wrote:
| Planting. Compost mixing is a good idea though.
| mabbo wrote:
| In the same area of thoughts, I am reminded of a farmer my
| parents knew many years ago. He raised cattle. And he got tired
| and decided to be lazy.
|
| You see, keeping cattle takes a lot of work. Constant vet bills
| for inoculations, treatments when they get sick. Corn-feeding, to
| maximize their size, means buying a lot of corn. Constant
| attention and work. And my parents' friend, well, he was tired of
| it.
|
| So he put his cattle out into a field. And he did nothing. If one
| got sick, it went to the dog food place. They ate grass that grew
| in the field. They didn't get as big and he didn't make as much
| money, but he also got to take things a bit slower, easier.
|
| Then, organic beef became a big deal. He did not give a shit
| about 'organic' or whatever these strange hippies were talking
| about. But he was more than happy if they wanted to pay him extra
| for his laziness.
|
| (Note: I am paraphrasing a second-hand story and while I grew up
| rural, I didn't raise cattle- mistakes are being made here,
| forgive me.)
| shavingspiders wrote:
| Grass based livestock farming, or grass based with corn
| finishing, is pretty common in high rainfall areas of the world
| like Ireland & New Zealand. Considerably lower intensity than
| feedlots (better for the environment too), easier to handle,
| and generally a higher quality output so long as you're around
| area that can process that output & send it to the right
| market.
| nickff wrote:
| Lower intensity is a double-edged sword; you're easier on the
| land, but you occupy a lot more of it.
|
| Over the past century, increases in agricultural productivity
| (due to high-intensity farming) in North America and Europe
| have allowed for the 're-wilding' of an area almost as large
| as France.
| hinkley wrote:
| Joel Salatin is somewhere in the middle. He field grazes his
| animals but fairly aggressively moves them around. With his
| management practices he's getting about 2-3 times the yield per
| acre of land as the average for his area. The practices and
| equipment necessary to do that are a better investment for him
| than buying more land.
|
| I don't know how he's competing on size, but the claim is that
| grazing down to the ground is less efficient for cattle, and
| you should move them long before they get to the bottom of the
| grass stalks.
| rch wrote:
| My sense is that it's like programming in that laziness can
| manifest in the form of automation, limits on tech debt, and
| other investments in efficiency.
|
| For example, a more intensive version of the lazy farmer's
| method would be to set timed gates around the property to
| induce herd movement for optimal grazing.
|
| At a talk on regenerative farming, one speaker estimated he was
| making about $150 an hour based on how little time it took to
| set and maintain a well designed gate system. This was on
| leased land.
| srehnborg wrote:
| Farmers Footprint is also worth checking out. They have a similar
| mission. - https://farmersfootprint.us/
|
| They have shown conventional soil will return to normal after 1
| growing season, which is pretty wild.
|
| They even reimburse farmers that make the switch, but don't see
| the same yields.
| kickout wrote:
| 1 year back to 'normal'? Unlikely. Soil that has been under
| intense management will almost _always_ need more than 1 year
| to 'return to normal' which is hard to define.
| srehnborg wrote:
| There is a great documentary on regenerative farming.
| https://farmersfootprint.us/watch/ - 6 minutes in. Worth
| watching the full 20 minutes.
| JackPoach wrote:
| I am highly skeptical of these claims. Corn is not new. Nor is
| wheat. Or rye or whatever. We have records of yields pre-green
| revolution, pre-GMO, pre-mechanization, pre-fertilizers, etc. And
| they aren't that great. Yes, modern agriculture is not
| sustainable and we should incorporate as many organic techniques
| as we can. But we also should be ready to take lower yields. And
| that's fine. We don't need that much corn. It doesn't go to human
| consumption, hardly any. It goes toward animal feed and high-
| fructose syrup production. We can survive with less Coke and less
| factory farmed poultry. But we should stop romantisizing our past
| and treat organic agriculture as something new or magical.
| jnmandal wrote:
| You are externalizing the factor of soil health. When we start
| a field with fertile, normal soil, and add extra inputs, yields
| absolutely go up in the near term. But after decades of that,
| then your yield is back to where it was when you didn't have
| inputs, and now your soil has become dirt. Yet the problem is
| you are required to pay for inputs just to keep that land at
| par with the year before. And if you want to wean off the
| inputs and switch back to the original method, yields will go
| down for a few years until the soil is regenerated. After which
| point you will still only be back to normal.
|
| The increased yields from input-heavy factory farming can
| essentially be seen as a loan of yield from the future. If you
| are overleveraged, and your capital (in this case the nutrients
| in the soil) is finite then when capital is depleted (leeching
| into the environment in this case) getting back to square one
| will require investment or continued increase in leverage.
| mcjiggerlog wrote:
| Lower yields = more land use to meet demand = more
| deforestation and loss of wilderness and biodiversity.
| Maximising yields is definitely something we want to do if we
| are interested in saving this planet.
| shmageggy wrote:
| AFAIK the debate is still out on what the best long term
| solution will be regarding intensity versus land-use. The
| organic approach allows biodiversity on the farm itself, as
| opposed to a monocrop which becomes a desert for any other
| species. For example, this article about almond farming where
| the organic farm has lower yields but doesn't kill off the
| bees that are used to pollinate it. https://www.theguardian.c
| om/environment/2020/jan/07/honeybee...
| mikey_p wrote:
| Don't forget to factor ethanol production in as well. In many
| places it is providing huge incentives for massive corn yields
| and production.
| [deleted]
| JackPoach wrote:
| I am 99% sure that corn ethanol is US and Brazil story.
| Anyway with oil prices this low, it makes no sense. The whole
| idea was insane from the beginning as corn ethanol has
| negative EROI (more energy is spent on producing a single
| unit of corn ethanol than you can produce by burning it.).
| pm90 wrote:
| It makes more sense if you think about it as an artificial
| market for the excess corn produced by US farmers. You have
| to do something with it, might as well make HFCS and
| ethanol.
| falcolas wrote:
| Thankfully, there are other things that can be done
| (specifically, making food) with that same corn - it just
| requires a bit more processing (mechanical or chemical)
| to free the endosperm from the hull.
| dehrmann wrote:
| > Organic Manure
|
| I doubt that this scales. There just isn't enough manure (organic
| or not) to build soil.
| chromatin wrote:
| Wow! Thanks for posting this link.
|
| My mother gave me some years ago a late 80s/early 90s copy of the
| "Rodale book of composting," which was excellent and I recommend.
| I have been applying the principles in my own home garden but was
| unaware of the larger context.
| exfalso wrote:
| Last time I looked into organic produce it seemed quite clear
| that it's a net negative for the environment. This is mostly due
| to land usage (up to 2x than conventional. Yeah let's cut down
| more rainforests so that the West can eat healthier sounding
| food...). The articles I read also mentioned eutrophication of
| water bodies caused by organic farming. This is because the
| nutrient content of organic manure has high variance, so farmers
| always over-fertilize, producing excess nutrients that seep into
| groundwater.
|
| This is one article I read a while back:
| https://ourworldindata.org/is-organic-agriculture-better-for...
|
| Can someone point to more good literature on this topic?
| robocat wrote:
| Cow manure: where do they get it from?
|
| I suspect that the input of cow manure is not sustainable, or
| not scalable, or not economic. That part of the article is a
| bit whiffy-washy to me.
| kickout wrote:
| There is plenty of cow poop, so the scale isn't a problem.
| Having that cow poop stay where you put it (in the soil)
| rather than running off in the nearest creek/river or seep
| into the groundwater--that's the hard part.
|
| Using cow poop is actually very smart. We (society) want meat
| so it is good to ensure efficient use of everything in that
| supply chain, using cow poop as a fertilizer is a great way
| to do that.
| ip26 wrote:
| The rain forest is not being cut down to grow organic heirloom
| tomatoes. From what I know, it's being razed to grow palm oil,
| bananas, and cheap corn/soy to feed cattle.
|
| In that vein, see your own link:
|
| _The organic-conventional debate often detracts from other
| aspects of dietary choices which have greater impact. If
| looking to reduce the environmental impact of your diet, what
| you eat can be much more influential than how it is produced.
| The relative difference in land use and greenhouse gas impacts
| between organic and conventional systems is typically less than
| a multiple of two. Compare this to the relative differences in
| impacts between food types where, as shown in the charts below,
| the difference in land use and greenhouse gas emissions per
| unit protein between high-impact meats and low-impact crop
| types can be more than 100-fold. If your primary concern is
| whether the potato accompanying your steak is conventionally or
| organically produced, then your focus is arguably misplaced
| from the decisions which could have the greatest impact._
| exfalso wrote:
| Very true, dietary choices have much larger impact (I'm
| currently eating broccoli as I'm typing this because of that
| very reason). However the claim that organic produce is
| better for the environment seems false nonetheless. Happy to
| read literature that proves otherwise.
| ip26 wrote:
| I don't have literature one way or the other, it's a very
| hard question that depends a lot on your criteria... But I
| don't think organic will ever take over completely, I
| mainly hope that it demonstrates to producers that
| consumers value attributes other than $/lb, trials a
| different way of doing things, and leads to industrial ag
| adopting the best parts.
|
| While we are talking hopes & dreams, I also have my fingers
| crossed that a growing higher-end market for fruits &
| vegetables could push back on some of the consolidation &
| commodification happening in US farmland, which has not
| been good for small farmers.
| swalsh wrote:
| Sorry if I missed something while reading this. Does this system
| reduce the dependency on added Nitrogen (given the luming
| Nitrogen crisis coming in the future if current rates persist)?
| Ensorceled wrote:
| Search for nitrogen in the original article, it definitely
| reduces the need for added nitrogen. Adding lots of cheap
| nitrogen is something we've become addicted to ... farmers used
| to rotate crops etc.
|
| There is another article on this site about how corn will
| uptake far more nitrogen than it needs, so cheap, abundant
| nitrogen isn't really as necessary as we believe.
| refurb wrote:
| Nitrogen crisis? First I've heard of this. Have an links to
| educate myself?
| Retric wrote:
| We are extracting Nitrogen from the atmosphere, that isn't
| going to run out. Ammonia is made from Nitrogen and Hydrogen,
| it's the Hydrogen that's extracted from natural gas. However,
| splitting it from water is again effectively unlimited and not
| that expensive.
|
| Phosphorus is plentiful, current methods give us a 300+ year
| supply and other options exist. Potassium is a little more
| questionable we are likely to need to mine the ocean floors
| fairly soon which would spike prices, but it could ultimately
| be a closed loop where we are collecting the runoff.
| TheNorthman wrote:
| The problem isn't us running out of nitrogen, the problem is
| the impact that nitrogen deposition has on terrestrial and
| aquatic ecosystems.
| Retric wrote:
| I agree that's a problem, however unlike most environmental
| issues runoff is an inefficiency not a byproduct. Farmers
| that more efficiently use fertilizer directly have less
| runoff. So, generally the economic incentives are in close
| alignment.
|
| The US for example has seen a significant reduction in
| runoff without that much pushback from farmers. That said,
| there is a point where with wasted fertilizer costs less
| than the methods of avoiding runoff, which changes the
| dynamics.
| himinlomax wrote:
| You can have nitrogen runoff problems whether you use
| artificial fertilizer or manure, the only difference is
| that people who use manure typically (though not always)
| are more careful about it.
| flyingfences wrote:
| > The system's sole source of fertility is leguminous cover
| crops
| marketingPro wrote:
| I didn't know such a problem may be coming.
|
| Would everyone composting solve this?
|
| If anyone was unaware, urine is high in nitrogen and when added
| to compost is like "adding gas to fire, but slower". I never
| had an issue with Nitrogen in my compost.
|
| I can see nitrogen going to waste if food ends up in a
| landfill, but I imagine our sewage systems recycle this for
| profit.
|
| Is this manageable with habit changes?
| kickout wrote:
| No, the scale of agriculture is too big for residential
| solutions to move the needle. Need economic incentives for
| these eco-friendly practices.
| marketingPro wrote:
| I did a crappy Google search and I found 50% of food is
| eaten by humans.
|
| I think you are incorrect here. 50% of nitrogen goes to
| waste if no one composts.
| 0000011111 wrote:
| Yes. In short this is environmentally friendly and does not scale
| globally.
| kleton wrote:
| No-till is the norm now for conventional grain in the US. The
| distinction is that instead of using herbicide to kill the cover
| crop, they are using mechanical methods that require specific
| timing.
| Aerroon wrote:
| How much (additional) human labor does this require? Farm work
| tends to be difficult and on the dangerous side.
| kickout wrote:
| Modern farming is hyper efficient and basically 90% automated.
|
| That said, the remaining 10% market is probably a 100B-1T
| market opportunity (seriously). Not many startups either.
| sudoaza wrote:
| It's all machined, no manual labor. Instead of sparying you
| would roll the pasture with already existing farming machinery.
| They use the same no till sower as other no-till methods.
| mikey_p wrote:
| There's still a fair bit of labor, but most of that now takes
| the form of repair and maintenance work on machines.
| carapace wrote:
| This is just the start: applied ecology makes money and saves the
| planet. Grow "food forests", practice _regenerative_ agriculture,
| make money. It 's fun and feels great. You can start right where
| you are.
|
| Reposting a comment I made a few weeks ago:
|
| A brain dump:
|
| I've been investigating a few systems of agriculture.
|
| - There's Small Plot INtensive (SPIN) which is specialized for
| market production, emphasizing minimizing labor and maximizing
| market crops.
|
| https://spinfarming.com/ (Be aware that these folks are selling
| their system as a course, and this is a sales site not an info
| site. You can get the details from reading carefully and watching
| the videos that practitioners have made.)
|
| https://www.transitionculture.org/2011/09/05/spin-farming-ba...
|
| Quitting Your Job To Farm on a Quarter Acre In Your Backyard?
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJx1SPClg6A
|
| Backyard Farming: 2 Year Market Garden Update of Nature's Always
| Right Farms https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zpn1oGkQrrg
|
| Profitable Farming and Designing for Farm Success by JEAN-MARTIN
| FORTIER https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92GDHGPSmeI
| https://www.themarketgardener.com/
|
| Neversink Farm in NY grosses $350,000 on farming 1.5 acres (area
| in production). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5IE6lYKXRw
|
| - Then there's the "Grow Bioinstensive" method which is designed
| to provide a complete diet in a small space while also building
| soil and fertility. They have been dialing it in for forty years
| and now have a turn-key system that is implemented and
| functioning all over the world.
|
| http://growbiointensive.org/ (These folks are also selling their
| system, but they also have e.g. manuals you can download for
| free. I find their site curiously hard to use.)
|
| - Permaculture (which could be called "applied ecology" with a
| kind of hippie spin. I'm not a hippie but I'm sometimes mistaken
| for one.) and a similar school (parallel evolution) called
| "Syntropic" Agriculture.
|
| Both of these systems aim to mimic natural ecosystems to create
| "food forests" that produce crops year-round without inputs (no
| fertilizer, no irrigation.) The process takes 5-15 years or so
| but then is self-sustaining and regenerative.
|
| For Permaculture I find Toby Hemenway's (RIP) videos very good:
|
| https://tobyhemenway.com/videos/how-permaculture-can-save-hu...
|
| https://tobyhemenway.com/videos/redesigning-civilization-wit...
|
| There's a very lively and civil forum at
| https://permies.com/forums
|
| For Syntropic agriculture: https://agendagotsch.com/en/what-is-
| syntropic-farming/
|
| (FWIW, I find Gotsch's writing (in English) to be impenetrable,
| even though I pretty much know what he's doing. Anyway, his
| results are incontrovertable.)
|
| I'm afraid I don't have a good link in re: Food Forests and eco-
| mimetic agriculture yet. This "Plant Abundance" fellow's youtube
| channel might be a good place to start, in any event it's a great
| example:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEFpzAuyFlLzshQR4_dkCsQ
|
| - If you really wanted to maximize food production and aren't
| afraid of building insfrastucture (like greenhouses and fish
| tanks) there's the (sadly now defunct) Growing Power model:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growing_Power
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vs7BG4lH3m4
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jV9CCxdkOng
|
| They used an integrated greenhouse/aquaculture/compost system to
| produce massive amounts of food right through Milwaukee winters.
|
| - Then there is the whole field (no pun intended) of regenerative
| agriculture, e.g.:
|
| "Treating the Farm as an Ecosystem with Gabe Brown Part 1, The 5
| Tenets of Soil Health"
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUmIdq0D6-A and "Symphony Of The
| Soil" Official Trailer -
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXRNF_1X2fU
|
| This is very much non-hippie, very much grounded in (often
| cutting-edge) science (ecology, microbiology, etc.) and
| ecologically and _economically_ superior to artificial methods
| (e.g. Brown makes money. It 's actually weird that more people
| aren't adopting these methods faster. You make more money, have
| fewer expenses, and your topsoil builds up year-on-year rather
| than washing away in erosion.)
| poma88 wrote:
| This is a great comment. Many over-voted comments here smell
| like PR from big food. Thanks
| doodlebugging wrote:
| Thanks for the multiple links. We are currently using a method
| that I don't see in your list - hugelkultur.[0]
|
| I currently have two spaces that I have established to try to
| take advantage of this low water use method. One is a keyhole
| garden [1] where I currently have a bunch of strawberry plants
| growing. This is the first time in 20 years of living here that
| I have strawberry plants that are still alive after summer heat
| is done. Something is working right.
|
| The other space is one I just completed constructing last week.
| It is an orchard space using hugelkultur concepts of mounded
| compostable debris. I don't yet have any idea how that will
| work but hopes are as high as the summer temperatures in Texas.
|
| I had a lot of logs, branches, limbs, and twigs from various
| weather events and several piles of composted wood chips and
| composted yard waste that I used to build the mounds. I had to
| buy some topsoil since that is in short supply on my place and
| I bought some composted manure too. I rented a skid steer to
| manage the construction so that part was easy. Doing what I did
| with a wheelbarrow would've been a huge job or one requiring
| multiple weak minds with strong backs or maybe promises of lots
| of free beer and smoked brisket.
|
| I have a variety of fruit trees planted (avocado, plum,
| pomegranate, apple, moro orange, lemon, fig) and will be
| covering the mounds with various deer-resistant plants. Some of
| the plants will be garden plants - onion, garlic, etc. Others
| are herbs for home use - mullein, saffron crocus, yarrow,
| hollyhocks, hyssop, and others.
|
| I chose this method since it seems well adapted to the
| challenges of growing in rocky soil in an environment where
| temperatures can get high for extended periods of time, like
| North Texas. I live on a rock outcrop and nothing grows unless
| it is in raised beds or heavily irrigated. I get all my potable
| water from my water well so I'm not inclined to waste it and
| very much prefer to plant things that are adapted to the area.
| I have killed off many non-native plants and invasive weeds
| since I moved here and allowed native grasses and flowers to
| take over. This saves a huge amount of maintenance since I
| don't water anything water the first year. It either lives with
| what the sky gods provide or it becomes a dry twig. I've had my
| share of dry twigs.
|
| My greenhouse and garden area use rainwater harvested from the
| greenhouse roof and collected in a tank. The pump we use to
| fill water buckets is powered by a solar panel with a battery
| backup. The greenhouse itself is my kids' enclosed sandbox
| building (I built that a long time ago) modified to a
| greenhouse since the kids have grown up.
|
| I have followed the Rodale's work since back in the early 90's
| and have used that over the years to guide my gardening plans
| and have found information gained to be very useful for those
| like myself who want to have small gardens for their family
| use. I'm glad to see they have carried out their long-term
| tests successfully though I don't know how much uptake they'll
| get among larger farmers. I do know that the method of
| maintaining soil fertility is a solid way to guarantee success.
|
| [0] https://richsoil.com/hugelkultur/ - General introduction to
| Hugelkultur and the construction of the mounds
|
| [1] https://gardeningmentor.com/keyhole-garden/ - Good
| introduction to Keyhole gardens and their construction
| zimbatm wrote:
| One of the difficulty for smaller farmers is the transition
| period where the field produces a lower yield. They don't have
| the monetary buffer available for that. I hope that Governments
| with a minimum of foresight will fund those efforts.
| VBprogrammer wrote:
| My impression of this is that the successful farmers are ones
| who cross from producing corn and soy to producing a variety of
| products which can be directly marketed at consumers (farmers
| markets, farm shop, veg box deliveries, pick your own etc) at
| prices which are far in excess of normal market prices. While
| this segment of the market is lucrative it's obviously limited
| in scale; most people want their normally weekly food at
| industrial scale prices.
| kickout wrote:
| The most successful farmers have the best scale (10,000+
| acres) of just corn/soy/wheat/cotton (depending on
| geography).
|
| The 'niche' guys may make good money, but their complexity is
| probably 1x-5x (maybe more) a 'stereotypical' row crop
| farmers farmers. That has to factor in somewhere.
| VBprogrammer wrote:
| Yes, that's clearly true, for clarity what I actually meant
| was "Most successful [at niche no till agriculture]..."
| mikey_p wrote:
| This is huge, to be successful today you really need to be
| in the several thousand acres ranges, where only a few
| generations ago farmers made a living on 100-200 acres. If
| you can't afford the capital to expand via real estate
| niche farming is a more viable option for many folks. It's
| also often more risk than conventional grains, but with
| typical tradeoffs with higher reward.
| randomdata wrote:
| _> only a few generations ago farmers made a living on
| 100-200 acres._
|
| You still quite easily can if you own the land outright,
| even in the grain business. The problem is that you need
| multi-millions to buy 100-200 acres, which nobody wanting
| to start farming has, save situations of inheritance.
| That means, for most, the vast majority of the potential
| profit turns into servicing debt or paying rent to the
| actual landowner. When you are only receiving a small
| portion of the pie that the land is actually generating,
| that's when you need thousands of acres to accumulate
| enough.
|
| To put it another way: The going rate for rent for
| farmland around here is around $300/acre. $300 * 200
| acres = $60,000. If you own the land and don't have to
| pay rent, that alone is a decent living; more than most
| people make. And that is ignoring the profit that someone
| renting would expect to make off the land.
| pradn wrote:
| I'm curious: how much revenue can an acre generate where
| you are?
| bluGill wrote:
| You can be successful on 10 acres - serving those high
| labor niche markets. Or you can be successful on 3000
| acres. It is hard to be in the middle.
| sudoaza wrote:
| I cannot find the raw data or details about it, but they must
| have it. The only reason I see any transition loss in
| productivity would be in building soil fertility/biomass vs
| synthetic fertilizers which are more readily absorbed. I would
| guess it's possible to adopt the vegetable cover part of it
| while keeping the traditional fertilizers without suffering the
| transition.
| bluGill wrote:
| Cover crops have been growing fast in conventional farming.
| It is less energy (read CO2!) to spray roundup to kill them
| before planting than to run a heavy roller (also soil
| compaction).
| kickout wrote:
| This is correct. Its not an education problem (most farmers
| agree with these no-till sustainable practices), its an
| incentive problem.
|
| No sane farmer who derives their living from farming is going
| to take such a huge risk when annualized corn-soy production is
| heavily subsidized by the government (rightly or wrongly) on
| the _possibility_ of these practices _maybe_ paying off
| (someday).
|
| https://thinkingagriculture.io/incentivizing-regenerative-ag...
|
| edit: There is a carefully crafted statement on the OP link
| saying increased yields _in dry years_. Outside of 2020 and
| 2012, the Midwest has been anything but dry. Can 't expect
| people to adapt unprofitable practices
| wil421 wrote:
| If there are already subsidies why can't there be subsidies
| specifically for adopting organic methods. You could also
| make the subsidies pay more during the first few years of the
| transition period.
|
| Milk is very subsidized as well. You could pair local dairies
| with local farmers participating in similar programs.
| bluGill wrote:
| Each farm is different - in fact within a field there is
| enough variation that the best management is not the same
| across the whole. Thus you cannot subsidies any one
| practice.
|
| What the subsidies do is subsidize insurance. Buy insurance
| and if you have a crop failure you get paid as if you had
| the average yield over the past 10 years. However your
| average goes down as well for the next failure so better
| not have too many bad years in a row.
|
| Organic despite the name is not the best thing for the
| environment. Some of it is, that quickly is normal farming.
| What is left is not using safe chemicals, instead using
| much more harmful - but natural - ones, or tillage to
| control weeds. (Note that this article is pushing no-till
| which is conventional farming today)
| chordalkeyboard wrote:
| The incentive structure for the people involved in asking
| for and deciding upon the subsidy structure is heavily
| weighted in favor of getting the subsidies at least cost to
| the business. Effectively, large ag producers are faced
| with a choice between "getting subsidies for labor-
| intensive sustainable practices" and "getting subsidies for
| machine-intensive practices".
| kickout wrote:
| That's the million dollar question. There are reasons to
| subsidize overproduction of food and plant-based biofuels
| (ethanol) -- food riots are bad. So the current system
| makes sense even if I don't agree with it 100%. I
| anticipate we will see governments study/adapt these
| subsidy markets for more eco-friendly practices (for the
| purpose of carbon sequestration and/or ground water
| protection).
| [deleted]
| motohagiography wrote:
| Isn't the viability of herbicides just a function of regional
| labour costs? I ask because I know some permaculture farmers who
| do these super dense crops with symbiotic plants, and it only
| works because they're out there working it.
| fouc wrote:
| Permaculture farming is fairly low effort actually. Most of the
| work is in shaping the earth. Generally seeds are sown semi-
| randomly and whatever pops up is what pops up. There's very
| little direct management of plants.
|
| Also getting in grazing animals does a great job of prepping
| land for new growth.
| zwieback wrote:
| How well would this scale in areas where most of our intensive
| agriculture is now, e.g. Kansas, Nebraska? We have a ton of
| farming like this guy is doing around where I live but we have
| lots of rain and pretty good soil to beging with.
| clarkmoody wrote:
| This talk introduced me to the no-till, soil health farming
| paradigm: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yPjoh9YJMk
|
| TL;DR: focus on soil health and diversify your crops. His results
| are stunning.
| kickout wrote:
| I think the Rodale people are well intentioned but off in their
| approach. Need to focus less on the technological aspect or more
| on the economic and scaling aspect.
|
| The reason people don't do this isn't because they aren't aware
| of such practices, they don't do it because you have to thread a
| needle as far as precise management is concerned to simply turn a
| profit. Not that much room for margin in today's agriculture
| landscape
| sudoaza wrote:
| Found [this] 2 year study in which one year apparently the
| cover crop was not enough to stop the weeds totally, there may
| be some fine tuning needed in the beginning, like which cover
| crop to sow. [this]
| http://umanitoba.ca/faculties/afs/agronomists_conf/media/Car...
| kickout wrote:
| Cover crops are a good tool, but there will never be a silver
| bullet solution for weeds (even autonomous weeding robots).
| Mother nature is crafty. That said, the 'chemical' era we are
| currently in is over, even if no one wants to admit it
|
| https://thinkingagriculture.io/innovation-efficiency-
| chemica...
| hinkley wrote:
| I've been researching a lot of plants and weeds lately, and
| quite frequently I am being reminded that there are many
| plants that are toxic to cows and horses, and so part of
| your job is to make sure your pastures are free of these
| plants.
|
| One of the appeals then of broad spectrum herbicides that
| you scorch the earth and plant what you want in the space.
| And despite some very loud protestations of horse owners,
| people who try to garden with horse manure have to contend
| with herbicides.
|
| Mechanical pest/weed management is still a very powerful
| tool. And maybe some day we can have robots do that for us,
| but we don't have to wait that long to get much of the
| benefit.
|
| In order to kill a weed, you first have to see the weed.
| Rather than putting all of this onto a drone, there's
| plenty of utility to be gained by having a system that
| looks for these plants and geotags them. Then a centralized
| identification system (possible, the farmer's eyeballs) can
| filter down the false positives and they can send someone
| out to dispatch the weeds by hand, and/or adjust their
| graze rotation patterns to reduce exposure.
|
| And something organic gardeners learn intimately is that
| every weed has intervals where they are most expensive to
| deal with. Seedlings may be too labor intensive. Blooming
| weeds are priority 1. But depending on soil profile, some
| weeds are easier to kill once their stalks and roots have
| become more robust - strong enough that you can grab the
| stalk and pull.
|
| So on any given day you may be aware of a hundred weeds,
| but only twenty of them are on the priority queue.
| sudoaza wrote:
| Could be possible that some weed adapts to grow through the
| bush or something, what i like specially about this is
| using legumes as both cover and fertilizer, which is
| something permaculture uses a lot too. Also it's
| reminiscent of how corn was traditionally grown, with beans
| as nitrogen fixing and squash as ground cover. But on the
| long run, my bet is on diversity instead of monocrops.
| bluGill wrote:
| Those old "3-sisters" ways of growing corn were done -
| but it greatly reduces the yields of all 3 crops because
| they compete with and harm each other.
| hinkley wrote:
| The goal is to increase the combined yield without a
| proportional increase in labor.
|
| Mark Shepard likes to brag about how he gets less half a
| harvest of six+ different species in the same field. He's
| still getting 2-3x as much food out of the space. Most
| importantly, I believe (and he agrees), when you monocrop
| you go for broke. If something goes wrong, you have very
| little to sell at the end of the year. If it's a bumper
| crop year, prices will be depressed if it's a good year
| for everybody. In either scenario, the dealer (bank)
| always wins.
|
| With six crops, the standard deviation between good years
| and bad years is reduced, which makes farming less of a
| trip to Vegas. That he gets more out of the same land
| brings up his average expected income. It's more work,
| yes, but he points out that many farmers have to take a
| side job to make ends meet, and he theoretically doesn't
| (he speaks and consults), so he can invest that time into
| increasing his farm's productivity.
| bluGill wrote:
| You don't have to mono crop or go "3-sisters" midevil
| farmers in Europe generally had many small fields -
| Barely on the highland, wheat in the best land...
| (3-sisters is American Crops and so not an option before
| Columbus). They achieved the same risk reducing diversity
| without having crops that directly harm each other next
| to each other.
| spiderfarmer wrote:
| This is where environmentalists always say that the consumer
| should pay more in the supermarkets, ignoring the fact that the
| supermarkets make the highest margins in the entire chain
| between seed and consumer. And they have no incentive to pay
| farmers more, because farmers don't have a lot of places where
| they can sell their products.
|
| Solve this problem and you can really change the system.
| adrianN wrote:
| Simple: Make better practices required by law, so that all
| farmers have to do it. Add some tariffs so that foreign
| farmers can't compete by ignoring these practices.
| kickout wrote:
| Great--let's outlaw ICE cars first, and regulate airlines
| too. We can't let those industries skirt by.
|
| Food Production is a greater societal need than travel most
| people would agree.
| crowbahr wrote:
| Right.
|
| Food production is a greater societal need and a lot of
| corn goes into making ethanol for cars to burn instead of
| food.
|
| We don't have to outlaw ICE cars to make it more
| expensive to drive them, we just have to make corn
| ethanol more expensive for gas companies to cut their
| fuel with, and food corn cheaper for humans.
|
| Also: We need to grow less corn overall. We make way, way
| more of it than we need and not enough of other better
| veg.
| kickout wrote:
| Corn is a poor ethanol crop. Period. It should not ever
| be used for its ethanol purpose. There are better crops
| suited for that purpose but the infrastructure in the US
| is set up for.....corn. Humans don't eat corn (or they
| eat a trivial percentage). 75% of the corn grown goes to
| feed animals (usually cattle) or cars (via ethanol).
|
| Yea we need to grow less corn. But we can't outlaw it.
| You just removed the livelihood for the Midwest. The
| current economic incentive structure is to grow corn
| (there literally is no downside). A solution that changes
| that has to include benefits for farmers, landowners,
| consumers, and society. It's not going to be easy (or
| cheap).
|
| https://thinkingagriculture.io/incentivizing-
| regenerative-ag...
| adrianN wrote:
| Why not both? Humanity can in fact more than one problem
| at the same time.
| kickout wrote:
| No. F that. Consumers aren't paying externalities for
| transportation costs (think airlines and cars). Why should
| agriculture be the bad guy? Start with transportation and
| then come after ag.
|
| Don't single out ag please
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| In my region most cash crop agriculture is being done on land
| that isn't even owned by the farmer. Most of my neighbours are
| leasing at least portions of their land out to a farmer, who
| then in turn subcontracts most work and just manages things.
|
| In that model there is almost no incentive structure for soil
| maintenance, environmental stewardship, diversification, etc.
|
| Most landowners here aren't even leasing it for the revenue,
| which is pretty peanuts for cash cropping on smaller plots, but
| for the indirect benefit of being able to claim farm tax rate
| instead of regular residential tax rates.
|
| For many years my vineyard, garden, etc. suffered from
| herbicide drift from next door -- but there was not a single
| contact I could go to to talk about this, everyone just points
| the finger, or you can't find the party involved.
| Responsibility too distributed, etc.
| bluGill wrote:
| This is why sharecropping is a common rent arrangement - you
| get a portion of whatever profit comes from your land. It is
| legally complex to set these up in a fair way, but when you
| do everyone has incentive to ensure the long term health of
| the farm. It then becomes easy to tell the landlord he should
| invest in X - because the yields will go up over the long
| term. Likewise landlords have incentive to follow the latest
| research and push the tenant to adopt what makes sense.
| (sometimes this means you agree to watch an experiment done
| elsewhere- if it isn't a good idea for your area someone else
| takes the loss)
| kickout wrote:
| There is truth in this statement. Land owners want the
| highest ROI for their investment (land). Farmers, who have a
| huge safety net from subsidies, have no problem propping up
| rent prices to grow corn/soy (and mine the soil).
|
| There needs to be economic incentives for farmers AND
| landowners to adapt these practices. It WILL cost money. See
| a link to my blog I posted in a different post. I talk about
| this in semi-depth.
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