5 ms·

Building on soil in Big Sandy: Regenerative organic farming in rural Montana

170 points by emilywolfe 5y ago

emilywolfe 5y ago
Hey HN! This is Part 2 of my regenerative/organic agriculture series, Common Ground. You all had such an interesting, in-depth conversation about Part 1 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27809279 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27809279), that I wanted to see what you think about the next installment. It's a combo of solutions journalism and a profile (always trying to break things over here), in which I explored the 40-year career of pioneering organic farmer and entrepreneur Bob Quinn, who also has a PhD in plant biochemistry. Quinn encounters a lot of failures, and I kept thinking how unlike a place like Silicon Valley, failure isn't necessarily celebrated in rural farming culture, where during the homestead era, failure might have meant death. Nonetheless, Quinn told me, he's seeing a potential sea change in food and farming: “I’m not pushing uphill quite as hard against so much tradition that says there’s no reason to change anything. Thirty years ago, fewer people had already gone broke. Everything was really rosy with industrial ag.”
- dccoolgai 5y ago
  Great reporting and great work! I'm really interested in some of the "less-cultivated" plants mentioned in the article (like Kernza). It seems so weird that of all the plants that exist, we grow like 10. Seems like there's a lot of room for that "fail-fast" mindset to locate new plants we could grow that suit a particular need (or are really delicious and we had no idea!).
  - emilywolfe 5y ago
    Thank you! And this is a good idea. My third (and last) installment in the series will be about policy. I'd be interested to see if there are any that encourage that kind of experimentation.
  - toper-centage 5y ago
    There was a picture going around o reddit of 50 totally different varieties of potatoes grown in Peru. How many varieties do we grow that are significantly distinct? This is probably caused by the optimization of industrial farming selecting for best yield (kg) with very little regard for looks, taste, or even nutricion. It's also harder to stock supermarkets with 50 different types of potatoes, carrots, lettuces, and dozens of other vegetables. Maybe a solution could be that not all supermarkets sell everything, instead of all of them selling exactly the same selection of products. But this would be too inconvenient and would never be tolerated.
    - dccoolgai 5y ago
      Exactly. But with like 40%ish of food completely wasted/thrown away on the consumer side "total Kg" is not the only thing to optimize for any more. It feels like there's an opportunity there to optimize for things like "better taste" and sell them into markets with more disposable income. One of my favorite Youtube channels is "weird fruit explorer" where this guy goes to all these different countries and eats fruit you never see in the U.S.
- rmason 5y ago
  While it's great this guy has the money to run his own research farm it's a bit unusual. In the Midwest where I live it's far more common for universities to do this task. Coupled with cooperative extension agents to spread adoption at a county level when they find something that works. Universities do basic science very well. When something's brand new like no-till was in the eighties and precision ag in the nineties farmers often get out ahead of the ag schools. No-till isn't exactly new but perhaps some of the Montana variations happen to be?
  - emilywolfe 5y ago
    So, this is just a pilot project, and he's actually trying to fund the research center. I'm pretty sure that's why he was willing to spend so much time with me on this project. The big thing is that each farmer or region needs to be experimenting to see what works there, since every place is different (climate, land management history, culture, resources, etc), and things are always changing. The universities mostly do the commodity crop research. You're definitely right that Quinn is ahead of that system. It seems like we need other structures to support more forward-thinking work like his, whether it's private equity, nonprofit or something else.
    - troyvit 5y ago
      My partner is figuring a lot of the same things out through https://farmsproject.org https://farmsproject.org. Farmers are taking huge risks, literally "betting the farm" on their regenerative practices because as you say the universities focus on commodity crop research. Your note somewhere else in this thread about comparing farmers to silicon valley entrepreneurs was a cool moment of clarity; they don't get several rounds of VC financing to try their ideas, just regular loans and a lot of paperwork tied to crop insurance. Down in eastern Colorado/western Nebraska & Kansas farmers are having a harder time being regenerative _and_ organic but a part of that is because they're also dryland farmers. Anyway it's exciting to see your stories hit hacker news! The innovation and work of the farmers you're covering are going to have a huge positive impact on US agriculture.
  - t-3 5y ago
mceoin 5y ago
Slightly off topic, but where is the best place to get a decent feed of regenerative-ag, rewilding, reforestation, conservation, land trust, indigenous land-rights, creative-land-use news? (HN for the pragmatic eco-conscious futurists.) Great post by teh way
- emilywolfe 5y ago
  There's some good stuff on the regenerative ag Subreddit https://www.reddit.com/r/RegenerativeAg/ https://www.reddit.com/r/RegenerativeAg/. Land Core is a leader in the space, as is the Soil Health Institute.
Causality1 5y ago
So how much more effectively could you regeneratively farm without being chained to the limits of organic farming? Just as a baseline, crops engineered towards this end instead of toward pure profit would likely be much better at it than anything organic.
- hinkley 5y ago
  Complex systems are bigger. If you were building a factory, you’d want the shortest supply chain you can manage because inventory is a liability. From the standpoint of avoiding the worst of climate change, you want the most complicated “supply chain” you can manage. This also works for nitrogen cycles as well. Nitrogen that spends time as protein in insects or microbes is better than metabolizing back into the air. Petrochemical agriculture is not very sophisticated. It can solve simple problems with few moving parts. Genetic engineering has started to ask more complex questions but at the end of the day we are still just getting past surface concerns. Where science and technology might help is with telemetry, but only if everyone prints out Goodhart’s Law and puts it over the door, on the fridge, the microwave, the coffee machine, etc. Data filtration is another thing. We think if invasiveness as a sort of score for a plant, but that’s an average of overall behavior. They are both harder and easier to deal with than we make it sound. Each plant is vulnerable during some part of its lifecycle, and or in certain biomes. It’s much easier to “take them out” during this window. But they’re patient. If you miss the window then you have a bigger problem next year. As a human my ability to juggle all of these concerns is somewhat limited, and a little detection and scheduling would go a long way toward helping me keep these problems small.
  - hinkley 5y ago
    To the petrochemical comment: for example look at Paul Stamets. Among the many irons he has in the fire, he knows that certain fungal pathogen species have competitors that are in some cases benign. But fungicides are broad spectrum. They kill off many fungi that would be no problem (and the occasional human liver). The worst weeds and the worst pathogens can often spread faster than their competitors. Only by maintaining a complex ecosystem can you achieve an armistice.
- 5y ago
chubot 5y ago
Great topic! I will be reading part 1 as well. I just watched "Kiss the Ground" on Netflix, a 2020 documentary about regenerative agriculture. https://www.netflix.com/title/81321999 https://www.netflix.com/title/81321999 Lots of smart people interviewed there. The side-by-sides of the industrial farm and regenerative farm were striking. And the demo of the egg might convince a few people. During the pandemic I tried to get about 50% of my calories from the farmer's market, and I'm hoping to keep that up after moving.
- emilywolfe 5y ago
  thank you! and thank you for reading part 1, as well.
robodog57 5y ago
I knew Bob- brilliant botanist and plant scientist. Took a trip with him and some family once- he knew every plant and how Lewis and Clark would have used it as they floated the Missouri.
mikewarot 5y ago
I was surprised that there was still tilling happening. My understanding is that tilling the fields helps dry out the soil, and breaks down part of the beneficial fungi and other biota in the soil.

170 points by emilywolfe 5y ago

Hey HN! This is Part 2 of my regenerative/organic agriculture series, Common Ground. You all had such an interesting, in-depth conversation about Part 1 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27809279 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27809279), that I wanted to see what you think about the next installment. It's a combo of solutions journalism and a profile (always trying to break things over here), in which I explored the 40-year career of pioneering organic farmer and entrepreneur Bob Quinn, who also has a PhD in plant biochemistry. Quinn encounters a lot of failures, and I kept thinking how unlike a place like Silicon Valley, failure isn't necessarily celebrated in rural farming culture, where during the homestead era, failure might have meant death. Nonetheless, Quinn told me, he's seeing a potential sea change in food and farming: “I’m not pushing uphill quite as hard against so much tradition that says there’s no reason to change anything. Thirty years ago, fewer people had already gone broke. Everything was really rosy with industrial ag.”

dccoolgai 5y ago
Great reporting and great work! I'm really interested in some of the "less-cultivated" plants mentioned in the article (like Kernza). It seems so weird that of all the plants that exist, we grow like 10. Seems like there's a lot of room for that "fail-fast" mindset to locate new plants we could grow that suit a particular need (or are really delicious and we had no idea!).
- emilywolfe 5y ago
  Thank you! And this is a good idea. My third (and last) installment in the series will be about policy. I'd be interested to see if there are any that encourage that kind of experimentation.
- toper-centage 5y ago
  There was a picture going around o reddit of 50 totally different varieties of potatoes grown in Peru. How many varieties do we grow that are significantly distinct? This is probably caused by the optimization of industrial farming selecting for best yield (kg) with very little regard for looks, taste, or even nutricion. It's also harder to stock supermarkets with 50 different types of potatoes, carrots, lettuces, and dozens of other vegetables. Maybe a solution could be that not all supermarkets sell everything, instead of all of them selling exactly the same selection of products. But this would be too inconvenient and would never be tolerated.
  - dccoolgai 5y ago
    Exactly. But with like 40%ish of food completely wasted/thrown away on the consumer side "total Kg" is not the only thing to optimize for any more. It feels like there's an opportunity there to optimize for things like "better taste" and sell them into markets with more disposable income. One of my favorite Youtube channels is "weird fruit explorer" where this guy goes to all these different countries and eats fruit you never see in the U.S.
rmason 5y ago
While it's great this guy has the money to run his own research farm it's a bit unusual. In the Midwest where I live it's far more common for universities to do this task. Coupled with cooperative extension agents to spread adoption at a county level when they find something that works. Universities do basic science very well. When something's brand new like no-till was in the eighties and precision ag in the nineties farmers often get out ahead of the ag schools. No-till isn't exactly new but perhaps some of the Montana variations happen to be?
- emilywolfe 5y ago
  So, this is just a pilot project, and he's actually trying to fund the research center. I'm pretty sure that's why he was willing to spend so much time with me on this project. The big thing is that each farmer or region needs to be experimenting to see what works there, since every place is different (climate, land management history, culture, resources, etc), and things are always changing. The universities mostly do the commodity crop research. You're definitely right that Quinn is ahead of that system. It seems like we need other structures to support more forward-thinking work like his, whether it's private equity, nonprofit or something else.
  - troyvit 5y ago
    My partner is figuring a lot of the same things out through https://farmsproject.org https://farmsproject.org. Farmers are taking huge risks, literally "betting the farm" on their regenerative practices because as you say the universities focus on commodity crop research. Your note somewhere else in this thread about comparing farmers to silicon valley entrepreneurs was a cool moment of clarity; they don't get several rounds of VC financing to try their ideas, just regular loans and a lot of paperwork tied to crop insurance. Down in eastern Colorado/western Nebraska & Kansas farmers are having a harder time being regenerative _and_ organic but a part of that is because they're also dryland farmers. Anyway it's exciting to see your stories hit hacker news! The innovation and work of the farmers you're covering are going to have a huge positive impact on US agriculture.
- t-3 5y ago

mceoin 5y ago

Slightly off topic, but where is the best place to get a decent feed of regenerative-ag, rewilding, reforestation, conservation, land trust, indigenous land-rights, creative-land-use news? (HN for the pragmatic eco-conscious futurists.) Great post by teh way

emilywolfe 5y ago
There's some good stuff on the regenerative ag Subreddit https://www.reddit.com/r/RegenerativeAg/ https://www.reddit.com/r/RegenerativeAg/. Land Core is a leader in the space, as is the Soil Health Institute.

Causality1 5y ago

So how much more effectively could you regeneratively farm without being chained to the limits of organic farming? Just as a baseline, crops engineered towards this end instead of toward pure profit would likely be much better at it than anything organic.

hinkley 5y ago
Complex systems are bigger. If you were building a factory, you’d want the shortest supply chain you can manage because inventory is a liability. From the standpoint of avoiding the worst of climate change, you want the most complicated “supply chain” you can manage. This also works for nitrogen cycles as well. Nitrogen that spends time as protein in insects or microbes is better than metabolizing back into the air. Petrochemical agriculture is not very sophisticated. It can solve simple problems with few moving parts. Genetic engineering has started to ask more complex questions but at the end of the day we are still just getting past surface concerns. Where science and technology might help is with telemetry, but only if everyone prints out Goodhart’s Law and puts it over the door, on the fridge, the microwave, the coffee machine, etc. Data filtration is another thing. We think if invasiveness as a sort of score for a plant, but that’s an average of overall behavior. They are both harder and easier to deal with than we make it sound. Each plant is vulnerable during some part of its lifecycle, and or in certain biomes. It’s much easier to “take them out” during this window. But they’re patient. If you miss the window then you have a bigger problem next year. As a human my ability to juggle all of these concerns is somewhat limited, and a little detection and scheduling would go a long way toward helping me keep these problems small.
- hinkley 5y ago
  To the petrochemical comment: for example look at Paul Stamets. Among the many irons he has in the fire, he knows that certain fungal pathogen species have competitors that are in some cases benign. But fungicides are broad spectrum. They kill off many fungi that would be no problem (and the occasional human liver). The worst weeds and the worst pathogens can often spread faster than their competitors. Only by maintaining a complex ecosystem can you achieve an armistice.
5y ago

chubot 5y ago

Great topic! I will be reading part 1 as well. I just watched "Kiss the Ground" on Netflix, a 2020 documentary about regenerative agriculture. https://www.netflix.com/title/81321999 https://www.netflix.com/title/81321999 Lots of smart people interviewed there. The side-by-sides of the industrial farm and regenerative farm were striking. And the demo of the egg might convince a few people. During the pandemic I tried to get about 50% of my calories from the farmer's market, and I'm hoping to keep that up after moving.

emilywolfe 5y ago
thank you! and thank you for reading part 1, as well.

robodog57 5y ago

I knew Bob- brilliant botanist and plant scientist. Took a trip with him and some family once- he knew every plant and how Lewis and Clark would have used it as they floated the Missouri.

mikewarot 5y ago

I was surprised that there was still tilling happening. My understanding is that tilling the fields helps dry out the soil, and breaks down part of the beneficial fungi and other biota in the soil.