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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
by estsauver 6y ago
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.
- kickout 6y agoIs 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
- nicoburns 6y agoOr indeed grow other crops that might be better suited to the environment in that location.
- estsauver 6y agoMaize 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 6y agoYes, 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.
- rmah 6y agoIt's only the best use for them if they want to continue to eat and live.
- Devils-Avocado 6y agoWhy does a human in Africa have a greater right to landmass and habitat than an elephant, gorilla, or giraffe? If these humans are thriving thanks to Western technology and aid, I think we have the right to dictate their population levels and environmental impacts.
- drewmol 6y agoIf 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=2016&locations=ZG&start=1961&view=chart https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/AG.LND.AGRI.K2?end=2016... [1]https://www.mordorintelligence.com/industry-reports/african-maize-market https://www.mordorintelligence.com/industry-reports/african-... [2]https://image.slidesharecdn.com/60366271-evolution-economic-and-agriculture-development-in-sub-saharan-africa-110725105917-phpapp01/95/evolution-economic-and-agriculture-development-in-subsaharan-africa-17-728.jpg?cb=1311591993 https://image.slidesharecdn.com/60366271-evolution-economic-...
- sudoaza 6y agoWhere 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 6y ago"They" presumably refers to Subsaharan farmers.
- tonyarkles 6y agoI think the poster is referring to sub-Saharan yields, not these test plots.
- Angostura 6y ago> 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 6y agoThe 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 6y agoThe 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.
- tastyfreeze 6y agoThe 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 6y agoStill takes a lot of startup capital to get the first plot of land though...
- nanna 6y agoTrouble 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.
- ced 6y agoSince 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 6y agoThe 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_Bowl
- bluGill 6y agoModern 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 6y agoHow 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.
- refurb 6y agoSoil 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 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dryland_farming
- bregma 6y ago> 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.
- ponker 6y agoWhat does labor do for crop yields? What do you actually do to change the crop yields?
- bregma 6y agoHoeing 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 6y agoInteresting, 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.
- text70 6y agoI used endogenous soil bacteria to effect no-till soil gardening while increasing yield and drought resistance in tomatoes.
- codeulike 6y agoThey 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_ 6y agoWhat 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 6y agoThere'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 6y ago>> 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 6y agoWe 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.
- davexunit 6y agoNothing 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.
- kickout 6y agoThat'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 6y agoI 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 6y agoyeah 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 6y agoUsing 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.
- alex_young 6y agoAre 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 6y ago>[...] it’s probably also useful to point out that they are a subsidiary of Monsanto. Why would that be useful?
- alex_young 6y agoMonsanto'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 6y agoNo, 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 6y ago> 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUmIdq0D6-A
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- russnewcomer 6y agoAs 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!
- estsauver 6y agoThanks, I appreciate that! My email is in my profile if you ever want to say hi.
- teorema 6y agoThis 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.
- solotronics 6y agohttps://youtu.be/a-zaAie8UZs 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.
- titzer 6y ago> 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.
- estsauver 6y agoYah, the interesting piece happens when you compare what happens when agricultural practices converge. Us historical corn yields prior to 1920/1930 (major introduction of industrial fertilizer happens pretty shortly thereafter) were identical to current SSA yields. Subsaharan African farms close in on US yields pretty quickly when the same inputs are used. The number of acres to make fertilizer are minimal. It’s very, very small relative to agricultural land under cultivation. In regards to financial incentives, I mention this specifically so you know I could have a bias and am leaving references to the science so you can make your own judgement. I’m not really in this line of work for the money though.
- onecommentman 6y agoSo at 200 bu/ac conventional corn yield, that’s about 16B bu/year? I ran numbers at one point, and came up with 8 bu/yr corn to provide the calories for a grown adult for a year (protein, nutrients notwithstanding). So ~2B people a year whose calories could be provided by just conventional corn produced by just the United States? So if a practice reduced yield by 50%, for the US it would mean reducing the calorie yield by 1B people? (Ethanol, feed for animals and the like ignored). How much surplus is in the system to support alternative practices?
- projektfu 6y agoHave you ever read The Story of B? Would you be able to read it without trying to argue against it simply because it contradicts your raison d’etre?
- estsauver 6y agoI haven’t, but definitely do read things from outside my view point pretty regularly. I tend not to find fiction compelling for settling empirical questions though, so I’m likely to pass on reading this for the same reason I have passed on reading atlas shrugged. The best way to convince me of something is generally non fiction. (To give a few examples of books that have changed my mind, I was a very conservative libertarian growing up in the school of Nozick, but ended up being much more liberal as a result of reading Foucault and his rather compelling recasting of how power dynamics work. I found Peter Singer, Nussbaum and Sen to all be compelling enough writers to basically convince me of what I should spend my life doing. If you have suggestions for science based books, I’d love to read them, but I find religious fiction generally leaves me unmoved and uninterested.)
- projektfu 6y agoIt’s not religious fiction. It’s more a collection of essays (or lectures, organized in the back of the book) with a sort of thriller storyline in the novel to make the reading more fun and explain better how the narrator is reacting to the lectures. But you could get a lot out of it by simply reading the appendix, which contains the arguments.
- elproxy 6y agoSurprised that nobody in the answers points to the levels of nitrous oxide emissions that nitrogen fertilizers brought along with them. At some point we have to decide which is worse: lower yields or hothouse earth...