13 ms·

> 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

by 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 ago
What does labor do for crop yields? What do you actually do to change the crop yields?
- bregma 6y ago
  Hoeing weeds. Bug picking. Fencing to keep out the wildlife. Watering in dry spells. Covering on frosty nights. Tilling, planting, soil conditioning, mulching, harvesting, processing for storage. Everything from fungus and nematodes to weevils, mice, rabbits, birds, deer, and bears all want what's in my garden. I have seen berry and tomato plants completely stripped of all leaves in less than a day by caterpillars. You can spend a day picking Colorado bugs off your potatoes and start again the next day picking off the same number. There is no end of work that can't be easily and cheaply replaced by a tank of chemicals and some petroleum-powered equipment to give better yields of better-looking food.
  - ponker 6y ago
    Interesting, thanks. I wonder how much of this will be replaceable by good robots that can use smaller amounts of electrical power. Bug picking seems like a good candidate, watering too. Fencing not so much, etc.
peterwwillis 6y ago
I've gotten massive amounts of food out of small raised beds with nothing more than compost tea and "plant food". Is it really not possible to consistently produce good yields from tightly packed beds with crop rotation on a 1 acre plot [without pesticides/herbicides]? I know it wouldn't scale up with typical large-scale farming monocultures, but for a mixed family plot? Aside: it seems we've long been able to feed the world (in terms of meeting caloric and nutritional needs) based on American farm capacity alone, it's just that nobody wants to pay for it.
- bamboozled 6y ago
  In Japan it seems this is how farmers work, on very small lots.
- bregma 6y ago
  I can get massive harvests of zucchini from two plants but it can't sustain a family for a year. Even more than a couple of weeks and the only thing it would sustain would be a mutiny.
jfengel 6y ago
Right now we over-feed the world, especially ourselves in the West. We produce an enormous amount of low-quality food, and malnutrition is driven more by external interference (misgovernment, wars) than by agriculture. Food is, as a percentage of people's budgets, cheaper than it has ever been. That suggests that there's a middle ground, where we shift to more labor-intensive practices to grow some more expensive but better produce that's less hard on the environment, without dismantling the entire industrial system. People could introduce more fresher foods, while still growing vast amounts of highly-processed-maize-and-soybeans for people who can only afford that. There are a lot of dimensions to that. It's not easy to prove that eating this way is necessarily healthier or easier on the environment. But we do know that the Western diet is bad for people's health, and we do know that it's hard on the environment, so it's worth considering alternatives.
- searine 6y ago
  >Food is, as a percentage of people's budgets, cheaper than it has ever been This is a good thing. Let's not screw it up, but rather improve on it. >where we shift to more labor-intensive practices Who is going to do the work? We already struggle filling these jobs. Those jobs that are filled are unsafe and low-paying.
  - jfengel 6y ago
    There's no reason we have to make farm work unsafe or low-paying. It's a consequence of the state of agriculture a century ago, when we were constantly afraid of running out of food. We put into place a lot of systems to drive down the price of food and increase the quantity. So yes, we should improve it. This is one suggestion for how to do so. It costs more money, but we no longer have to make price the #1 objective, not in a world where people are willing to spend $4 and up on a cup of coffee or pay a 50-100% premium for a dubious "organic" label (a term that has drifted very, very far from what it meant when Rodale coined it). That makes more money available for farm labor, to improve safety and pay workers better. It would take only a small increase in costs to make a large increase in wages: they receive only a few percent of the final consumer cost of the product.
voisin 6y ago
> I couldn't sustain my family for a year on a 1-acre garden plot even if I had the time to work it intensively and used nothing but recycled organic byproduct Check out “The Market Gardener”[0] if you need help learning how to do far, far better than this. We need more, smaller farms. Biointensive farming and permaculture can save our planet. [0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18406251 https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18406251
- kiliantics 6y ago
  John Seymour has also been writing books for years on how to sustain a whole family on an acre of land.
- vram22 6y ago
  Yes, Jean-Martin (JM) Fortier (Quebec) is a good example, though there are better / more comprehensive ones, and at larger scale too, see below. And JM is not even doing full permaculture, e.g. not using multi-height crops (i.e. ground covers through plants of a few more different heights to top canopy trees, 100 or more feet tall), so as to use more of the available sunlight and underground nutrients (shrub roots can go deeper than herbs, and trees even deeper, and what is brought up from deeper can be shared with shallow-rooting plants via compost, chop-and-drop, etc.). And he still makes fairly high profits per acre / person / year, i.e. overall. He has many videos about his work, both the technicals and commercials, on YouTube. Search by his name as well as for a great series titled Les Fermiers. And some examples higher on the axes of land area as well as permaculture and / or regenerative agriculture, vs. "just" organic farming, include: - Gabe Brown, 20+ years at it, 4 or 5000? acres, mixed grasses (grains) and broadleaf crops, cover crops, livestock (beef, pigs, etc.), land getting better each year, saves hugely on synthetic fertilizer and pesticide (see a chart in his Treating The Farm as an Ecosystem video), profits better too, and higher than his synthetic-using and tilling neighbors and state averages (ND, USA), and going up the value chain, so getting more of the final consumer dollar vs. middlemen. The average take for "conventional" US farmers is quite low, he says. Oh, and he does not need or take govt. farm subsidies, as many others do. Has many videos too, search for his name. Check the comparative stats and photos. - Richard Perkins, Sweden. Not sure of area, but above a few acres at least, maybe 25. Mixed stuff again. High profits again. Videos again. Many years' good results again. - Last but one of the best, Geoff Lawton (NSW, AU), long time permaculture expert (learned from Bill Mollison), doer, 66 acre Zaytuna Farm, is real mixed farm plus demonstration site, yearly trains many interns, consultant (to small orgs through to countries). Ditto for many of above points like axes, diversity, profits, improving over time, cost savings, etc. etc. Edited for typos.
codeulike 6y ago
Its not 72 experiments, its 72 plots. This is normal for agricultural research, as a control for soil variations within the test area. i.e. you dont compare several big plots, you compare lots of little ones to control for natural variations accross the field such as proximity to a river.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- bluGill 6y ago
  This is very important. Farmers with thousands of acres still divide it all into subfields that are around 2500 square meters that they manage separately. They are looking to go smaller than that, which computers allow them to do. By manage separately the same tractor crosses over each one in a field, but each subsection gets a different amount of fertilizer, seed, and other chemical based on all the data they can get. Sometimes they even have more than one seed/chemical tank so they can apply different amounts of each in one pass. When you have poor and good soil in the same field (all fields have this to some extent) you want to put the minimum money into the poor areas, while it is worth putting more into the productive areas. (People often ask about building up the bad soils - this is done too, but you can't really change the sand/clay ratio)
durkie 6y ago
> My experience (over decades) is I couldn't sustain my family for a year on a 1-acre garden plot even if I had the time to work it intensively and used nothing but recycled organic byproduct (compost and, uh, other stuff) as fertilizer. I find this surprising. I help run an Atlanta-area non-profit that has a ~1 acre organic farm that donates everything it produces. For the year 2020 we have already donated 3120 lb / 1415 kg of food. We're not trying to produce a nutritionally complete output on the farm, but that's still ~70 lb / 31.7 kg of food a week on average.
- f- 6y ago
  Well, potato is one of the higher-calorie crops, and one pound contains around 350 calories. If you produce 3,120 lbs a year, that gives you about a million calories. Now, let's assume a family of three - an average person needs around 2,000 kcal a day. That's 2,000 * 365 * 3, or around 2,200,000 kcal a year. So, you come quite a bit short. And that's on a good year; you're gonna have bad years, too. Also a function of climate and soil. In the 19th century, settlers in the plains - Nebraska, Wyoming, etc - often couldn't make it work on 640 acres granted by the government. In contrast, there are eastern states where 20 acres would be more than enough. (Farming in the West is now much more viable thanks to deep wells and mechanical irrigation, but that's a capital-intensive and resource-intensive approach that works best at a scale.)
  - owenversteeg 6y ago
    As pointed out downthread, you can indeed feed a family on one acre of land, and many people do actually do this. The problem with your math is that it assumes the 3k lb yield from gp comment is for potatoes. Your crop yield depends a lot on the crop. Aparently you can get between 10-30 tons of potatoes per acre (that range is from beginner yields to expert) which would be 7-21 million calories per year. Plenty of room, then, to grow a number of other crops to eat a balanced diet.
    - noir_lord 6y ago
      Potatoes (if you eat the skin) and milk would theoretically be a balanced diet, supplemented with fish/occasional meat it was pretty much the Irish diet pre-potato famine. Boring as hell after a while but it'd keep you alive.
davexunit 6y ago
Food resilience can't be found in a few large farms, but many little ones.
estsauver 6y ago
Many of our farmers do sustain themselves (and often their families) on an acre or less in Kenya, so I would suggest that you contact your local agricultural extension school for some suggestions. :)
- rch 6y ago
  The library system is helpful as well. In Colorado (and elsewhere, as I understand it) some libraries have seed banks, classes on pollinators and nutrition, and potentially community gardens.
  - Melting_Harps 6y ago
    > The library system is helpful as well. In Colorado (and elsewhere, as I understand it) some libraries have seed banks, classes on pollinators and nutrition, and potentially community gardens. I'm in Boulder county, and many offer(ed) those programs and seed banks but access to Community Gardens has always been limited here. The wait lists can be pretty long and during the pandemic and shortages people ran to local farms and bought out their CSA memberships and meat pre-sales (happening now actually for most livestock) in record timing. California has it, too. UC Davis is quite involved in Biodynamics in the region and offers classes for winemaking using the practices. These fires have really put a strain on the local economy and programs so I'm not sure what it will look like after this, but I hope it prevails. With that said, the results of this study are not really that surprising to me and follow my own observations: I did a Biodynamic horticulture apprenticeship in Europe and managed a Biodynamic farm in Maui. The issue is with the subsidies that distort the prices and perverts the incentives to keep farmers dependent on such a vile system, and this is all over the Western world, and much of the East, in my experience. We should be encouraging our youth that are aware of the climate change they will face to get involved in restorative Ag and offering them low to no interest loans on land and equipment while systematically removing the subsidies for corn, soy and other non profitable crops that heavily rely on dangerous external inputs which only consolidates the Industry more in the hands of large chemical corps. If I'm honest people should see the transition to organic/ biodynamic Ag as one of not just viable Soil Biology and ethics but also of Climate Science, Carbon sequestration from Ag can make significant in-roads in reducing the atmospheric carbon. Hemp is an incredibly amazing crop at capturing carbon from the atmosphere and building top soil, it sheds most of its foliage throughout the season and create a high canopy to reduce water requirements after 7-10 weeks after germination depending on regions and cultivar. It is a heavy feeder and will require crop rotation, but as seen with the green-rush of CBD products, these have massive Value added Market potential. While I studied the significance of other plants throughout my apprenticeship none captured my attention as much as hemp and I mainly went to Europe as hemp was legal in the EU and many products were being made from it while it was still illegal in the US at the time (2011-2014). With that said, I really hope COVID disrupted the paradigm we had been operating for so long and makes people look at these problems with solutions that some of us had been involved in and advocating for nearly decades now.
ClumsyPilot 6y ago
"I couldn't sustain my family for a year on a 1-acre garden plot" That should give you between 4 tons (for wheat) and 25 tons (for potato) of produce. Surely that's enough?
- ChrisLomont 6y ago
  Eating only wheat or only potatoes is not going to be very healthy. Once you have to mix vegetables, yield will suffer dramatically. Also, US yield for wheat is ~45 bushels per acre, wheat is 60 lbs per bushel, for 2700 lbs. This is 1.3 tons, not 4. And this is done with large scale, high yield processes that do not scale down to an acre. Where did you get 4 tons? https://www.statista.com/statistics/190356/wheat-yield-per-harvested-acre-in-the-us-from-2000/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/190356/wheat-yield-per-h...
  - ClumsyPilot 6y ago
    Uk Gov. Statistics gives 9 tons per hectar, which is like 2.2 acres. Are we measuring different stuff? Surely yield in Uk can't be 3 times higher. As for diet: yield of carrots and many vagetables is usually higher than for wheat, but yes getting any real variery from that hectar would be unrealistic. http://www.farmbusiness.co.uk/business/2019-farm-output-estimates-released-by-defra.html#:~:text=Wheat%3A%20Production%20in%20the%20UK,of%208.3%20tonnes%20per%20hectare http://www.farmbusiness.co.uk/business/2019-farm-output-esti....
    - ChrisLomont 6y ago
      A hectare is 2.47 acres, almost an 11% difference from 2.2. Also the 9 was an abnormally high year (I think the highest ever in the UK?). This year is down 40%, which is the worst since the 1980s [0]. >Are we measuring different stuff? Apparently. Also, why use UK numbers to compare to a story on US agriculture, especially without mentioning you switched countries? Can I cite numbers from Congo without noting it? >Surely yield in Uk can't be 3 times higher. Sure it can - variation in wheat production has well over a 50x variation among countries. Not every country has the UK climate, or even the uniformity that the UK has. The climate and rainfall in the UK are very well suited to wheat production. Also, I just posted the values. And here's [1] another place you can look. From this place you can select countries to compare them. The US is ~1/3 the output. The UK has exceptionally high numbers, nearly the highest in the world. Pretty much every source I find is similar. [0] https://www.allaboutfeed.net/Raw-Materials/Articles/2020/8/UK-suffers-worst-wheat-crop-in-40-years-632827E/ https://www.allaboutfeed.net/Raw-Materials/Articles/2020/8/U... [1] https://ourworldindata.org/crop-yields https://ourworldindata.org/crop-yields
brodouevencode 6y ago
Could it be true that some experiments don't require that much land?
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
onecommentman 6y ago
The tribal wisdom for ecofolks in the 1970s was 2 acres to nutritionally support a family of 4 with environmentally friendly practices that didn’t involve potatoes, beans and cabbage every day...

by bregma 6y ago

ponker 6y ago

What does labor do for crop yields? What do you actually do to change the crop yields?

bregma 6y ago
Hoeing weeds. Bug picking. Fencing to keep out the wildlife. Watering in dry spells. Covering on frosty nights. Tilling, planting, soil conditioning, mulching, harvesting, processing for storage. Everything from fungus and nematodes to weevils, mice, rabbits, birds, deer, and bears all want what's in my garden. I have seen berry and tomato plants completely stripped of all leaves in less than a day by caterpillars. You can spend a day picking Colorado bugs off your potatoes and start again the next day picking off the same number. There is no end of work that can't be easily and cheaply replaced by a tank of chemicals and some petroleum-powered equipment to give better yields of better-looking food.
- ponker 6y ago
  Interesting, thanks. I wonder how much of this will be replaceable by good robots that can use smaller amounts of electrical power. Bug picking seems like a good candidate, watering too. Fencing not so much, etc.

peterwwillis 6y ago

I've gotten massive amounts of food out of small raised beds with nothing more than compost tea and "plant food". Is it really not possible to consistently produce good yields from tightly packed beds with crop rotation on a 1 acre plot [without pesticides/herbicides]? I know it wouldn't scale up with typical large-scale farming monocultures, but for a mixed family plot? Aside: it seems we've long been able to feed the world (in terms of meeting caloric and nutritional needs) based on American farm capacity alone, it's just that nobody wants to pay for it.

bamboozled 6y ago
In Japan it seems this is how farmers work, on very small lots.
bregma 6y ago
I can get massive harvests of zucchini from two plants but it can't sustain a family for a year. Even more than a couple of weeks and the only thing it would sustain would be a mutiny.

jfengel 6y ago

Right now we over-feed the world, especially ourselves in the West. We produce an enormous amount of low-quality food, and malnutrition is driven more by external interference (misgovernment, wars) than by agriculture. Food is, as a percentage of people's budgets, cheaper than it has ever been. That suggests that there's a middle ground, where we shift to more labor-intensive practices to grow some more expensive but better produce that's less hard on the environment, without dismantling the entire industrial system. People could introduce more fresher foods, while still growing vast amounts of highly-processed-maize-and-soybeans for people who can only afford that. There are a lot of dimensions to that. It's not easy to prove that eating this way is necessarily healthier or easier on the environment. But we do know that the Western diet is bad for people's health, and we do know that it's hard on the environment, so it's worth considering alternatives.

searine 6y ago
>Food is, as a percentage of people's budgets, cheaper than it has ever been This is a good thing. Let's not screw it up, but rather improve on it. >where we shift to more labor-intensive practices Who is going to do the work? We already struggle filling these jobs. Those jobs that are filled are unsafe and low-paying.
- jfengel 6y ago
  There's no reason we have to make farm work unsafe or low-paying. It's a consequence of the state of agriculture a century ago, when we were constantly afraid of running out of food. We put into place a lot of systems to drive down the price of food and increase the quantity. So yes, we should improve it. This is one suggestion for how to do so. It costs more money, but we no longer have to make price the #1 objective, not in a world where people are willing to spend $4 and up on a cup of coffee or pay a 50-100% premium for a dubious "organic" label (a term that has drifted very, very far from what it meant when Rodale coined it). That makes more money available for farm labor, to improve safety and pay workers better. It would take only a small increase in costs to make a large increase in wages: they receive only a few percent of the final consumer cost of the product.

voisin 6y ago

> I couldn't sustain my family for a year on a 1-acre garden plot even if I had the time to work it intensively and used nothing but recycled organic byproduct Check out “The Market Gardener”[0] if you need help learning how to do far, far better than this. We need more, smaller farms. Biointensive farming and permaculture can save our planet. [0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18406251 https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18406251

kiliantics 6y ago
John Seymour has also been writing books for years on how to sustain a whole family on an acre of land.
vram22 6y ago
Yes, Jean-Martin (JM) Fortier (Quebec) is a good example, though there are better / more comprehensive ones, and at larger scale too, see below. And JM is not even doing full permaculture, e.g. not using multi-height crops (i.e. ground covers through plants of a few more different heights to top canopy trees, 100 or more feet tall), so as to use more of the available sunlight and underground nutrients (shrub roots can go deeper than herbs, and trees even deeper, and what is brought up from deeper can be shared with shallow-rooting plants via compost, chop-and-drop, etc.). And he still makes fairly high profits per acre / person / year, i.e. overall. He has many videos about his work, both the technicals and commercials, on YouTube. Search by his name as well as for a great series titled Les Fermiers. And some examples higher on the axes of land area as well as permaculture and / or regenerative agriculture, vs. "just" organic farming, include: - Gabe Brown, 20+ years at it, 4 or 5000? acres, mixed grasses (grains) and broadleaf crops, cover crops, livestock (beef, pigs, etc.), land getting better each year, saves hugely on synthetic fertilizer and pesticide (see a chart in his Treating The Farm as an Ecosystem video), profits better too, and higher than his synthetic-using and tilling neighbors and state averages (ND, USA), and going up the value chain, so getting more of the final consumer dollar vs. middlemen. The average take for "conventional" US farmers is quite low, he says. Oh, and he does not need or take govt. farm subsidies, as many others do. Has many videos too, search for his name. Check the comparative stats and photos. - Richard Perkins, Sweden. Not sure of area, but above a few acres at least, maybe 25. Mixed stuff again. High profits again. Videos again. Many years' good results again. - Last but one of the best, Geoff Lawton (NSW, AU), long time permaculture expert (learned from Bill Mollison), doer, 66 acre Zaytuna Farm, is real mixed farm plus demonstration site, yearly trains many interns, consultant (to small orgs through to countries). Ditto for many of above points like axes, diversity, profits, improving over time, cost savings, etc. etc. Edited for typos.

codeulike 6y ago

Its not 72 experiments, its 72 plots. This is normal for agricultural research, as a control for soil variations within the test area. i.e. you dont compare several big plots, you compare lots of little ones to control for natural variations accross the field such as proximity to a river.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
bluGill 6y ago
This is very important. Farmers with thousands of acres still divide it all into subfields that are around 2500 square meters that they manage separately. They are looking to go smaller than that, which computers allow them to do. By manage separately the same tractor crosses over each one in a field, but each subsection gets a different amount of fertilizer, seed, and other chemical based on all the data they can get. Sometimes they even have more than one seed/chemical tank so they can apply different amounts of each in one pass. When you have poor and good soil in the same field (all fields have this to some extent) you want to put the minimum money into the poor areas, while it is worth putting more into the productive areas. (People often ask about building up the bad soils - this is done too, but you can't really change the sand/clay ratio)

durkie 6y ago

> My experience (over decades) is I couldn't sustain my family for a year on a 1-acre garden plot even if I had the time to work it intensively and used nothing but recycled organic byproduct (compost and, uh, other stuff) as fertilizer. I find this surprising. I help run an Atlanta-area non-profit that has a ~1 acre organic farm that donates everything it produces. For the year 2020 we have already donated 3120 lb / 1415 kg of food. We're not trying to produce a nutritionally complete output on the farm, but that's still ~70 lb / 31.7 kg of food a week on average.

f- 6y ago
Well, potato is one of the higher-calorie crops, and one pound contains around 350 calories. If you produce 3,120 lbs a year, that gives you about a million calories. Now, let's assume a family of three - an average person needs around 2,000 kcal a day. That's 2,000 * 365 * 3, or around 2,200,000 kcal a year. So, you come quite a bit short. And that's on a good year; you're gonna have bad years, too. Also a function of climate and soil. In the 19th century, settlers in the plains - Nebraska, Wyoming, etc - often couldn't make it work on 640 acres granted by the government. In contrast, there are eastern states where 20 acres would be more than enough. (Farming in the West is now much more viable thanks to deep wells and mechanical irrigation, but that's a capital-intensive and resource-intensive approach that works best at a scale.)
- owenversteeg 6y ago
  As pointed out downthread, you can indeed feed a family on one acre of land, and many people do actually do this. The problem with your math is that it assumes the 3k lb yield from gp comment is for potatoes. Your crop yield depends a lot on the crop. Aparently you can get between 10-30 tons of potatoes per acre (that range is from beginner yields to expert) which would be 7-21 million calories per year. Plenty of room, then, to grow a number of other crops to eat a balanced diet.
  - noir_lord 6y ago
    Potatoes (if you eat the skin) and milk would theoretically be a balanced diet, supplemented with fish/occasional meat it was pretty much the Irish diet pre-potato famine. Boring as hell after a while but it'd keep you alive.

davexunit 6y ago

Food resilience can't be found in a few large farms, but many little ones.

estsauver 6y ago

Many of our farmers do sustain themselves (and often their families) on an acre or less in Kenya, so I would suggest that you contact your local agricultural extension school for some suggestions. :)

rch 6y ago
The library system is helpful as well. In Colorado (and elsewhere, as I understand it) some libraries have seed banks, classes on pollinators and nutrition, and potentially community gardens.
- Melting_Harps 6y ago
  > The library system is helpful as well. In Colorado (and elsewhere, as I understand it) some libraries have seed banks, classes on pollinators and nutrition, and potentially community gardens. I'm in Boulder county, and many offer(ed) those programs and seed banks but access to Community Gardens has always been limited here. The wait lists can be pretty long and during the pandemic and shortages people ran to local farms and bought out their CSA memberships and meat pre-sales (happening now actually for most livestock) in record timing. California has it, too. UC Davis is quite involved in Biodynamics in the region and offers classes for winemaking using the practices. These fires have really put a strain on the local economy and programs so I'm not sure what it will look like after this, but I hope it prevails. With that said, the results of this study are not really that surprising to me and follow my own observations: I did a Biodynamic horticulture apprenticeship in Europe and managed a Biodynamic farm in Maui. The issue is with the subsidies that distort the prices and perverts the incentives to keep farmers dependent on such a vile system, and this is all over the Western world, and much of the East, in my experience. We should be encouraging our youth that are aware of the climate change they will face to get involved in restorative Ag and offering them low to no interest loans on land and equipment while systematically removing the subsidies for corn, soy and other non profitable crops that heavily rely on dangerous external inputs which only consolidates the Industry more in the hands of large chemical corps. If I'm honest people should see the transition to organic/ biodynamic Ag as one of not just viable Soil Biology and ethics but also of Climate Science, Carbon sequestration from Ag can make significant in-roads in reducing the atmospheric carbon. Hemp is an incredibly amazing crop at capturing carbon from the atmosphere and building top soil, it sheds most of its foliage throughout the season and create a high canopy to reduce water requirements after 7-10 weeks after germination depending on regions and cultivar. It is a heavy feeder and will require crop rotation, but as seen with the green-rush of CBD products, these have massive Value added Market potential. While I studied the significance of other plants throughout my apprenticeship none captured my attention as much as hemp and I mainly went to Europe as hemp was legal in the EU and many products were being made from it while it was still illegal in the US at the time (2011-2014). With that said, I really hope COVID disrupted the paradigm we had been operating for so long and makes people look at these problems with solutions that some of us had been involved in and advocating for nearly decades now.

ClumsyPilot 6y ago

"I couldn't sustain my family for a year on a 1-acre garden plot" That should give you between 4 tons (for wheat) and 25 tons (for potato) of produce. Surely that's enough?

ChrisLomont 6y ago
Eating only wheat or only potatoes is not going to be very healthy. Once you have to mix vegetables, yield will suffer dramatically. Also, US yield for wheat is ~45 bushels per acre, wheat is 60 lbs per bushel, for 2700 lbs. This is 1.3 tons, not 4. And this is done with large scale, high yield processes that do not scale down to an acre. Where did you get 4 tons? https://www.statista.com/statistics/190356/wheat-yield-per-harvested-acre-in-the-us-from-2000/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/190356/wheat-yield-per-h...
- ClumsyPilot 6y ago
  Uk Gov. Statistics gives 9 tons per hectar, which is like 2.2 acres. Are we measuring different stuff? Surely yield in Uk can't be 3 times higher. As for diet: yield of carrots and many vagetables is usually higher than for wheat, but yes getting any real variery from that hectar would be unrealistic. http://www.farmbusiness.co.uk/business/2019-farm-output-estimates-released-by-defra.html#:~:text=Wheat%3A%20Production%20in%20the%20UK,of%208.3%20tonnes%20per%20hectare http://www.farmbusiness.co.uk/business/2019-farm-output-esti....
  - ChrisLomont 6y ago
    A hectare is 2.47 acres, almost an 11% difference from 2.2. Also the 9 was an abnormally high year (I think the highest ever in the UK?). This year is down 40%, which is the worst since the 1980s [0]. >Are we measuring different stuff? Apparently. Also, why use UK numbers to compare to a story on US agriculture, especially without mentioning you switched countries? Can I cite numbers from Congo without noting it? >Surely yield in Uk can't be 3 times higher. Sure it can - variation in wheat production has well over a 50x variation among countries. Not every country has the UK climate, or even the uniformity that the UK has. The climate and rainfall in the UK are very well suited to wheat production. Also, I just posted the values. And here's [1] another place you can look. From this place you can select countries to compare them. The US is ~1/3 the output. The UK has exceptionally high numbers, nearly the highest in the world. Pretty much every source I find is similar. [0] https://www.allaboutfeed.net/Raw-Materials/Articles/2020/8/UK-suffers-worst-wheat-crop-in-40-years-632827E/ https://www.allaboutfeed.net/Raw-Materials/Articles/2020/8/U... [1] https://ourworldindata.org/crop-yields https://ourworldindata.org/crop-yields

brodouevencode 6y ago

Could it be true that some experiments don't require that much land?

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onecommentman 6y ago

The tribal wisdom for ecofolks in the 1970s was 2 acres to nutritionally support a family of 4 with environmentally friendly practices that didn’t involve potatoes, beans and cabbage every day...