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Farmer Bob Cannard of Napa has been saying this for 25 something years now. All that I knew about growing, I know from him and his students. Even though I never

Farmer Bob Cannard of Napa has been saying this for 25 something years now. All that I knew about growing, I know from him and his students. Even though I never had the opportunity to learn from him, I absorbed second and third hand. Farmers have enormous knowledge of earth and plants and trees. I wish they’d be given the recognition they deserve as domain experts. We are just wasting time.

rglover 6y ago
What do you think are some ways to boost their voices and/or credibility? Seems like a no brainer to listen to these folks.
- bluntfang 6y ago
  i think a good first step would be to remove farming subsidies so that they don't make decisions based on the fact that growing corn and soy is profitable because of the subsidies.
- jelliclesfarm 6y ago
  Partnerships and collaborations. Have tech companies sponsor farms by letting them use tech. Many farmers are land rich, cash poor, labour costs eat up profit margins. Many will die. And with these farms, the knowledge. They will sell the land and retire on the proceeds as rich farmland is paved over. What they need is accessible, affordable tech. And where their inherited generational and practical knowledge can be tested and validated and adopted by tech. It needs to be with trustworthy partners who don’t see farmers as future consumers but as collaborators and partners. Current Agtech is geared towards commodity crops and industrial Ag. All farming knowledge that is soil and environment oriented comes from small family farms. Their goal is to keep the soil fertile. The purpose of a farming corporation is to make profits. Not soil health or environment. By asking big Ag concerns to take care of soil, we are burdening them with a job they don’t want..but that requirement towards soil and environment should be part of the tech they use. So the domain experts of soil..the ones who actually have dirty hands by working in the soil should be the ones who help create the tech. Right now, wrong allocation of responsibility to skill is what’s not working. Farming is intuitive. A farmer tries to maintain the soil and make it better. Industrial Ag razes* down soil with each harvest and supplements With inputs and brute mechanical force, they bring soil back to a threshold that is bare minimum for cultivation. That’s why a farmer says that only sun, water and soil is needed to grow food. Industrial Ag needs inputs, machinery and data. As a small acreage soil focused farmer, I say that we need soil, water, sun...and tech. Tech that would replace manual repetitive labour ..labour costs that is killing our profits can be boosted by small acreage automation/mechanization. *i like to illustrate this with a personal example. When I wanted to redo my garden, I wanted to move a couple of structures, add a fountain, plant a few trees, remove some vegetation and put down a walking path with pavers. When I called a landscape architect, he said that we will have to remove everything, create a blank slate and implement the landscape design. That is the difference between farmers and industrial Ag.
  - kitotik 6y ago
    Do you see any other areas in addition to mechanization that tech can be valuable? In other words, are there problems that software alone can help solve or is it simply down to replacing some of the manual labor with robotics and smarter machines?
    - jelliclesfarm 6y ago
      I think we need a systems approach in Ag ..in both small or industrial farming..too. So we can achieve systems level results. Software can be helpful but it’s enhancements contribute very little to the profit margins. Take for example this cost analysis of orient eggplant for 2005(I picked this eggplant because it’s not a commodity crop grown by industrial Ag and is niche. In other words, it’s not like lettuce or strawberries or corn or soy) http://sfp.ucdavis.edu/crops/coststudieshtml/BpEggplantOrientalSJV2005/ http://sfp.ucdavis.edu/crops/coststudieshtml/BpEggplantOrien... Check the percent of labour costs and capital/equip costs wrt operating costs. Software will help as part of the bigger systems approach, but at the end of the day, the urgent problem we need to tackle is labour costs and labour availability.
      - kitotik 6y ago
        Thank you. The systems approach does seem to be the only way to meaningful impact. “Simply” automating the existing systems doesn’t seem the right approach either.
      - abakker 6y ago
        Systems example: farmers are paid per pound for tomatoes. They therefore want to water heavily before harvest so the tomatoes get as heavy as possible. Then they ship the heaviest possible tomatoes to a factory to be dehydrated into ketchup, sauce, and other canned goods. The energy loss comes in 3 different parts - water waste, extra fuel in shipping, and in energy to dehydrate. Everyone pays more. The system solution would be to price the tomato solids, not the water.
        6y ago
- dylan604 6y ago
  Removing corporate farm entities from having such a loud voice would be a good first step to me.
Someone 6y ago
What exactly has he been saying? That rock weathering captures CO2 has been known for at least 30 years (https://www.nature.com/articles/345486b0 https://www.nature.com/articles/345486b0, from 1990, introduced the idea to crush rock to speed up the process) This paper estimates how much carbon could be captured globally and at what price point. It would not surprise me if farmers have been saying the first for decades, but it would surprise me if they already did those calculations decades ago.
- jsilence 6y ago
  How much CO2 is produced by the energy required for crushing the rock?
  - StavrosK 6y ago
    This is a red herring. Consuming energy doesn't produce CO2, generating the energy does. The answer to "how much CO2 is produced by the energy required to <do action>" is always "as much as your power generation method". Crush the rocks using solar power, and it's zero.
    - jelliclesfarm 6y ago
      This made me think of early civilizations that always sprouted on river valleys. Indus Valley, Nile valley, Danube, Yangtze ..when nomads became pastoralists and then agriculturalists, they must have relied upon water that came down from glaciers or flowed across other lands. River bed silt always has the best soil minerals for growing. The river bed is full of minerals that it had carried with it..perhaps flowing over different rocks, it brings some with it? Contrast that today..where we have a 45 billion dollar Ag industry in California ..legit Desert.
    - jsilence 6y ago
      Still crushing the rock is an activity you'd not do without the goal to bind co2. If the CO2 equivalent of the energy required for this is higher than the amount of CO2 that can be offset by the rock dust, it becomes a CO2 producing activity in total. If your energy generation process is CO2 friendly you might simply offset other energy use with this energy and generate a better CO2 balance by this, skipping all the rock crushing.
pstuart 6y ago
Biochar had a lot of attention several years back. It still seems like it would be worth pursuing because it sequesters carbon and helps to build up healthy soil.
gorgoiler 6y ago
Here is a fascinating submission from a few months ago, along those lines: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22853398 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22853398 The Botanist (2018) Directors Maude Plante-Husaruk and Maxime Lacoste-Lebuis met expert botanist Raïmberdi while travelling in Central Asia. His reflections on the nomadic life, and on practices that are rooted in an ancient rural lifestyle, offer a fascinating personal record of the region's history, and the extreme hardships its population experienced after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

rglover 6y ago

What do you think are some ways to boost their voices and/or credibility? Seems like a no brainer to listen to these folks.

bluntfang 6y ago
i think a good first step would be to remove farming subsidies so that they don't make decisions based on the fact that growing corn and soy is profitable because of the subsidies.
jelliclesfarm 6y ago
Partnerships and collaborations. Have tech companies sponsor farms by letting them use tech. Many farmers are land rich, cash poor, labour costs eat up profit margins. Many will die. And with these farms, the knowledge. They will sell the land and retire on the proceeds as rich farmland is paved over. What they need is accessible, affordable tech. And where their inherited generational and practical knowledge can be tested and validated and adopted by tech. It needs to be with trustworthy partners who don’t see farmers as future consumers but as collaborators and partners. Current Agtech is geared towards commodity crops and industrial Ag. All farming knowledge that is soil and environment oriented comes from small family farms. Their goal is to keep the soil fertile. The purpose of a farming corporation is to make profits. Not soil health or environment. By asking big Ag concerns to take care of soil, we are burdening them with a job they don’t want..but that requirement towards soil and environment should be part of the tech they use. So the domain experts of soil..the ones who actually have dirty hands by working in the soil should be the ones who help create the tech. Right now, wrong allocation of responsibility to skill is what’s not working. Farming is intuitive. A farmer tries to maintain the soil and make it better. Industrial Ag razes* down soil with each harvest and supplements With inputs and brute mechanical force, they bring soil back to a threshold that is bare minimum for cultivation. That’s why a farmer says that only sun, water and soil is needed to grow food. Industrial Ag needs inputs, machinery and data. As a small acreage soil focused farmer, I say that we need soil, water, sun...and tech. Tech that would replace manual repetitive labour ..labour costs that is killing our profits can be boosted by small acreage automation/mechanization. *i like to illustrate this with a personal example. When I wanted to redo my garden, I wanted to move a couple of structures, add a fountain, plant a few trees, remove some vegetation and put down a walking path with pavers. When I called a landscape architect, he said that we will have to remove everything, create a blank slate and implement the landscape design. That is the difference between farmers and industrial Ag.
- kitotik 6y ago
  Do you see any other areas in addition to mechanization that tech can be valuable? In other words, are there problems that software alone can help solve or is it simply down to replacing some of the manual labor with robotics and smarter machines?
  - jelliclesfarm 6y ago
    I think we need a systems approach in Ag ..in both small or industrial farming..too. So we can achieve systems level results. Software can be helpful but it’s enhancements contribute very little to the profit margins. Take for example this cost analysis of orient eggplant for 2005(I picked this eggplant because it’s not a commodity crop grown by industrial Ag and is niche. In other words, it’s not like lettuce or strawberries or corn or soy) http://sfp.ucdavis.edu/crops/coststudieshtml/BpEggplantOrientalSJV2005/ http://sfp.ucdavis.edu/crops/coststudieshtml/BpEggplantOrien... Check the percent of labour costs and capital/equip costs wrt operating costs. Software will help as part of the bigger systems approach, but at the end of the day, the urgent problem we need to tackle is labour costs and labour availability.
    - kitotik 6y ago
      Thank you. The systems approach does seem to be the only way to meaningful impact. “Simply” automating the existing systems doesn’t seem the right approach either.
    - abakker 6y ago
      Systems example: farmers are paid per pound for tomatoes. They therefore want to water heavily before harvest so the tomatoes get as heavy as possible. Then they ship the heaviest possible tomatoes to a factory to be dehydrated into ketchup, sauce, and other canned goods. The energy loss comes in 3 different parts - water waste, extra fuel in shipping, and in energy to dehydrate. Everyone pays more. The system solution would be to price the tomato solids, not the water.
      - 6y ago
dylan604 6y ago
Removing corporate farm entities from having such a loud voice would be a good first step to me.

Someone 6y ago

What exactly has he been saying? That rock weathering captures CO2 has been known for at least 30 years (https://www.nature.com/articles/345486b0 https://www.nature.com/articles/345486b0, from 1990, introduced the idea to crush rock to speed up the process) This paper estimates how much carbon could be captured globally and at what price point. It would not surprise me if farmers have been saying the first for decades, but it would surprise me if they already did those calculations decades ago.

jsilence 6y ago
How much CO2 is produced by the energy required for crushing the rock?
- StavrosK 6y ago
  This is a red herring. Consuming energy doesn't produce CO2, generating the energy does. The answer to "how much CO2 is produced by the energy required to <do action>" is always "as much as your power generation method". Crush the rocks using solar power, and it's zero.
  - jelliclesfarm 6y ago
    This made me think of early civilizations that always sprouted on river valleys. Indus Valley, Nile valley, Danube, Yangtze ..when nomads became pastoralists and then agriculturalists, they must have relied upon water that came down from glaciers or flowed across other lands. River bed silt always has the best soil minerals for growing. The river bed is full of minerals that it had carried with it..perhaps flowing over different rocks, it brings some with it? Contrast that today..where we have a 45 billion dollar Ag industry in California ..legit Desert.
  - jsilence 6y ago
    Still crushing the rock is an activity you'd not do without the goal to bind co2. If the CO2 equivalent of the energy required for this is higher than the amount of CO2 that can be offset by the rock dust, it becomes a CO2 producing activity in total. If your energy generation process is CO2 friendly you might simply offset other energy use with this energy and generate a better CO2 balance by this, skipping all the rock crushing.

pstuart 6y ago

Biochar had a lot of attention several years back. It still seems like it would be worth pursuing because it sequesters carbon and helps to build up healthy soil.

gorgoiler 6y ago

Here is a fascinating submission from a few months ago, along those lines: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22853398 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22853398 The Botanist (2018) Directors Maude Plante-Husaruk and Maxime Lacoste-Lebuis met expert botanist Raïmberdi while travelling in Central Asia. His reflections on the nomadic life, and on practices that are rooted in an ancient rural lifestyle, offer a fascinating personal record of the region's history, and the extreme hardships its population experienced after the collapse of the Soviet Union.