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Investors say agroforestry is climate friendly and also profitable

278 points by shrthnd 6y ago

shrthnd 6y ago
"If farmers increased silvopasture acreage from approximately 550 million hectares today to about 770 million hectares by 2050 (1.36 billion acres to 1.9 billion acres), Drawdown estimated carbon dioxide emissions could be reduced over those 30 years by up to 42 gigatons — more than enough to offset all of the carbon dioxide emitted by humans globally in 2015, according to NOAA — and could return $206 billion to $273 billion on investment."
- the8472 6y ago
  That means 30 years of work + maintaining the results indefinitely afterwards to offset 1 year worth of emissions?
  - nothal 6y ago
    With a return of billions though? Most profit requires effort.
    - xwdv 6y ago
      Billions have less value the farther into the future they are, unless you can take out a loan with it.
- zdragnar 6y ago
  Note that silvopasture is a combination of livestock grazing pasture and trees. The opposite method it would replace is the factory farm where animals are much more concentrated (with all the moral issues involved). The problem, I think, is one of volume- I don't see the factory farms shutting down in favor of techniques that require broader skill sets (tree harvesting, land management) beyond what they are already hiring for and investing technology in, especially since per-square-area production of meat is substantially smaller. I would love to see factory farms convert to silvopasture, especially if that means lower prices for things like nuts, but the broader skill set and management challenges make me think they will continue to be niche competitors to, not replacements of, our current supply.
  - riffraff 6y ago
    > if that means lower prices for things like nuts, aren't nuts in the US stupid cheap as it is? American almonds are everywhere in Europe, and cost less than locally grown ones. (And they taste of nothing, I am not sure if it's because they get harvested earlier, because of preservation or because of the cultivar)
    - zdragnar 6y ago
      As for almonds, probably a combination of cultivar and picking time. Some nuts are still very expensive, though, and pound for pound beef can be cheaper than many.
jbeales 6y ago
So they rediscovered orchards?
- Shared404 6y ago
  It looks to me less like rediscovering orchards, and more mixing them in with livestock/other crops in a beneficial manner.
  - jbeales 6y ago
    Mixing with livestock isn't really new either. So long as the animal doesn't kill the trees orchards are pretty great places for animals. I think I've seen orchards that are also hay operations too. I guess if we get into something more mixed then that they haven't really rediscovered orchards, they've rediscovered permaculture!
    - jessaustin 6y ago
      I think I've seen orchards that are also hay operations too. I've mowed, raked, and baled a fair amount of hay over the years. This involves driving tractors and trucks around in fields pulling easily damaged implements in precise circles. Doing so in the presence of lots of mature trees seems a daunting task...
- cavanasm 6y ago
  It's more complicated than that. They blend traditional food crops with trees, shrubs, etc, often alongside some kind of transition cycle where they'll change what is growing where over time. Sort of a blend of sustainable logging with farming.
- dhruvkar 6y ago
  ernst gotsch is the name to lookup. Growing food under a forest canopy with plenty of pruning, which creates healthy soil and less/no need for fertilizers. It's an effort to mimic a forest ecosystem and let things grow in their natural way (livestock is another aspect).
ngngngng 6y ago
> It turns out, people NEED food. Really, it's remarkable. And they'll actually pay dollars for food that you've grown, so that they can then eat it, because otherwise they'll die.
- hef19898 6y ago
  Crazy, them people, right?
- einpoklum 6y ago
  Surprisingly, that's not quite true. That is, people do need food, but humanity over-produces food massively already [1]. And in many countries, you'll collapse economically if you try to live by selling food - and it's government subsidies which keep farming afloat. [1] - Of course there's also massive hunger due to the failure of our species to more reasonably distribute the food it produces, biases in which kinds of food get produced where and when etc.
nothal 6y ago
It's really wild to me that investors realizing foresting exists and continues to exist because it makes money is a story. I did forestry related club stuff in high school for a program called Envirothon and there's a rich history of silviculture in the US and Europe going back a long ways. IIRC, we actually have more forest in the US today than 100 years ago because of silviculture. Notably, the Vanderbilt's started modern silviculture in the US and introduced all sorts of interesting measurements only relevant to foresters to the US like a chain (66 ft imperial) or Diameter Breast Height (the circumference of a tree at 4.5 ft, because that was right around the breast of your average heighted forester).
- hef19898 6y ago
  Fun fact, one of the first detailed concepts of sustainability comes from forestry in Germany by Hans Carl von Carlowitz in 1713. https://www.forstwirtschaft-in-deutschland.de/index.php?id=53&L=1 https://www.forstwirtschaft-in-deutschland.de/index.php?id=5...
  - riffraff 6y ago
    Japan also started protecting forests and managing them sustainably a long time ago[0], in the Edo period (1603-1868). [0] https://www.nippon.com/en/features/c03912/ https://www.nippon.com/en/features/c03912/
freeqaz 6y ago
I think that "mixed" farming like this article describes has a huge potential for automation by the software field. Monocrops[0] (homogeneous fields of crops like corn or soybeans) are easy to build automated robots for. We've been doing that for generations now, starting with combine harvesters[1]. But there are many problems with growing monocrops[2]. Pests are a problem -- they breed and spread disease. And on the soil nutrient side, you have to keep re-fertilizing (and often over-fertilize[3]) every year to keep it going. And still nutrients continue to decline in the food that Americans are eating[4]. If, as a field (of software engineers), we can figure out a way to build robots that allow growing and harvesting plants in heterogeneous environments, that will be a significant step forward to fixing these problems. I'm optimistic that it will be possible in the next decade to build it and make it profitable. :) If you don't have to use fertilizer and pests don't eat your crops because you haven't created the ideal breeding ground for pests + disease, then this problem should be solved by market forces alone. At least, I hope so! 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monocropping https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monocropping 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combine_harvester https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combine_harvester 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monocropping#Monocropping_difficulty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monocropping#Monocropping_diff... 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertilizer#Environmental_effects https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertilizer#Environmental_effec... 4: https://journals.ashs.org/hortsci/view/journals/hortsci/44/1/article-p15.xml https://journals.ashs.org/hortsci/view/journals/hortsci/44/1...
- banads 6y ago
  Nature abhors monoculture
- jrumbut 6y ago
  I think this is a problem seen in many fields, that they are designed around our ability to model them.
  - reginaldo 6y ago
    That, and the fact that we don't really revisit the modeling approaches when the constraints that led to them no longer apply. For instance, incremental evolution based on a branch where work was done "by hand" into animals, simpler machines and then very complex machines might lead to a very different result than evolution from a branch where the ability to design some types of complex machines is there "from the start". Note that this is different than saying "let's completely ignore the past".
ForrestN 6y ago
I got quite deep into the article, but couldn't get through the morass of PR to understand the basic idea of their agroforestry initiative. At one point, they actually write that a lightbulb went off... but what is the new idea? Is there anyone familiar with this field who tell a clear story of what their idea is, and how planting trees in existing farms will work in practice to accomplish all the results they predict? I'm sure it's an interesting story.
- cagenut 6y ago
  I just so happened to watch this youtube this week that answers that (at a high level): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEZvF68sytc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEZvF68sytc Part of the reason its so difficult to summarize is because its about taking a systems approach to the farming/biology and therefore it is infinitely varied in practice.
- freeqaz 6y ago
  I think there are a few benefits that they're (poorly) trying to articulate in the article, so I'll fill in with my own (biased) thoughts. :) - Growing trees in rows alongside feed crops (like hay) is more profitable for farmers because they gain additional income from fruit trees + lumber sales. - More trees that get to grow pulls CO2 from the atmosphere and is good for the environment. - There is a symbiotic relationship with the soil and trees that is beneficial for the health of other plants. This also helps with soil blowing away due to wind barriers + roots holding it down. Less erosion. - Pests can't travel as easily between "segmented" fields of crops because they are obstructed by trees. This helps mitigate risk for farmers. - Higher income per acre when you intermix trees in the fields where livestock graze. You can go harvest the fruit trees while the grass grows for the cows to graze on. The problem is that these changes require time to make. Trees don't sprout up overnight and that's a problem for farmers, but there is a big environmental incentive for it. Maybe the government should step in to incubate these kinds of projects? They may be the only institution with the long-term economic incentive to do so.
  - mikeg8 6y ago
    This is a great answer, thank you for articulating. My only disagreement would be in regards to government being the only institution with the economic incentive to do invest here, long-term. From my understanding of the federal governments involvement in agriculture subsidies, the government seems to be much more in support of the entrenched, large-scale industrial farming systems. I hope for a future where our department of agriculture comes around to support these holistic farming practices.
hodgesrm 6y ago
It's really surprising to me that we tend to focus on sustainability rather than simple economic benefits when pitching initiatives to combat climate change. Case in point: The US had a great opportunity to sell alternative energy sources as way to get off Middle East oil after 9/11. Instead we continued to consume oil like there's no tomorrow while squandering trillions on fruitless wars.
- evilsetg 6y ago
  The valuing of (short-term) economic benefit over sustainability is precisely what is fueling climate change.
  - fillskills 6y ago
    I would go a little further and say that short term economic benefits of existing entrenched players is causing harm. Its taking too long to get those people out and replaced with fresh minds who can look at the same systems and find new ways to make money while having a sustainable earth
- schnevets 6y ago
  Reminds me of this classic political cartoon: https://i.cbc.ca/1.5192931.1562703009!/fileImage/httpImage/joel-pett-cartoon.jpg https://i.cbc.ca/1.5192931.1562703009!/fileImage/httpImage/j... The problem with any revamp is that powerful incumbents wield the most power. They are capable of controlling the rate of change. In the early 2000s, Exxon and other oil companies were the most powerful, influential businesses on the planet, and they weren't about to let their politicians endorse a shift to renewables.
- zanny 6y ago
  The trillions weren't squandered for the thousands of defense contractors and suppliers that made fortunes off said wars. Its why they lobbied for them in the first place. Now a lot of warmongers profiteering off occupational imperialism are rolling in wealth courtesy of the US taxpayer.
- mrich 6y ago
jessaustin 6y ago
This seems like a scam to me. The reason VCs don't fund "normal" crops like wheat etc. is that commodities don't generate the high profits that make "unicorns" possible. There have been fewer people employed in agriculture in USA every year for the last 150 years. The only long-term successful firms are selling "picks and shovels", and even they have to resort to evil to generate reliable profits (Monsanto, etc.) All of the crops under discussion in TFA are also commodities. Where is the profit going to arise? These venture funds will not return investors' money.
- Vysero 6y ago
  It seems fishy to me as well knowing that most farmers operate at a loss each year. Whatever profit a system like this might generate would have to be enough to offset those losses whilst still providing enough to keep the farmers happy along with the investors?? Seems pretty damn unlikely that this "agroforestry" is capable of doing that.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- greatgib 6y ago
  I think that something the article tries to not to be explicit is that the reel business model is: Lots of company greenwash and pretend to "compensate" their CO2 emissions by paying farms like that to plant trees. And that is very profitable as costs to plant a tree compared is a lot lower than the income received from a companies in compensation. And now, vulture funds realized that they can make a lot of money on the back of the carbon reduction market!
jeffbee 6y ago
The feds would have to stop distorting the markets in the West before any of this could happen economically, right? People didn't just forget how to grow orchards and pastures. They got run out of business by the California water projects and the BLM. As long as the BLM keeps leasing out grazing land for $1/acre and as long as Reclamation allows Stewart Resnick to grow 100k acres of nuts on otherwise worthless land, how can sustainable growers compete?
- harikb 6y ago
  Just so people aren't confused, BLM == Bureau of Land Management
  - konschubert 6y ago
    Thanks, I was confused.
  - skrebbel 6y ago
    Hahaha I had this weird picture in my head of an angry mob of protestors leasing out grazing land for $1/acre.
- rshnotsecure 6y ago
  One thing people don't realize about the BLM and the Department of the Interior in general is that they maintain the world's largest airforce. This Airforce exists mainly as a mountain rescue and forest firefighting unit(s). Also, because we're now in the 2020s, they are the worlds largest purchaser of drones, even beyond the military. A lot of fascinating, cutting edge stuff is going on at BLM and DoI.
  - jeffbee 6y ago
    It doesn't bother me one bit that the BLM manages land. It's a major public benefit that we have so much information about our natural resources. I think the USDA soil survey, for example, a one of the great wonders of the information age. The thing that bothers me is how they lease out public lands essentially for free to stockmen who proceed to destroy the landscape.
abalone 6y ago
> If farmers increased silvopasture acreage from approximately 550 million hectares today to about 770 million hectares by 2050... carbon dioxide emissions could be reduced over those 30 years by up to 42 gigatons — more than enough to offset all of the carbon dioxide emitted by humans globally in 2015 This is both exciting and depressing. A massive effort and it still only offsets 1/30th of global emissions. Fixing climate is not going to be based in “profitability”, at least in any near term sense. It is about dramatically reducing our CO2-based economic activity to preserve the planet for future generations. Capitalism is not geared for that kind of calculation.
gdubs 6y ago
The book that got me into this was Mark Shepard's 'Restoration Agriculture". [1] His "New Forest Farm" in WI has been making use of these ideas for some time now. [2] Shepard got his inspiration from Permaculture [3] and the books, "Tree Crops", [4] and "The One Straw Revolution". [5] 1: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16441733-restoration-agriculture https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16441733-restoration-agr... 2: https://newforestfarm.us https://newforestfarm.us 3: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/381988.Permaculture https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/381988.Permaculture 4: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/714112.Tree_Crops https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/714112.Tree_Crops 5: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/976905.The_One_Straw_Revolution https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/976905.The_One_Straw_Rev...
- mahaganapati 6y ago
  One Straw Revolution changed my life. It inspired me to learn permaculture first hand. It's such an enjoyable book to read
  - mkmk2 6y ago
    Seconded, also a great read if you're just casually interested
- LunaSea 6y ago
  Fukuoka's own apprentices declared that his methods flat out didn't work. Lots of permaculture practices are pure dogma and don't have a scientific justification. All the permaculture farms I could find were profitable thanks to free outside input or through selling training sessions.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
Vysero 6y ago
If you were one of these people... please see yourself out.
mikeg8 6y ago
If you are interested in this subject, I highly recommend checking out Joel Salatin and Polyface Farm. They are doing amazing work. http://www.polyfacefarms.com/ http://www.polyfacefarms.com/ https://vimeo.com/125404937 https://vimeo.com/125404937
- minerjoe 6y ago
  And Mark Shepherd at New Forest Farm. http://newforestfarm.us http://newforestfarm.us His book "Restoration Agriculture" details his system, which can be likened to agroforestry.
poorna12 6y ago
An initiative worth looking at : The Complete What, Why & How of Agroforestry https://isha.sadhguru.org/us/en/blog/article/complete-what-why-how-agroforestry https://isha.sadhguru.org/us/en/blog/article/complete-what-w...
reginaldo 6y ago
Ever since watching the video on syntropic agriculture which I bumped into by reading a comment here in HN [1], I've been doing some research on the matter. The practice seems promising. It seems to work at both small and large scales, so it enables small farms, which are very hard to defend as a business in the US. It also has a component of improving the value of land, by making marginal (sandy) terrain into productive agricultural land. The other interesting fact is that the productivity per acre for the individual cultivars when planted together is higher than if they were the only thing being planted. I can see those things combining to drastically increase products. The part of the video that was the most interesting was the farmer saying "this works. If I don't sell, I don't live, and I do sell" (not an exact quote). Intriguing indeed. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23631196 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23631196 / https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSPNRu4ZPvE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSPNRu4ZPvE
0xdeadbeefbabe 6y ago
> and investor financing to help add trees and tree crops to agricultural models. Wow, sounds profitable I suppose.
ruffrey 6y ago
There's a startup working on this called Propagate Ventures. IIRC they have an agroforestry project planning tool for farmers.
hosh 6y ago
The article doesn't mention permaculture. Permaculture has been used commercial settings (and its design principles includes agroforestry). Permies have been talking about resilient and regenerative systems for a long while now, going beyond sustainability. Permaculture design looks at the whole system. So not just trees, but also things to plant with the trees. With planting along contours and adding swales to catch rainfall, and direct it to flow through everything. Incorporating animals into the system, such as grazers (cows, sheep, goats), and micrograzers (chickens, ducks, geese). Probably the biggest thing not discussed in the article is how permaculture design can lead to decentralized food systems. A decentralized food system is not something that VCs can invest capital in and expect multiple returns on, but I think in the long run, that is where we as a civilization need to move towards.
- minerjoe 6y ago
  Not just food. Let's "localize" all of our needs. Every single one of them. Note that is "needs", not wants. There will always be room for trade in things that you cannot produce locally such as coffee, but for almost every other thing, there are local solutions. Open Source Ecology [1] attempts to go the high-tech route and they may get somewhere, but they are only one of many approaches to localizing. With the internet we can have many groups working on localizing their own needs and sharing their successes and failures with the world. Add some gamification and wholla we have people competing to actully figure out how to live on this planet while leaving the place better afterwards. Note that a completely local system would probably not have much need at all for state backed currency except for trade. [1] http://www.opensourceecology.org http://www.opensourceecology.org
  - hosh 6y ago
    Exactly! OSE has a permaculture page on their wiki, though hardly anyone added anything in there. This kind of stuff is not well-organized. I thought, for example, building a graphdb-based lookup system for planning companion planting. Another is some kind of decentralized barter system. Without being beholden to generating huge returns, I think this would be really useful. But like pioneer plants and “weeds”, I see a lot of permies using whatever adhoc means they have to trade information and barter for services. (But it is why I became very interested in Free Software, mesh networking, and raspberry pis. The supply chain that supports the internet is still fragile, and is currently coopted by Big Tech).
einpoklum 6y ago
This is a weird piece in that it seems to completely ignore the massive subsidies [1] the agriculture sector of most (?) industrialized economies relies on. Then when you read: > [Someone] estimates that agroforestry systems can create eight times more profit than conventional agriculture. you have to ask yourself: "Profit after subsidies? But who said you'll get the same subsidies? If you can actually turn a profit, they might not subsidize you at that point?" ---- [1] - For more information on these subsidies (which I'm not opposed to, it's complicated): * In the EU it's apparently 59 Billion EUR/year , according to this: https://farmsubsidy.org/ https://farmsubsidy.org/ * Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultural_subsidy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultural_subsidy
- reillyse 6y ago
  I like the European farm subsidies, I think they are a great example of how to share wealth among a lot of citizens and maintain high quality food. Btw, 59 Billion seems like a large number but compared to the actual GDP of the EU thats a very very small number. Also in the US for example farm subsidies are pretty high and generally funnel to rich people, there is both farm related subsidies that go direct to farmers and insurance companies (among others) and then the farm bill which is another huge subsidy.
  - einpoklum 6y ago
    I actually didn't say I oppose them. However, note that better-off Europeans and US citizens are subsidized, then their products flood the markets elsewhere and farmers all over the world - who also don't have access to appropriate technology - can't compete against it. So the farmers in poorer countries get screwed. Not such a great example of wealth sharing...
    - reillyse 6y ago
      Did you edit your original comment? I recall there being more emphasis and an exclamation point or two :)
dzink 6y ago
Why many buzzwords? In simpler language: trees surrounding farm land keep strong winds from blowing nutrients away and have other benefits. For that and other benefits Before 1989, a lot of farm land in Bulgaria was surrounded by tree belts as they also provided shade for farm workers. In the US much bigger efficiency has been achieved by farming large fields with giant automated machinery. Effect on nutrients is unclear. However what this company is suggesting is to pair farmers of different types and plant productive trees between flat crop lands to enable multiple types of production happening at the same time. An underlying premise is a carbon offset system may pay for such investment. The part that’s missing is how much harvesting efficiency will be lost when you lose the ability to use big machines to harvest single crops. That said, there may be lands suitable for mixed farming that were underused before. Hopefully those farmers don’t get into too much debt trying to pursue potential carbon credits.
carapace 6y ago
Better late than never. The guy who invented/coined "Syntropic" agriculture grows the world's best cocoa beans at 3x the yield of similar-quality conventional farms with no inputs. He also gets a lot of other crops from the same land. Life is four-billion-year-old nanotech and it works really well. Get with it money dudes. (Conventional agriculture is, in retrospect, almost the dumbest thing you can do with land.)
landon32 6y ago
One cool company working on this in the UK: https://projectwren.com/projects/regenerative-agroforestry https://projectwren.com/projects/regenerative-agroforestry
dharma1 6y ago
Anyone here have some woodland and use it for growing food crops (mix of fruit trees, nut trees, root vegetables, berries and mushrooms?) This is something I've been thinking about trying for a while. Or maybe converting pasture land to more mixed purpose? I realise it's not something you can scale or automate easily, but I'm not really looking for that. Just a few hectares for personal use. I understand it will take many years for the trees to grow
- vram22 6y ago
  Check out permaculture, food forests and Geoff Lawton videos (he covers both, and food forests are a subset of permaculture). He is a permaculture boss who learned from Bill Mollison, father of permaculture. Check (his) Zaytuna Farm video tour parts 1 and 2. Australia is big on permaculture but many other countries' people are doing it too. Huw Richards (Wales, UK), Maddy and Tim Harland (UK), Krishna McKenzie (Auroville, Tamil Nadu, India), Pete Kanaris (Florida, USA), Richard Perkins (Sweden) are just a few. All those named have YouTube videos.
jelliclesfarm 6y ago
I would like to create/see robots that seed and plant Miyawaki style dense mini forests in urban areas. I don’t live in the right zone, but I tell my friends in the lower hemispheres that when they have a child, they must plant at least 1/2 acre of forest. Or a fruit orchard or a hardwood grove. Why? Because at its worst, it’s Ag but is green and income producing. And at its best it’s green, Carbon sequestering long term..medium benefits for a hardwood grove with ebony or teak or rosewood that are super slow growing and will grow with the child..leaving them a legacy and an inheritance. If anyone wants to collaborate for such a project, please reach out(my handle at gmail). I am still researching for the northern hemisphere.
poma88 6y ago
True story, land use when sustainable delivers long term benefits of all kinds, also to investors
vram22 6y ago
Gabe Brown has been doing regenerative agriculture for over two decades on Brown's Ranch, over 2000 acres, in Bismarck, North Dakota successfully. Food crops plus cover crops plus livestock, all integrated. Lot of good results compared to neighboring farmers doing the traditional synthetic fertilizer / pesticide / tilling / monoculture approach. There are others like him too. And he's been invited to and giving a lot of talks about it at many confs for years: Watch "Treating the Farm as an Ecosystem with Gabe Brown Part 1, The 5 Tenets of Soil Health" https://youtu.be/uUmIdq0D6-A https://youtu.be/uUmIdq0D6-A
codecamper 6y ago
Investors say yada is good for you. ok?
Ericson2314 6y ago
> Vulcan Farm in Illinois combines intensive perennial polyculture, windbreaks, alley cropping, and silvopasture, and also features an innovative long-term lease model that provides options to non-operator landholders and land access for agroforestry farmers Ah, so VCs have discovered sharecropping.
soobrosa 6y ago
Might be a bit more complicated. "Underground deserts below fertility islands? Woody species desiccate lower soil layers in sandy drylands" https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/ecog.04906 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/ecog.04906

278 points by shrthnd 6y ago

"If farmers increased silvopasture acreage from approximately 550 million hectares today to about 770 million hectares by 2050 (1.36 billion acres to 1.9 billion acres), Drawdown estimated carbon dioxide emissions could be reduced over those 30 years by up to 42 gigatons — more than enough to offset all of the carbon dioxide emitted by humans globally in 2015, according to NOAA — and could return $206 billion to $273 billion on investment."

the8472 6y ago
That means 30 years of work + maintaining the results indefinitely afterwards to offset 1 year worth of emissions?
- nothal 6y ago
  With a return of billions though? Most profit requires effort.
  - xwdv 6y ago
    Billions have less value the farther into the future they are, unless you can take out a loan with it.
zdragnar 6y ago
Note that silvopasture is a combination of livestock grazing pasture and trees. The opposite method it would replace is the factory farm where animals are much more concentrated (with all the moral issues involved). The problem, I think, is one of volume- I don't see the factory farms shutting down in favor of techniques that require broader skill sets (tree harvesting, land management) beyond what they are already hiring for and investing technology in, especially since per-square-area production of meat is substantially smaller. I would love to see factory farms convert to silvopasture, especially if that means lower prices for things like nuts, but the broader skill set and management challenges make me think they will continue to be niche competitors to, not replacements of, our current supply.
- riffraff 6y ago
  > if that means lower prices for things like nuts, aren't nuts in the US stupid cheap as it is? American almonds are everywhere in Europe, and cost less than locally grown ones. (And they taste of nothing, I am not sure if it's because they get harvested earlier, because of preservation or because of the cultivar)
  - zdragnar 6y ago
    As for almonds, probably a combination of cultivar and picking time. Some nuts are still very expensive, though, and pound for pound beef can be cheaper than many.

jbeales 6y ago

So they rediscovered orchards?

Shared404 6y ago
It looks to me less like rediscovering orchards, and more mixing them in with livestock/other crops in a beneficial manner.
- jbeales 6y ago
  Mixing with livestock isn't really new either. So long as the animal doesn't kill the trees orchards are pretty great places for animals. I think I've seen orchards that are also hay operations too. I guess if we get into something more mixed then that they haven't really rediscovered orchards, they've rediscovered permaculture!
  - jessaustin 6y ago
    I think I've seen orchards that are also hay operations too. I've mowed, raked, and baled a fair amount of hay over the years. This involves driving tractors and trucks around in fields pulling easily damaged implements in precise circles. Doing so in the presence of lots of mature trees seems a daunting task...
cavanasm 6y ago
It's more complicated than that. They blend traditional food crops with trees, shrubs, etc, often alongside some kind of transition cycle where they'll change what is growing where over time. Sort of a blend of sustainable logging with farming.
dhruvkar 6y ago
ernst gotsch is the name to lookup. Growing food under a forest canopy with plenty of pruning, which creates healthy soil and less/no need for fertilizers. It's an effort to mimic a forest ecosystem and let things grow in their natural way (livestock is another aspect).

ngngngng 6y ago

> It turns out, people NEED food. Really, it's remarkable. And they'll actually pay dollars for food that you've grown, so that they can then eat it, because otherwise they'll die.

hef19898 6y ago
Crazy, them people, right?
einpoklum 6y ago
Surprisingly, that's not quite true. That is, people do need food, but humanity over-produces food massively already [1]. And in many countries, you'll collapse economically if you try to live by selling food - and it's government subsidies which keep farming afloat. [1] - Of course there's also massive hunger due to the failure of our species to more reasonably distribute the food it produces, biases in which kinds of food get produced where and when etc.

nothal 6y ago

It's really wild to me that investors realizing foresting exists and continues to exist because it makes money is a story. I did forestry related club stuff in high school for a program called Envirothon and there's a rich history of silviculture in the US and Europe going back a long ways. IIRC, we actually have more forest in the US today than 100 years ago because of silviculture. Notably, the Vanderbilt's started modern silviculture in the US and introduced all sorts of interesting measurements only relevant to foresters to the US like a chain (66 ft imperial) or Diameter Breast Height (the circumference of a tree at 4.5 ft, because that was right around the breast of your average heighted forester).

hef19898 6y ago
Fun fact, one of the first detailed concepts of sustainability comes from forestry in Germany by Hans Carl von Carlowitz in 1713. https://www.forstwirtschaft-in-deutschland.de/index.php?id=53&L=1 https://www.forstwirtschaft-in-deutschland.de/index.php?id=5...
- riffraff 6y ago
  Japan also started protecting forests and managing them sustainably a long time ago[0], in the Edo period (1603-1868). [0] https://www.nippon.com/en/features/c03912/ https://www.nippon.com/en/features/c03912/

freeqaz 6y ago

I think that "mixed" farming like this article describes has a huge potential for automation by the software field. Monocrops[0] (homogeneous fields of crops like corn or soybeans) are easy to build automated robots for. We've been doing that for generations now, starting with combine harvesters[1]. But there are many problems with growing monocrops[2]. Pests are a problem -- they breed and spread disease. And on the soil nutrient side, you have to keep re-fertilizing (and often over-fertilize[3]) every year to keep it going. And still nutrients continue to decline in the food that Americans are eating[4]. If, as a field (of software engineers), we can figure out a way to build robots that allow growing and harvesting plants in heterogeneous environments, that will be a significant step forward to fixing these problems. I'm optimistic that it will be possible in the next decade to build it and make it profitable. :) If you don't have to use fertilizer and pests don't eat your crops because you haven't created the ideal breeding ground for pests + disease, then this problem should be solved by market forces alone. At least, I hope so! 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monocropping https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monocropping 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combine_harvester https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combine_harvester 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monocropping#Monocropping_difficulty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monocropping#Monocropping_diff... 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertilizer#Environmental_effects https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertilizer#Environmental_effec... 4: https://journals.ashs.org/hortsci/view/journals/hortsci/44/1/article-p15.xml https://journals.ashs.org/hortsci/view/journals/hortsci/44/1...

banads 6y ago
Nature abhors monoculture
jrumbut 6y ago
I think this is a problem seen in many fields, that they are designed around our ability to model them.
- reginaldo 6y ago
  That, and the fact that we don't really revisit the modeling approaches when the constraints that led to them no longer apply. For instance, incremental evolution based on a branch where work was done "by hand" into animals, simpler machines and then very complex machines might lead to a very different result than evolution from a branch where the ability to design some types of complex machines is there "from the start". Note that this is different than saying "let's completely ignore the past".

ForrestN 6y ago

I got quite deep into the article, but couldn't get through the morass of PR to understand the basic idea of their agroforestry initiative. At one point, they actually write that a lightbulb went off... but what is the new idea? Is there anyone familiar with this field who tell a clear story of what their idea is, and how planting trees in existing farms will work in practice to accomplish all the results they predict? I'm sure it's an interesting story.

cagenut 6y ago
I just so happened to watch this youtube this week that answers that (at a high level): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEZvF68sytc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEZvF68sytc Part of the reason its so difficult to summarize is because its about taking a systems approach to the farming/biology and therefore it is infinitely varied in practice.
freeqaz 6y ago
I think there are a few benefits that they're (poorly) trying to articulate in the article, so I'll fill in with my own (biased) thoughts. :) - Growing trees in rows alongside feed crops (like hay) is more profitable for farmers because they gain additional income from fruit trees + lumber sales. - More trees that get to grow pulls CO2 from the atmosphere and is good for the environment. - There is a symbiotic relationship with the soil and trees that is beneficial for the health of other plants. This also helps with soil blowing away due to wind barriers + roots holding it down. Less erosion. - Pests can't travel as easily between "segmented" fields of crops because they are obstructed by trees. This helps mitigate risk for farmers. - Higher income per acre when you intermix trees in the fields where livestock graze. You can go harvest the fruit trees while the grass grows for the cows to graze on. The problem is that these changes require time to make. Trees don't sprout up overnight and that's a problem for farmers, but there is a big environmental incentive for it. Maybe the government should step in to incubate these kinds of projects? They may be the only institution with the long-term economic incentive to do so.
- mikeg8 6y ago
  This is a great answer, thank you for articulating. My only disagreement would be in regards to government being the only institution with the economic incentive to do invest here, long-term. From my understanding of the federal governments involvement in agriculture subsidies, the government seems to be much more in support of the entrenched, large-scale industrial farming systems. I hope for a future where our department of agriculture comes around to support these holistic farming practices.

hodgesrm 6y ago

It's really surprising to me that we tend to focus on sustainability rather than simple economic benefits when pitching initiatives to combat climate change. Case in point: The US had a great opportunity to sell alternative energy sources as way to get off Middle East oil after 9/11. Instead we continued to consume oil like there's no tomorrow while squandering trillions on fruitless wars.

evilsetg 6y ago
The valuing of (short-term) economic benefit over sustainability is precisely what is fueling climate change.
- fillskills 6y ago
  I would go a little further and say that short term economic benefits of existing entrenched players is causing harm. Its taking too long to get those people out and replaced with fresh minds who can look at the same systems and find new ways to make money while having a sustainable earth
schnevets 6y ago
Reminds me of this classic political cartoon: https://i.cbc.ca/1.5192931.1562703009!/fileImage/httpImage/joel-pett-cartoon.jpg https://i.cbc.ca/1.5192931.1562703009!/fileImage/httpImage/j... The problem with any revamp is that powerful incumbents wield the most power. They are capable of controlling the rate of change. In the early 2000s, Exxon and other oil companies were the most powerful, influential businesses on the planet, and they weren't about to let their politicians endorse a shift to renewables.
zanny 6y ago
The trillions weren't squandered for the thousands of defense contractors and suppliers that made fortunes off said wars. Its why they lobbied for them in the first place. Now a lot of warmongers profiteering off occupational imperialism are rolling in wealth courtesy of the US taxpayer.
mrich 6y ago

jessaustin 6y ago

This seems like a scam to me. The reason VCs don't fund "normal" crops like wheat etc. is that commodities don't generate the high profits that make "unicorns" possible. There have been fewer people employed in agriculture in USA every year for the last 150 years. The only long-term successful firms are selling "picks and shovels", and even they have to resort to evil to generate reliable profits (Monsanto, etc.) All of the crops under discussion in TFA are also commodities. Where is the profit going to arise? These venture funds will not return investors' money.

Vysero 6y ago
It seems fishy to me as well knowing that most farmers operate at a loss each year. Whatever profit a system like this might generate would have to be enough to offset those losses whilst still providing enough to keep the farmers happy along with the investors?? Seems pretty damn unlikely that this "agroforestry" is capable of doing that.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
greatgib 6y ago
I think that something the article tries to not to be explicit is that the reel business model is: Lots of company greenwash and pretend to "compensate" their CO2 emissions by paying farms like that to plant trees. And that is very profitable as costs to plant a tree compared is a lot lower than the income received from a companies in compensation. And now, vulture funds realized that they can make a lot of money on the back of the carbon reduction market!

jeffbee 6y ago

The feds would have to stop distorting the markets in the West before any of this could happen economically, right? People didn't just forget how to grow orchards and pastures. They got run out of business by the California water projects and the BLM. As long as the BLM keeps leasing out grazing land for $1/acre and as long as Reclamation allows Stewart Resnick to grow 100k acres of nuts on otherwise worthless land, how can sustainable growers compete?

harikb 6y ago
Just so people aren't confused, BLM == Bureau of Land Management
- konschubert 6y ago
  Thanks, I was confused.
- skrebbel 6y ago
  Hahaha I had this weird picture in my head of an angry mob of protestors leasing out grazing land for $1/acre.
rshnotsecure 6y ago
One thing people don't realize about the BLM and the Department of the Interior in general is that they maintain the world's largest airforce. This Airforce exists mainly as a mountain rescue and forest firefighting unit(s). Also, because we're now in the 2020s, they are the worlds largest purchaser of drones, even beyond the military. A lot of fascinating, cutting edge stuff is going on at BLM and DoI.
- jeffbee 6y ago
  It doesn't bother me one bit that the BLM manages land. It's a major public benefit that we have so much information about our natural resources. I think the USDA soil survey, for example, a one of the great wonders of the information age. The thing that bothers me is how they lease out public lands essentially for free to stockmen who proceed to destroy the landscape.

abalone 6y ago

> If farmers increased silvopasture acreage from approximately 550 million hectares today to about 770 million hectares by 2050... carbon dioxide emissions could be reduced over those 30 years by up to 42 gigatons — more than enough to offset all of the carbon dioxide emitted by humans globally in 2015 This is both exciting and depressing. A massive effort and it still only offsets 1/30th of global emissions. Fixing climate is not going to be based in “profitability”, at least in any near term sense. It is about dramatically reducing our CO2-based economic activity to preserve the planet for future generations. Capitalism is not geared for that kind of calculation.

gdubs 6y ago

The book that got me into this was Mark Shepard's 'Restoration Agriculture". [1] His "New Forest Farm" in WI has been making use of these ideas for some time now. [2] Shepard got his inspiration from Permaculture [3] and the books, "Tree Crops", [4] and "The One Straw Revolution". [5] 1: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16441733-restoration-agriculture https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16441733-restoration-agr... 2: https://newforestfarm.us https://newforestfarm.us 3: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/381988.Permaculture https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/381988.Permaculture 4: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/714112.Tree_Crops https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/714112.Tree_Crops 5: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/976905.The_One_Straw_Revolution https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/976905.The_One_Straw_Rev...

mahaganapati 6y ago
One Straw Revolution changed my life. It inspired me to learn permaculture first hand. It's such an enjoyable book to read
- mkmk2 6y ago
  Seconded, also a great read if you're just casually interested
LunaSea 6y ago
Fukuoka's own apprentices declared that his methods flat out didn't work. Lots of permaculture practices are pure dogma and don't have a scientific justification. All the permaculture farms I could find were profitable thanks to free outside input or through selling training sessions.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

Vysero 6y ago

If you were one of these people... please see yourself out.

mikeg8 6y ago

If you are interested in this subject, I highly recommend checking out Joel Salatin and Polyface Farm. They are doing amazing work. http://www.polyfacefarms.com/ http://www.polyfacefarms.com/ https://vimeo.com/125404937 https://vimeo.com/125404937

minerjoe 6y ago
And Mark Shepherd at New Forest Farm. http://newforestfarm.us http://newforestfarm.us His book "Restoration Agriculture" details his system, which can be likened to agroforestry.

poorna12 6y ago

An initiative worth looking at : The Complete What, Why & How of Agroforestry https://isha.sadhguru.org/us/en/blog/article/complete-what-why-how-agroforestry https://isha.sadhguru.org/us/en/blog/article/complete-what-w...

reginaldo 6y ago

Ever since watching the video on syntropic agriculture which I bumped into by reading a comment here in HN [1], I've been doing some research on the matter. The practice seems promising. It seems to work at both small and large scales, so it enables small farms, which are very hard to defend as a business in the US. It also has a component of improving the value of land, by making marginal (sandy) terrain into productive agricultural land. The other interesting fact is that the productivity per acre for the individual cultivars when planted together is higher than if they were the only thing being planted. I can see those things combining to drastically increase products. The part of the video that was the most interesting was the farmer saying "this works. If I don't sell, I don't live, and I do sell" (not an exact quote). Intriguing indeed. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23631196 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23631196 / https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSPNRu4ZPvE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSPNRu4ZPvE

0xdeadbeefbabe 6y ago

> and investor financing to help add trees and tree crops to agricultural models. Wow, sounds profitable I suppose.

ruffrey 6y ago

There's a startup working on this called Propagate Ventures. IIRC they have an agroforestry project planning tool for farmers.

hosh 6y ago

The article doesn't mention permaculture. Permaculture has been used commercial settings (and its design principles includes agroforestry). Permies have been talking about resilient and regenerative systems for a long while now, going beyond sustainability. Permaculture design looks at the whole system. So not just trees, but also things to plant with the trees. With planting along contours and adding swales to catch rainfall, and direct it to flow through everything. Incorporating animals into the system, such as grazers (cows, sheep, goats), and micrograzers (chickens, ducks, geese). Probably the biggest thing not discussed in the article is how permaculture design can lead to decentralized food systems. A decentralized food system is not something that VCs can invest capital in and expect multiple returns on, but I think in the long run, that is where we as a civilization need to move towards.

minerjoe 6y ago
Not just food. Let's "localize" all of our needs. Every single one of them. Note that is "needs", not wants. There will always be room for trade in things that you cannot produce locally such as coffee, but for almost every other thing, there are local solutions. Open Source Ecology [1] attempts to go the high-tech route and they may get somewhere, but they are only one of many approaches to localizing. With the internet we can have many groups working on localizing their own needs and sharing their successes and failures with the world. Add some gamification and wholla we have people competing to actully figure out how to live on this planet while leaving the place better afterwards. Note that a completely local system would probably not have much need at all for state backed currency except for trade. [1] http://www.opensourceecology.org http://www.opensourceecology.org
- hosh 6y ago
  Exactly! OSE has a permaculture page on their wiki, though hardly anyone added anything in there. This kind of stuff is not well-organized. I thought, for example, building a graphdb-based lookup system for planning companion planting. Another is some kind of decentralized barter system. Without being beholden to generating huge returns, I think this would be really useful. But like pioneer plants and “weeds”, I see a lot of permies using whatever adhoc means they have to trade information and barter for services. (But it is why I became very interested in Free Software, mesh networking, and raspberry pis. The supply chain that supports the internet is still fragile, and is currently coopted by Big Tech).

einpoklum 6y ago

This is a weird piece in that it seems to completely ignore the massive subsidies [1] the agriculture sector of most (?) industrialized economies relies on. Then when you read: > [Someone] estimates that agroforestry systems can create eight times more profit than conventional agriculture. you have to ask yourself: "Profit after subsidies? But who said you'll get the same subsidies? If you can actually turn a profit, they might not subsidize you at that point?" ---- [1] - For more information on these subsidies (which I'm not opposed to, it's complicated): * In the EU it's apparently 59 Billion EUR/year , according to this: https://farmsubsidy.org/ https://farmsubsidy.org/ * Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultural_subsidy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultural_subsidy

reillyse 6y ago
I like the European farm subsidies, I think they are a great example of how to share wealth among a lot of citizens and maintain high quality food. Btw, 59 Billion seems like a large number but compared to the actual GDP of the EU thats a very very small number. Also in the US for example farm subsidies are pretty high and generally funnel to rich people, there is both farm related subsidies that go direct to farmers and insurance companies (among others) and then the farm bill which is another huge subsidy.
- einpoklum 6y ago
  I actually didn't say I oppose them. However, note that better-off Europeans and US citizens are subsidized, then their products flood the markets elsewhere and farmers all over the world - who also don't have access to appropriate technology - can't compete against it. So the farmers in poorer countries get screwed. Not such a great example of wealth sharing...
  - reillyse 6y ago
    Did you edit your original comment? I recall there being more emphasis and an exclamation point or two :)

dzink 6y ago

Why many buzzwords? In simpler language: trees surrounding farm land keep strong winds from blowing nutrients away and have other benefits. For that and other benefits Before 1989, a lot of farm land in Bulgaria was surrounded by tree belts as they also provided shade for farm workers. In the US much bigger efficiency has been achieved by farming large fields with giant automated machinery. Effect on nutrients is unclear. However what this company is suggesting is to pair farmers of different types and plant productive trees between flat crop lands to enable multiple types of production happening at the same time. An underlying premise is a carbon offset system may pay for such investment. The part that’s missing is how much harvesting efficiency will be lost when you lose the ability to use big machines to harvest single crops. That said, there may be lands suitable for mixed farming that were underused before. Hopefully those farmers don’t get into too much debt trying to pursue potential carbon credits.

carapace 6y ago

Better late than never. The guy who invented/coined "Syntropic" agriculture grows the world's best cocoa beans at 3x the yield of similar-quality conventional farms with no inputs. He also gets a lot of other crops from the same land. Life is four-billion-year-old nanotech and it works really well. Get with it money dudes. (Conventional agriculture is, in retrospect, almost the dumbest thing you can do with land.)

landon32 6y ago

One cool company working on this in the UK: https://projectwren.com/projects/regenerative-agroforestry https://projectwren.com/projects/regenerative-agroforestry

dharma1 6y ago

Anyone here have some woodland and use it for growing food crops (mix of fruit trees, nut trees, root vegetables, berries and mushrooms?) This is something I've been thinking about trying for a while. Or maybe converting pasture land to more mixed purpose? I realise it's not something you can scale or automate easily, but I'm not really looking for that. Just a few hectares for personal use. I understand it will take many years for the trees to grow

vram22 6y ago
Check out permaculture, food forests and Geoff Lawton videos (he covers both, and food forests are a subset of permaculture). He is a permaculture boss who learned from Bill Mollison, father of permaculture. Check (his) Zaytuna Farm video tour parts 1 and 2. Australia is big on permaculture but many other countries' people are doing it too. Huw Richards (Wales, UK), Maddy and Tim Harland (UK), Krishna McKenzie (Auroville, Tamil Nadu, India), Pete Kanaris (Florida, USA), Richard Perkins (Sweden) are just a few. All those named have YouTube videos.

jelliclesfarm 6y ago

I would like to create/see robots that seed and plant Miyawaki style dense mini forests in urban areas. I don’t live in the right zone, but I tell my friends in the lower hemispheres that when they have a child, they must plant at least 1/2 acre of forest. Or a fruit orchard or a hardwood grove. Why? Because at its worst, it’s Ag but is green and income producing. And at its best it’s green, Carbon sequestering long term..medium benefits for a hardwood grove with ebony or teak or rosewood that are super slow growing and will grow with the child..leaving them a legacy and an inheritance. If anyone wants to collaborate for such a project, please reach out(my handle at gmail). I am still researching for the northern hemisphere.

poma88 6y ago

True story, land use when sustainable delivers long term benefits of all kinds, also to investors

vram22 6y ago

Gabe Brown has been doing regenerative agriculture for over two decades on Brown's Ranch, over 2000 acres, in Bismarck, North Dakota successfully. Food crops plus cover crops plus livestock, all integrated. Lot of good results compared to neighboring farmers doing the traditional synthetic fertilizer / pesticide / tilling / monoculture approach. There are others like him too. And he's been invited to and giving a lot of talks about it at many confs for years: Watch "Treating the Farm as an Ecosystem with Gabe Brown Part 1, The 5 Tenets of Soil Health" https://youtu.be/uUmIdq0D6-A https://youtu.be/uUmIdq0D6-A

codecamper 6y ago

Investors say yada is good for you. ok?

Ericson2314 6y ago

> Vulcan Farm in Illinois combines intensive perennial polyculture, windbreaks, alley cropping, and silvopasture, and also features an innovative long-term lease model that provides options to non-operator landholders and land access for agroforestry farmers Ah, so VCs have discovered sharecropping.

soobrosa 6y ago

Might be a bit more complicated. "Underground deserts below fertility islands? Woody species desiccate lower soil layers in sandy drylands" https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/ecog.04906 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/ecog.04906