15 ms·

Healthy soil is key to feeding the world

297 points by dnetesn 5y ago

nelsonic 5y ago
Great article. If you're interested in this topic, recommend watching "Living Soil" documentary on YT: https://youtu.be/ntJouJhLM48 https://youtu.be/ntJouJhLM48
andrewclunn 5y ago
No mention of worms and their importance in healthy soil? Or the impact of pesticides on them?
- AlexandrB 5y ago
  It's not just worms. We're lucky to have excellent soil in our backyard and it's absolutely crawling with millipedes, isopods, and springtails.
  - kingsloi 5y ago
    I have a vermicompost bin in my kitchen, I'm in awe whenever I open it at just how many bugs there are in there just doin' their thing, and it's all self contained. The only "pest" I've had has been ants entering the bin and stealing food. Once I wrapped some double sided tape on the legs, that cleared up that. Even my wife likes 'em.
- hinkley 5y ago
  The northern Midwest has no native worms. They all died in the last ice age. It’s all insect and microbe decay. Imported worms are slowly changing what trees can grow. The seedlings are adapted to life in a thick duff layer that the worms eat.
  - carapace 5y ago
    As someone who was 110% pro-worm this was a bitter pill to swallow, but yeah, my beloved compost worms (Eisenia foetida) are a "non-native invasive" species.[1] "And so it goes." I wonder about the ecological equilibrium that might obtain in a thousand years... [1] "Eisenia fetida worms are native to Europe, but have been introduced (both intentionally and unintentionally) to every other continent except Antarctica." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eisenia_fetida https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eisenia_fetida
    - hinkley 5y ago
      I moved so that solved the problem, but the common wisdom does seem to be that Eisenia foetida colonies rarely survive more than a couple years, since they don't burrow far and they aren't cold adapted. If you have to pick a worm, that certainly beats nightcrawlers by a mile. I'm told that they think most incursions are caused by fishing expeditions where the fisherman releases the worms at the end of the day, rather than carting them back home. You can track the progress outward in a circle, not unlike fungal fairy rings. In a pinch you can start an Eisenia foetida worm bin by calling all of the bait shops to see who can sell you a large container of them. So clearly they're an option for fisherman.
beckman466 5y ago
wish i could upvote this a hundred times. i love the work of Million Belay with The Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA) (https://afsafrica.org https://afsafrica.org) as well as with the Stockholm Resilience Agency. this video of his and others like it really drove home the important core reasons to focus on soil health: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ZQrufxn990 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ZQrufxn990 (https://graid.earth/a-resilient-food-future-for-the-people-of-the-forest/ https://graid.earth/a-resilient-food-future-for-the-people-o...) also i think this video about Ernst Götsch and his 'syntropic' agroforestry is very exciting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSPNRu4ZPvE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSPNRu4ZPvE
maxerickson 5y ago
The breakdown I'd like to see is a histogram of where calories come from, binned by the size of the farm they are grown on. Most farms (and farmland) in the US are still classified as family farms. As long as they are closely held, farms managing thousands of acres are family farms. https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/farm-economy/land-use-land-value-tenure/farmland-ownership-and-tenure/ https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/farm-economy/land-use-land-v... The good news if if you convince an industrial farmer that something will be more profitable, they will do it, at least in aggregate they don't resist better methods for no reason.
- jelliclesfarm 5y ago
  Family farms operate about half of America’s farmland and they are responsible for about 21% of production. Link: https://www.usda.gov/media/blog/2020/01/23/look-americas-family-farms https://www.usda.gov/media/blog/2020/01/23/look-americas-fam... Family farms grow commodity and fiber and not necessarily food calories. ‘Industrial farmer’ will toe the line of the inputs industry(feed, fertilizer and weedicides) and collect subsidies. Profitability doesn’t relate to good soil practices. Profit is extracted from all that ancillary to the food production industry. Example: There is no money in growing food. The profit comes if you own your truck lines and part of the supply chain. Or Agtech or inputs make more money than the proceeds of actual food. Subsidies make up most farm income and pushing more farmers into debt and bankruptcy. It’s not very rosy. Industrial farms have polluted our waters and poisoned our soils that habitat and eco systems are entirely decimated. And crop diversity is also severely compromised and we lose so much variety and cultivars. That’s why we get tasteless red delicious apples and Roma tomatoes because it’s easy to mechanize to feed billions cheap food. In my opinion, I think there should be two kinds of food. Cheap Soylent kind of nutritious goop to stave off malnutrition and starvation in industrial factory farms with strict protocols to deal with the environmental impact and then real food whose price reflects the true cost of growing food for billions cheaply. But all ag and food production should be termed industrial as it is the erasure of nature and habitat and eco systems. I am very much in favour of the late great E.O.Wilson’s Half Earth proposal and I think it should be considered in earnest to save our planet.
  - 5y ago
abdullahkhalids 5y ago
Under this heading, > Myth 2: Large farms are more efficient The author cites two studies, one from 1989 and and one from 1992, to claim that large farms are not more efficient. I feel like 30 years of technological advancements might have changed that. So the evidence seems very weak to me. P.S. I would really want to live in a universe where small farms were more efficient than large ones. But evidence is evidence.
- Ensorceled 5y ago
  It's also a bit weasel wordy .. "While large farms excel at producing a lot of a particular crop – like corn or wheat – small diversified farms produce more food and more kinds of food per hectare overall." I believe in the movement and have seen what factory farming does to a place first hand, but I always cringe when movements try to turn cons into pros with misleading comparisons.
  - goda90 5y ago
    I think we just don't have a settled definition of efficiency. I've seen farmers claim that using the right rotations, edible cover crops, and grazing cattle and free-range chickens leads to more calories per acre, more diverse crops and all without fertilizers or pesticides. But no claims about farmer and machinery time per acre. Factory farming is probably fewer farmers and fewer tractors per calorie.
    - Ensorceled 5y ago
      Agreed. My grandfather raised 20-30 dairy cows on 200 acres. Horse and plow. Little fertilizer. Crop rotation (pasture/clover/hay). Lots of child labour. Wood lot for firewood at the back. Better for the land, but I wouldn't be that kind of farmer for anything. Now large dairy farms are running hundreds of head of cattle with only a couple of full time workers but tend to use quite a bit more acres per cow (or just plain buy hay and other feed from other places).
      - 5y ago
Pxtl 5y ago
I've always said, sustainable soil management techniques getting incorporated into conventional farming will be the ultimate benefit provided by the organic farming movement.
- kickout 5y ago
  Not a bad prediction and I agree. Would the organic food people be okay with that though? Some of those people want to convert 100% to organic, which is obviously not scalable or sustainable (ironically).
  - goodpoint 5y ago
    > obviously not scalable or sustainable reliable citation needed.
    - kickout 5y ago
      https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/10/22/132497/sorryorganic-farming-is-actually-worse-for-climate-change/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/10/22/132497/sorryorga... Also source: me. Been in agriculture for a long time. Have good friends that _run large organic farms_ (1,000-4,000 acres).
    - goodpoint 5y ago
      A recent paper on Nature with 68 citations describes organic farming as sustainable: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-019-0266-6 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-019-0266-6
colechristensen 5y ago
This strikes me as someone who formed a conclusion and went out to go find supporting evidence to write about. It is also wrong. The key to feeding the world was the Green Revolution, the system of plant variety and hybrid development, fertilization, pest management, and mechanization with related techniques which developed the capacity to feed the planet in the mid 20th century. Without it the world’s population would have been limited by starvation billions of people ago. There are good arguments that those techniques can be significantly improved upon, but the people pushing for them generally don’t have very much of an idea of how things work and just tend to repeat each other’s “bro science”. https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Revolution https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Revolution
- adityaathalye 5y ago
  Not to dispute your assertions, but perhaps it's worth looking at an alternate viewpoint. I found Masanobu Fukuoka's "The One-Straw Revolution" quite compelling. In it, Fukuoka argues for finding ways to diversify plant variety, improve soil quality and fertilization, manage pests such that external input (mechanization, fertilizers, pesticides, heavy irrigation) is not needed in the first place. All while improving yields year after year. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/976905.The_One_Straw_Revolution https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/976905.The_One_Straw_Rev... A dear friend has been applying the so-called "natural farming" principles for about a quarter of a century now, and swears by it. His farm is beautiful in a wabi-sabi sense, and is abundant like a forest. (edit: language, clarified sentence)
  - kickout 5y ago
    It's clear these practices don't scale. It's like saying you only need to hire 1 software dev and have them do everything, perfectly. When you find that 1 dev, it looks great. Your friend's farm is likely a well run operation and he might be a top 1% farmer (how ever you would quantify that). Also you make no mention of profitability, most farms are for profit and need to generate positive cash flow, regardless of practices. Oftentimes these sustainable practices are antagonistic to profitability, a complicated problem people in ag/tech/engineering/policy are working to resolve.
cletus 5y ago
This article feels intellectually dishonest. > According to a recent U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) report, family farms produce over three-quarters of the world’s food. Here's a bunch of data [1]. You see some obvious patterns. Firstly, large farms dominate the developed world. Developing farms dominate the developing world. The reason for this should be obvious: labour cost is the driving factor. Labor is cheap in the developed world. This makes farming machinery really expensive in labour terms. In the developed world, this isn't the case. Mechanized agriculture favors large farms so here you are. I'm not sure we should be celebrating that a large amount of the world's population is growing and tending food by hand. > Conventional farming practices that degrade soil health undermine humanity’s ability to continue feeding everyone over the long run. So this I somewhat agree with. It used to be (or at least it feels like this is the case?) that in years past there was a more conscious effort to rotate crops to rehab the soil whereas now it seems like we bridge this gap chemically. I don't think "healthy soil" is the key here however. The bigger factor is energy cost. Want to make more soil? You can do that... with sufficient energy. Want fresh water? You can desalinate if you have to. The limiting factor is... energy. Want to improve land usage with so-called "vertical farming"? The limiting factor there is, you guessed it, energy. I actually look forward to a future with sufficient automation and cheap energy such that very few humans are actually required for food production. [1]: https://ourworldindata.org/farm-size https://ourworldindata.org/farm-size
- hazza_n_dazza 5y ago
  you should read bill gates blog, you might get along ;) Nice ideas, but back to earth and fix the problems now by doing less. Not racing to the stars and destroying more on the way. Dont worry, humanity will have unlimited energy (hey dont we already) and will get tho the stars. Best not to destroy the planet on the way.
foxhop 5y ago
This planet is huge, we have near infinite energy extruding and emitting from the sun. The universe is huge. The planets surface is huge. The earth crust is huge. Overpopulation is a myth if we can spread out and not overwhelm specific places of our world. Slow down on the extraction. Slow down on the waste. Let us multiply not divide. If you want to learn more, check out the YouTube channel listed in my profile. The universe is a Trivium, inputs > processing > outputs Pollution is the piling up of byproducts or inert or semi-inert materials. Things which are no longer useful or helpful inside biological bodies. Pollution bio accumulates inside all bodies, including our earth. We grow our inputs (food) in a very sensitive edge between atmosphere and earth's crust, 0-30 or so feet. Let us maximize the edges, reduce pollution, & multiply and share our soil & soil growing skills.
- aliswe 5y ago
  overpopulation, i mean population growth speed, has been demonstrated to take only a few years to die off in certain cases.
shafyy 5y ago
The real key to feeding the world and not destroying the planet is to stop eating animals and animal products. End of story.
- hall0ween 5y ago
  With all due respect, without evidence your argument is baseless. I think your appealing to your ethos to persuade others (and on the internet what authority do you have?). I agree the world population should stop eating animals, but why? My reasons are: (1) morally dubious -- the majority of animals raised to be eaten live in squalor. It is below me, personally, to eat an animal raised in those conditions. For many people it isn't AND this doesn't support the argument that not eating animals is better for the planet. (2) environmental impact -- the UN put out a list some years ago stating that to reduce environmental impact, consuming less animal and animal product is the way to go. Here is one list [0] indicting that among a collection of behavioral changes, eating more vegetables is helpful. Here is another [1] indicating that to reduce carbon footprint, travel (rather than diet) are primary ways to do so. [0] https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/16-ways-take-action-climate https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/16-ways-take-act... [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-52719662 https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-52719662 End of story? You must provide more than internet ethos to persuade an audience!
  - shafyy 5y ago
    You're right, I should have provided a source. In the end, it's basic physics, really. If you make a plant, and feed that plant to an animal, and then eat that animal, your caloric conversion rate will always be lower than eating the plant directly lest you violate the laws of thermodynamics. But, here's a really good summary by Our World in Data going into more detail: https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
chimere 5y ago
If you're interested in healthy soils, and particularly their enormous potential for carbon sequestration, consider joining my team at Yard Stick! We're building hardware that measures soil carbon in-situ, 90% cheaper than conventional methods. Currently hiring a few different hardware roles: https://useyardstick.notion.site/useyardstick/Careers-at-Yard-Stick-f58f4300a69646d0b0c0f630dd8b2ad8 https://useyardstick.notion.site/useyardstick/Careers-at-Yar...
- nerdponx 5y ago
  Who is a customer for a product like this?
  - AtlasBarfed 5y ago
    You'd probably need an effective carbon economy and regulatory framework that would reward soil with good carbon sequestration. But to your point, the masters human race would rather destroy themselves that do things like that.
    - hammock 5y ago
      No. Healthy soil means high carbon content (mycelium, microbes etc). "Dead soil" that has been tilled too much will have fucked up nitrogen and other cycles, requiring irrigation, supplemental fertilizer and more pesticides. The climate crisis angle is just icing on the cake.
  - tastyfreeze 5y ago
    I would like one for home gardening. Soil carbon is one measure of soil health.
    - hazza_n_dazza 5y ago
      stick your finger in and see if it is black with humus!
  - chimere 5y ago
desktopninja 5y ago
Maybe paid too much attention in that "elective" class Environmental Science in college but this book should have been taken seriously since its publication: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_Spring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_Spring
- colechristensen 5y ago
  Silent Spring is emotionally manipulative hyperbole which does harm to reasonable progress because it was among to introduce the catastrophizing of environmental issues which creates zealots and anti-zealots instead of a narrative dominated by pragmatic improvement and optimization.
  - carapace 5y ago
    In context (and hindsight) it was the necessary "emotionally manipulative hyperbole" to kick off the whole shebang, eh?
    - colechristensen 5y ago
      I don’t know about “necessarily”, going back and imagining history happening differently isn’t always a fruitful activity. There were certainly people interested in preserving high quality environments and concerned with degradation before the more extreme and hyperbole laden “environmental movement” One can only guess how things would have evolved differently, but people did have successes before the exaggeration became common, and overreaction and political splits to extreme views is currently a significant obstacle to progress. When you exaggerate, you create opposition who do too.
      - LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
        Ahem. Create opposition? By whom? Big multinationals which have budgets for PR greenwashing everything? And lawyers to mute dissent? Which has been proven again and again after the fact? When things were already broken? See it as an asymmetric answer in the war of attrition by the commercial killers of the environment.
otrahuevada 5y ago
According to this people: https://www.unep.org/thinkeatsave/get-informed/worldwide-food-waste https://www.unep.org/thinkeatsave/get-informed/worldwide-foo... about a third of the food produced is thrown away along with half the water used to produce it. Strikes me as an obviously improvable thing, as long as we're as a species capable of reining in the market forces at play. But then again, we as a community don't seem to able to stop a couple hundred maladaptive nerds from using downvotes as a "me no likey" button, so there's that.
- nyokodo 5y ago
  > as long as we're as a species capable of reining in the market forces at play. A better phrase would be “reining in the perverse incentives at play” as government is just as prone to give in to perverse incentives or regulatory capture that promote waste.
fredrikholm 5y ago
There's a small pot of land in my city that starts right where one of our parks end. It's not fenced, the amount of traffic (people, dogs, cats, trucks) is similar to that of the park. On that land, grass grows freely, bushes stretch and grow at will, weeds come and go throughout the year. Native flowers bloom seemingly out of nowhere. There's always bees, mosquitoes, ticks, birds and the likes during the warmer months. Every fall, a new layer of mulch forms as leaves, plant matter and dog poop gets stuck in the grass and plants, protecting the soil from both heat and winter in the coming year. On the park land, there is an annual cycle of desperate attempts to keep the grasses and bushes alive. Each fall, months of cutting the grasses short, plucking weeds, removing leaves and plant matter, cutting down bushes to "encourage root growth" and general practices that expose the soil to sunlight during dry months have decimated most plants. By winter, something like half of all grasses are gone, a small section of bushes get diseased and die off, leaving only a few patches of healthy soil versus a large amount of compacted earth and/or mud that gets washed away during heavy rain fall. Each spring, the city drives heavy machinery to replant most of the grass(es) again. The earth being heavily compacted, all seeds land on top of the soil. They subsequently dry out in the sun, and a large majority of them never get to root. The regrowth of grass is either via direct transplant (soil and everything) or when people in the neighbourhood plants their own seeds (and make sure to water them) after deaf complaints to the city/municipality. Taking inspiration, we tried to replicate such a system for our shared courtyard. Branches, twigs, leaves and food waste is composted and used as mulch (though we started with store-bought wood chips). No dirt is exposed to sunlight or frost, only plants are. Barely no effort to remove weeds as very few are strong enough to grow through all that mulch. When we are forced to restrict water usage during the driest months, most plants pull through, with some having minor die off or they just look droopy and sad until next rainfall. The neighbours (three courtyards) do it the more traditional way of removing leaves, dead plants and pulling the large(r) amount of weeds that pop up in the barren soil. During years when water use is restricted, a lot of their plants and flowers dry up and die, causing them to buy and replant new ones the season after. We've managed to convince some by showing them our results, but so far it's only us in our block that does this. It's madness, and I wouldn't be suprised if there were similar stories with (industrialized, work-intensive) farming.
jaxr 5y ago
Although the article seems very poor, for motives already stated by other posters, I think there is a legitimate debate that is not being taken. Industrial farming is pretty bad in ecological terms. Organic farming might be better, but the incentives are just not there. As with many of climate-related issues today vs capitalism, the problem seems to be costs externalization. This case seems trickier than atmospheric emissions because in many case, people degrading the soil actually owns the land, which would affect long-term yields. However, money earned today might compound better than long term yield degradation, which is also harder to grasp to us humans?
- hammock 5y ago
  >climate-related issues *Environmental issues
jeromenerf 5y ago
> simplistic idea is the real key to misplaced expectations I have spent some time playing with gpt3 and have almost been able to generate the article and the top comments by iterating over “permaculture”, “green revolution”, “vegetarian” and “technology”.
Out_of_Characte 5y ago
This article clearly fails to convince the HN crowd despite being correct on every claim. Those who have never been to a farm do not understand the importance of 'dead soil' its not some utopian dream to want to reduce both pesticides and reliance on fertilizers. Its an necessity. The excessive use of pesticides and fertilizer is the agricultural ponzi scheme, every year you're repaying all your debts with more of what is slowly reducing yields. It might have saved millions of people from starvation during the population boom but now it is most definitely a giant risk to the future crops that must grow. I'll link sources later but generally, all pesticide use is slowly increasing due to diseases becoming resilient against the safest pesticides and because monoculture growing (large single crop farms) is inherently bad at managing disease. I hate to bring up Coronavirus but people must learn that despite our intelligence, viruses, bacteria and parasites are most definitely still smarter than our defences. especially when it comes down to basic chemicals we spray everywhere or dare I say it, vaccines. Failing to understand how to use the tools available to us risks losing the very tools upholding society. We saw it with antibiotics, we're seeing it with pesticides and we're going to see nature out-evolving us if we're not cognizant of the dangers.
- searine 5y ago
  Biological resistance is inevitable if there is a mild single mode of action. It doesn't matter if you are organic, permaculture or conventional. If you use a single mode of action that lets some survive, it will be resisted eventually. Did you know insects can develop resistance to crop rotations and spring burns? Resistance isn't limited to chemicals. How do you fix this? Multiple, overlapping modes of action. If we can effectively control HIV and it's extremely high mutation rate, we handle a few weeds.
davesailer 5y ago
Good read... "Dirt to Soil One Family's Journey into Regenerative Agriculture", by Gabe Brown, 2018 Gabe Brown didn't set out to change the world when he first started working alongside his father-in-law on the family farm in North Dakota. But as a series of weather-related crop disasters put Brown and his wife, Shelly, in desperate financial straits, they started making bold changes to their farm. Brown―in an effort to simply survive―began experimenting with new practices he'd learned about from reading and talking with innovative researchers and ranchers. As he and his family struggled to keep the farm viable, they found themselves on an amazing journey into a new type of farming: regenerative agriculture. Brown dropped the use of most of the herbicides, insecticides, and synthetic fertilizers that are a standard part of conventional agriculture. He switched to no-till planting, started planting diverse cover crops mixes, and changed his grazing practices. In so doing Brown transformed a degraded farm ecosystem into one full of life―starting with the soil and working his way up, one plant and one animal at a time. In Dirt to Soil Gabe Brown tells the story of that amazing journey and offers a wealth of innovative solutions to our most pressing and complex contemporary agricultural challenge―restoring the soil. The Brown's Ranch model, developed over twenty years of experimentation and refinement, focuses on regenerating resources by continuously enhancing the living biology in the soil. Using regenerative agricultural principles, Brown's Ranch has grown several inches of new topsoil in only twenty years! The 5,000-acre ranch profitably produces a wide variety of cash crops and cover crops as well as grass-finished beef and lamb, pastured laying hens, broilers, and pastured pork, all marketed directly to consumers. The key is how we think, Brown says. In the industrial agricultural model, all thoughts are focused on killing things. But that mindset was also killing diversity, soil, and profit, Brown realized. Now he channels his creative thinking toward how he can get more life on the land―more plants, animals, and beneficial insects. "The greatest roadblock to solving a problem," Brown says, "is the human mind." One source: https://u1lib.org/book/5283239/7bd9a9 https://u1lib.org/book/5283239/7bd9a9 38.14 MB About the Author Gabe Brown is a pioneer of the soil-health movement and has been named one of the twenty-five most influential agricultural leaders in the United States. Brown, his wife, Shelly, and son, Paul, own Brown’s Ranch, a holistic, diversified 5,000-acre farm and ranch near Bismarck, North Dakota. The Browns integrate their grazing and no-till cropping systems, which include cash crops and multispecies cover crops along with all- natural, grass-finished beef and lamb, pastured pork, and laying hens. The Brown family has received a Growing Green Award from the Natural Resources Defense Council, an Environmental Stewardship Award from the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, and the USA Zero-Till Farmer of the Year Award.
deeviant 5y ago
Small farms use absurd amounts of labor, the cost of which in the developed countries would go far beyond "economically infeasible" to "actually impossible". The modern world is not going to go back to subsistence farming, nor should it. Agriculture does need a revolution, but not in the direction that this article wants it. As far as what direction to take Ag, my company is working on technology that reduces herbicide usage by 70+% in the largest sector: row crops, and it's going to hit the fields in a big way very soon. Leveraging the advances in robotics and AI to treat each plant individually and efficiently as possible will revolutionize Ag. Crop inputs can be reduced, new chemistries even organic ones may be unlocked for large scale use, the changes that will be wrought when this technology reaches maturity and large-scale market penetration will change Ag fundamentally, for the better.
- colechristensen 5y ago
  It is doubtful that crop input costs will be reduced as companies like yours will seek to capture the savings in chemical costs by charging for the usage of the machinery. I’m not saying that’s necessarily bad.
  - deeviant 5y ago
    Since the more advanced machinery costs more, a customer would not buy it unless it saves them money, thus a significant enough amount of the savings must be realized by the customer after the increased cost to have any reasonable chance of market success: the farmer must win as well or the product is doomed. In this way, the market does keep a company honest. Farmers are absolutely incredible businessman, they will have nothing to do with technology that only makes money for somebody else. Also, we generally sell our equipment and the vast majority is customer or Ag service provider owned.
- hinkley 5y ago
  Many of these people are trying to get the farm animals to do the labor, rather than humans. These conveniences and petrochemicals and predicated in an infinite supply of fossil fuels. Something has to change, and if we don’t change it then Time will do it for us.
carapace 5y ago
I've been doing small backyard-scale experiments with soil-building the last few years and I've come around to the viewpoint that soil should be thought of as a kind of distributed organism. (Someone once called this the "Gaia hypothesis writ small".) The soil organism is made up of myriad species of fungi, bacteria, insects, etc., but it seems to work as a whole (cf. Michael Levin's work, like "What Bodies Think About: Bioelectric Computation Outside the Nervous System - NeurIPS 2018" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjD1aLm4Thg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjD1aLm4Thg ) In any event, what I've found is that the health of the crops is most easily influenced by looking after the health of the soil (duh?) and that, if you get the soil right, the plants seem like they can't help but grow vigorously.
- pohl 5y ago
  Not more than a month ago I spent almost an hour trying, unsuccessfully, to google that Michael Levin talk, having forgotten his name, the title, the forum, etc. Thank you, thank you for the link!
- vollmarj 5y ago
  Me too! Could you say more about what kinds of experiments you've been doing and how you are measuring the results? I've been using the Haney Soil Test along with Phospholipid Fatty Acid Analysis (PLFA) to understand how my management practices have been impacting overall soil health and microbe communities. I've been thinking about how I wish I could collaborate more with others on research to help build a dataset that can be used to quantify the effects of regenerative farming.
  - hazza_n_dazza 5y ago
    Measuring humus is a great start to measuring soil quality. Simply looking at the 'black' left on ones hands after feeling the soil is a great start. It is an established science (soil management), just not applied in commercial farming very often.
  - carapace 5y ago
    I haven't done anything quite that sophisticated! I have only "anecdata" to contribute. We are basically on sand dunes here and our "soil" is what I call "dirty sand". I had a bunch of wood chips with some chicken manure and feathers in it and I spread that about six inches deep over a bare patch of sand. I added potatoes and kept it moist. Now, a year and a half later, there's a layer of rich living soil between the sand and the wood chips. There are lots of worms and other critters living in there, and I have plants growing well. It's January and I've got broccoli, blooming nasturtiums, fava beans, and potatoes of course, plus a lot of other things. Mushrooms appear regularly too. I don't add any fertilizer or anything.
joe_the_user 5y ago
National Research Council study quoted in article: "A well-managed alternative farming systems nearly always use less synthetic chemical pesticides, fertilizers, and antibiotics per unit of production than conventional farms." There's a certain disingenuousness in this rhetoric. A skilled, professional bicycle frame builder can build a frame that's stronger with less materials than the frames that come out of semi-automated plants in Korea. But that doesn't mean the framebuilder is "more efficient". Industrial agriculture is far more efficient in terms of labor. That's what matters in the process of transforming society. Notably, the labor freed up by industrial agriculture can be used to very efficiently accumulate more resources to be put into agriculture and even more knowledge. Which isn't to say small scale farms don't some virtues but let's be clear what's going on.
- TaylorAlexander 5y ago
  I don’t think it’s disingenuous to say that certain types of farms use less harmful chemicals. But if you know that they take more labor then one could ask, how can we reduce the labor requirements of small farms to make those benefits scale? For my part I’m designing a solar powered farming robot that is totally open source, with the hope that this will lead to low automation costs for small regenerative organic farms. https://community.twistedfields.com/t/a-closer-look-at-acorn-our-open-source-precision-farming-rover/108 https://community.twistedfields.com/t/a-closer-look-at-acorn...
- nithril 5y ago
  It requires far more knowledge: an in depth understanding of the agriculture relating sciences. But less pesticides, less fertilizers, no-till certainly reduces the labor.
  - jazzyjackson 5y ago
    > But less pesticides, less fertilizers, no-till certainly reduces the labor. How do you figure? Pesticide, Fertilization, Tilling and Harvesting are precisely the types of labor that has been automated and is now done 60-feet wide by 4 miles an hour.
chubot 5y ago
I really liked this documentary! Kiss the Ground (2020) https://www.netflix.com/title/81321999 https://www.netflix.com/title/81321999 Some striking pictures of two fields next to each other, and really inspiring grit by intelligent farmers
dghughes 5y ago
Common sense in politics is also key. My Canadian province grows different crops but potatoes are the big crop here 25% of all potatoes bought in Canada. This summer was perfect and in the fall it was a bumper crop it was amazing. But then two fields out of hundred tested positive for a plant virus called potato wart. It's an ugly fungus on the potato but it's harmless to humans. There are now millions of pounds of perfectly fine potatoes that can't be sold. The biggest market the US will not buy them. It was just a few potatoes out of millions of pounds. The remaining are for food only and can't grow into a plant. Even Puerto Rico which buys a lot of potatoes grown here (30%?). They don't grow potatoes in Puerto Rico so a fungus is not a threat. But it is not permitted to buy any potatoes from Canada (archaic shipping laws don't help) but specifically no potatoes from here PEI. They can't even give them away since it takes too long to ship them and who will pay the labour costs, or the fuel to ship them? They need to be disposed of before they rot. So even if you as a farmer grow a crop and lots of it there are laws that can ruin your day. And that's after you spent 18 hour days all summer growing a good crop.
- jazzyjackson 5y ago
  Can rotting potatoes not be used in building soil? It won't be profitable, but its better than landfilling... what is the manner of disposal anyway?
  - dghughes 5y ago
    Here is what my local government has about disposal: Can potato waste be buried in abandoned or operating excavation pits? No. Potato waste is organic and being that all excavation pits have exposed bedrock in them, which creates an easy access to the groundwater table, the organic waste can contaminate it. https://www.princeedwardisland.ca/en/information/agriculture-and-land/guidelines-disposal-cull-potatoes https://www.princeedwardisland.ca/en/information/agriculture... Some farmers are using tractors with snowblower attachment to shred the potatoes. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/prince-edward-island/pei-potatoes-destroying-memories-1.6286477 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/prince-edward-island/pei-pota...
- halpert 5y ago
Ericson2314 5y ago
Once read a very scary prediction on HN that if the planet warms all the temperate soils will decompose to gases and non-bidodegrable stuff instead of accumulating, and so we'll have lousy tropical soil everywhere and way more greenhouse gases.

297 points by dnetesn 5y ago

Great article. If you're interested in this topic, recommend watching "Living Soil" documentary on YT: https://youtu.be/ntJouJhLM48 https://youtu.be/ntJouJhLM48

andrewclunn 5y ago

No mention of worms and their importance in healthy soil? Or the impact of pesticides on them?

AlexandrB 5y ago
It's not just worms. We're lucky to have excellent soil in our backyard and it's absolutely crawling with millipedes, isopods, and springtails.
- kingsloi 5y ago
  I have a vermicompost bin in my kitchen, I'm in awe whenever I open it at just how many bugs there are in there just doin' their thing, and it's all self contained. The only "pest" I've had has been ants entering the bin and stealing food. Once I wrapped some double sided tape on the legs, that cleared up that. Even my wife likes 'em.
hinkley 5y ago
The northern Midwest has no native worms. They all died in the last ice age. It’s all insect and microbe decay. Imported worms are slowly changing what trees can grow. The seedlings are adapted to life in a thick duff layer that the worms eat.
- carapace 5y ago
  As someone who was 110% pro-worm this was a bitter pill to swallow, but yeah, my beloved compost worms (Eisenia foetida) are a "non-native invasive" species.[1] "And so it goes." I wonder about the ecological equilibrium that might obtain in a thousand years... [1] "Eisenia fetida worms are native to Europe, but have been introduced (both intentionally and unintentionally) to every other continent except Antarctica." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eisenia_fetida https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eisenia_fetida
  - hinkley 5y ago
    I moved so that solved the problem, but the common wisdom does seem to be that Eisenia foetida colonies rarely survive more than a couple years, since they don't burrow far and they aren't cold adapted. If you have to pick a worm, that certainly beats nightcrawlers by a mile. I'm told that they think most incursions are caused by fishing expeditions where the fisherman releases the worms at the end of the day, rather than carting them back home. You can track the progress outward in a circle, not unlike fungal fairy rings. In a pinch you can start an Eisenia foetida worm bin by calling all of the bait shops to see who can sell you a large container of them. So clearly they're an option for fisherman.

beckman466 5y ago

wish i could upvote this a hundred times. i love the work of Million Belay with The Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA) (https://afsafrica.org https://afsafrica.org) as well as with the Stockholm Resilience Agency. this video of his and others like it really drove home the important core reasons to focus on soil health: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ZQrufxn990 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ZQrufxn990 (https://graid.earth/a-resilient-food-future-for-the-people-of-the-forest/ https://graid.earth/a-resilient-food-future-for-the-people-o...) also i think this video about Ernst Götsch and his 'syntropic' agroforestry is very exciting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSPNRu4ZPvE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSPNRu4ZPvE

maxerickson 5y ago

The breakdown I'd like to see is a histogram of where calories come from, binned by the size of the farm they are grown on. Most farms (and farmland) in the US are still classified as family farms. As long as they are closely held, farms managing thousands of acres are family farms. https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/farm-economy/land-use-land-value-tenure/farmland-ownership-and-tenure/ https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/farm-economy/land-use-land-v... The good news if if you convince an industrial farmer that something will be more profitable, they will do it, at least in aggregate they don't resist better methods for no reason.

jelliclesfarm 5y ago
Family farms operate about half of America’s farmland and they are responsible for about 21% of production. Link: https://www.usda.gov/media/blog/2020/01/23/look-americas-family-farms https://www.usda.gov/media/blog/2020/01/23/look-americas-fam... Family farms grow commodity and fiber and not necessarily food calories. ‘Industrial farmer’ will toe the line of the inputs industry(feed, fertilizer and weedicides) and collect subsidies. Profitability doesn’t relate to good soil practices. Profit is extracted from all that ancillary to the food production industry. Example: There is no money in growing food. The profit comes if you own your truck lines and part of the supply chain. Or Agtech or inputs make more money than the proceeds of actual food. Subsidies make up most farm income and pushing more farmers into debt and bankruptcy. It’s not very rosy. Industrial farms have polluted our waters and poisoned our soils that habitat and eco systems are entirely decimated. And crop diversity is also severely compromised and we lose so much variety and cultivars. That’s why we get tasteless red delicious apples and Roma tomatoes because it’s easy to mechanize to feed billions cheap food. In my opinion, I think there should be two kinds of food. Cheap Soylent kind of nutritious goop to stave off malnutrition and starvation in industrial factory farms with strict protocols to deal with the environmental impact and then real food whose price reflects the true cost of growing food for billions cheaply. But all ag and food production should be termed industrial as it is the erasure of nature and habitat and eco systems. I am very much in favour of the late great E.O.Wilson’s Half Earth proposal and I think it should be considered in earnest to save our planet.
- 5y ago

abdullahkhalids 5y ago

Under this heading, > Myth 2: Large farms are more efficient The author cites two studies, one from 1989 and and one from 1992, to claim that large farms are not more efficient. I feel like 30 years of technological advancements might have changed that. So the evidence seems very weak to me. P.S. I would really want to live in a universe where small farms were more efficient than large ones. But evidence is evidence.

Ensorceled 5y ago
It's also a bit weasel wordy .. "While large farms excel at producing a lot of a particular crop – like corn or wheat – small diversified farms produce more food and more kinds of food per hectare overall." I believe in the movement and have seen what factory farming does to a place first hand, but I always cringe when movements try to turn cons into pros with misleading comparisons.
- goda90 5y ago
  I think we just don't have a settled definition of efficiency. I've seen farmers claim that using the right rotations, edible cover crops, and grazing cattle and free-range chickens leads to more calories per acre, more diverse crops and all without fertilizers or pesticides. But no claims about farmer and machinery time per acre. Factory farming is probably fewer farmers and fewer tractors per calorie.
  - Ensorceled 5y ago
    Agreed. My grandfather raised 20-30 dairy cows on 200 acres. Horse and plow. Little fertilizer. Crop rotation (pasture/clover/hay). Lots of child labour. Wood lot for firewood at the back. Better for the land, but I wouldn't be that kind of farmer for anything. Now large dairy farms are running hundreds of head of cattle with only a couple of full time workers but tend to use quite a bit more acres per cow (or just plain buy hay and other feed from other places).
    - 5y ago

Pxtl 5y ago

I've always said, sustainable soil management techniques getting incorporated into conventional farming will be the ultimate benefit provided by the organic farming movement.

kickout 5y ago
Not a bad prediction and I agree. Would the organic food people be okay with that though? Some of those people want to convert 100% to organic, which is obviously not scalable or sustainable (ironically).
- goodpoint 5y ago
  > obviously not scalable or sustainable reliable citation needed.
  - kickout 5y ago
    https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/10/22/132497/sorryorganic-farming-is-actually-worse-for-climate-change/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/10/22/132497/sorryorga... Also source: me. Been in agriculture for a long time. Have good friends that _run large organic farms_ (1,000-4,000 acres).
  - goodpoint 5y ago
    A recent paper on Nature with 68 citations describes organic farming as sustainable: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-019-0266-6 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-019-0266-6

colechristensen 5y ago

This strikes me as someone who formed a conclusion and went out to go find supporting evidence to write about. It is also wrong. The key to feeding the world was the Green Revolution, the system of plant variety and hybrid development, fertilization, pest management, and mechanization with related techniques which developed the capacity to feed the planet in the mid 20th century. Without it the world’s population would have been limited by starvation billions of people ago. There are good arguments that those techniques can be significantly improved upon, but the people pushing for them generally don’t have very much of an idea of how things work and just tend to repeat each other’s “bro science”. https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Revolution https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Revolution

adityaathalye 5y ago
Not to dispute your assertions, but perhaps it's worth looking at an alternate viewpoint. I found Masanobu Fukuoka's "The One-Straw Revolution" quite compelling. In it, Fukuoka argues for finding ways to diversify plant variety, improve soil quality and fertilization, manage pests such that external input (mechanization, fertilizers, pesticides, heavy irrigation) is not needed in the first place. All while improving yields year after year. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/976905.The_One_Straw_Revolution https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/976905.The_One_Straw_Rev... A dear friend has been applying the so-called "natural farming" principles for about a quarter of a century now, and swears by it. His farm is beautiful in a wabi-sabi sense, and is abundant like a forest. (edit: language, clarified sentence)
- kickout 5y ago
  It's clear these practices don't scale. It's like saying you only need to hire 1 software dev and have them do everything, perfectly. When you find that 1 dev, it looks great. Your friend's farm is likely a well run operation and he might be a top 1% farmer (how ever you would quantify that). Also you make no mention of profitability, most farms are for profit and need to generate positive cash flow, regardless of practices. Oftentimes these sustainable practices are antagonistic to profitability, a complicated problem people in ag/tech/engineering/policy are working to resolve.

cletus 5y ago

This article feels intellectually dishonest. > According to a recent U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) report, family farms produce over three-quarters of the world’s food. Here's a bunch of data [1]. You see some obvious patterns. Firstly, large farms dominate the developed world. Developing farms dominate the developing world. The reason for this should be obvious: labour cost is the driving factor. Labor is cheap in the developed world. This makes farming machinery really expensive in labour terms. In the developed world, this isn't the case. Mechanized agriculture favors large farms so here you are. I'm not sure we should be celebrating that a large amount of the world's population is growing and tending food by hand. > Conventional farming practices that degrade soil health undermine humanity’s ability to continue feeding everyone over the long run. So this I somewhat agree with. It used to be (or at least it feels like this is the case?) that in years past there was a more conscious effort to rotate crops to rehab the soil whereas now it seems like we bridge this gap chemically. I don't think "healthy soil" is the key here however. The bigger factor is energy cost. Want to make more soil? You can do that... with sufficient energy. Want fresh water? You can desalinate if you have to. The limiting factor is... energy. Want to improve land usage with so-called "vertical farming"? The limiting factor there is, you guessed it, energy. I actually look forward to a future with sufficient automation and cheap energy such that very few humans are actually required for food production. [1]: https://ourworldindata.org/farm-size https://ourworldindata.org/farm-size

hazza_n_dazza 5y ago
you should read bill gates blog, you might get along ;) Nice ideas, but back to earth and fix the problems now by doing less. Not racing to the stars and destroying more on the way. Dont worry, humanity will have unlimited energy (hey dont we already) and will get tho the stars. Best not to destroy the planet on the way.

foxhop 5y ago

This planet is huge, we have near infinite energy extruding and emitting from the sun. The universe is huge. The planets surface is huge. The earth crust is huge. Overpopulation is a myth if we can spread out and not overwhelm specific places of our world. Slow down on the extraction. Slow down on the waste. Let us multiply not divide. If you want to learn more, check out the YouTube channel listed in my profile. The universe is a Trivium, inputs > processing > outputs Pollution is the piling up of byproducts or inert or semi-inert materials. Things which are no longer useful or helpful inside biological bodies. Pollution bio accumulates inside all bodies, including our earth. We grow our inputs (food) in a very sensitive edge between atmosphere and earth's crust, 0-30 or so feet. Let us maximize the edges, reduce pollution, & multiply and share our soil & soil growing skills.

aliswe 5y ago
overpopulation, i mean population growth speed, has been demonstrated to take only a few years to die off in certain cases.

shafyy 5y ago

The real key to feeding the world and not destroying the planet is to stop eating animals and animal products. End of story.

hall0ween 5y ago
With all due respect, without evidence your argument is baseless. I think your appealing to your ethos to persuade others (and on the internet what authority do you have?). I agree the world population should stop eating animals, but why? My reasons are: (1) morally dubious -- the majority of animals raised to be eaten live in squalor. It is below me, personally, to eat an animal raised in those conditions. For many people it isn't AND this doesn't support the argument that not eating animals is better for the planet. (2) environmental impact -- the UN put out a list some years ago stating that to reduce environmental impact, consuming less animal and animal product is the way to go. Here is one list [0] indicting that among a collection of behavioral changes, eating more vegetables is helpful. Here is another [1] indicating that to reduce carbon footprint, travel (rather than diet) are primary ways to do so. [0] https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/16-ways-take-action-climate https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/16-ways-take-act... [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-52719662 https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-52719662 End of story? You must provide more than internet ethos to persuade an audience!
- shafyy 5y ago
  You're right, I should have provided a source. In the end, it's basic physics, really. If you make a plant, and feed that plant to an animal, and then eat that animal, your caloric conversion rate will always be lower than eating the plant directly lest you violate the laws of thermodynamics. But, here's a really good summary by Our World in Data going into more detail: https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]

chimere 5y ago

If you're interested in healthy soils, and particularly their enormous potential for carbon sequestration, consider joining my team at Yard Stick! We're building hardware that measures soil carbon in-situ, 90% cheaper than conventional methods. Currently hiring a few different hardware roles: https://useyardstick.notion.site/useyardstick/Careers-at-Yard-Stick-f58f4300a69646d0b0c0f630dd8b2ad8 https://useyardstick.notion.site/useyardstick/Careers-at-Yar...

nerdponx 5y ago
Who is a customer for a product like this?
- AtlasBarfed 5y ago
  You'd probably need an effective carbon economy and regulatory framework that would reward soil with good carbon sequestration. But to your point, the masters human race would rather destroy themselves that do things like that.
  - hammock 5y ago
    No. Healthy soil means high carbon content (mycelium, microbes etc). "Dead soil" that has been tilled too much will have fucked up nitrogen and other cycles, requiring irrigation, supplemental fertilizer and more pesticides. The climate crisis angle is just icing on the cake.
- tastyfreeze 5y ago
  I would like one for home gardening. Soil carbon is one measure of soil health.
  - hazza_n_dazza 5y ago
    stick your finger in and see if it is black with humus!
- chimere 5y ago

desktopninja 5y ago

Maybe paid too much attention in that "elective" class Environmental Science in college but this book should have been taken seriously since its publication: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_Spring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_Spring

colechristensen 5y ago
Silent Spring is emotionally manipulative hyperbole which does harm to reasonable progress because it was among to introduce the catastrophizing of environmental issues which creates zealots and anti-zealots instead of a narrative dominated by pragmatic improvement and optimization.
- carapace 5y ago
  In context (and hindsight) it was the necessary "emotionally manipulative hyperbole" to kick off the whole shebang, eh?
  - colechristensen 5y ago
    I don’t know about “necessarily”, going back and imagining history happening differently isn’t always a fruitful activity. There were certainly people interested in preserving high quality environments and concerned with degradation before the more extreme and hyperbole laden “environmental movement” One can only guess how things would have evolved differently, but people did have successes before the exaggeration became common, and overreaction and political splits to extreme views is currently a significant obstacle to progress. When you exaggerate, you create opposition who do too.
    - LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
      Ahem. Create opposition? By whom? Big multinationals which have budgets for PR greenwashing everything? And lawyers to mute dissent? Which has been proven again and again after the fact? When things were already broken? See it as an asymmetric answer in the war of attrition by the commercial killers of the environment.

otrahuevada 5y ago

According to this people: https://www.unep.org/thinkeatsave/get-informed/worldwide-food-waste https://www.unep.org/thinkeatsave/get-informed/worldwide-foo... about a third of the food produced is thrown away along with half the water used to produce it. Strikes me as an obviously improvable thing, as long as we're as a species capable of reining in the market forces at play. But then again, we as a community don't seem to able to stop a couple hundred maladaptive nerds from using downvotes as a "me no likey" button, so there's that.

nyokodo 5y ago
> as long as we're as a species capable of reining in the market forces at play. A better phrase would be “reining in the perverse incentives at play” as government is just as prone to give in to perverse incentives or regulatory capture that promote waste.

fredrikholm 5y ago

There's a small pot of land in my city that starts right where one of our parks end. It's not fenced, the amount of traffic (people, dogs, cats, trucks) is similar to that of the park. On that land, grass grows freely, bushes stretch and grow at will, weeds come and go throughout the year. Native flowers bloom seemingly out of nowhere. There's always bees, mosquitoes, ticks, birds and the likes during the warmer months. Every fall, a new layer of mulch forms as leaves, plant matter and dog poop gets stuck in the grass and plants, protecting the soil from both heat and winter in the coming year. On the park land, there is an annual cycle of desperate attempts to keep the grasses and bushes alive. Each fall, months of cutting the grasses short, plucking weeds, removing leaves and plant matter, cutting down bushes to "encourage root growth" and general practices that expose the soil to sunlight during dry months have decimated most plants. By winter, something like half of all grasses are gone, a small section of bushes get diseased and die off, leaving only a few patches of healthy soil versus a large amount of compacted earth and/or mud that gets washed away during heavy rain fall. Each spring, the city drives heavy machinery to replant most of the grass(es) again. The earth being heavily compacted, all seeds land on top of the soil. They subsequently dry out in the sun, and a large majority of them never get to root. The regrowth of grass is either via direct transplant (soil and everything) or when people in the neighbourhood plants their own seeds (and make sure to water them) after deaf complaints to the city/municipality. Taking inspiration, we tried to replicate such a system for our shared courtyard. Branches, twigs, leaves and food waste is composted and used as mulch (though we started with store-bought wood chips). No dirt is exposed to sunlight or frost, only plants are. Barely no effort to remove weeds as very few are strong enough to grow through all that mulch. When we are forced to restrict water usage during the driest months, most plants pull through, with some having minor die off or they just look droopy and sad until next rainfall. The neighbours (three courtyards) do it the more traditional way of removing leaves, dead plants and pulling the large(r) amount of weeds that pop up in the barren soil. During years when water use is restricted, a lot of their plants and flowers dry up and die, causing them to buy and replant new ones the season after. We've managed to convince some by showing them our results, but so far it's only us in our block that does this. It's madness, and I wouldn't be suprised if there were similar stories with (industrialized, work-intensive) farming.

jaxr 5y ago

Although the article seems very poor, for motives already stated by other posters, I think there is a legitimate debate that is not being taken. Industrial farming is pretty bad in ecological terms. Organic farming might be better, but the incentives are just not there. As with many of climate-related issues today vs capitalism, the problem seems to be costs externalization. This case seems trickier than atmospheric emissions because in many case, people degrading the soil actually owns the land, which would affect long-term yields. However, money earned today might compound better than long term yield degradation, which is also harder to grasp to us humans?

hammock 5y ago
>climate-related issues *Environmental issues

jeromenerf 5y ago

> simplistic idea is the real key to misplaced expectations I have spent some time playing with gpt3 and have almost been able to generate the article and the top comments by iterating over “permaculture”, “green revolution”, “vegetarian” and “technology”.

Out_of_Characte 5y ago

This article clearly fails to convince the HN crowd despite being correct on every claim. Those who have never been to a farm do not understand the importance of 'dead soil' its not some utopian dream to want to reduce both pesticides and reliance on fertilizers. Its an necessity. The excessive use of pesticides and fertilizer is the agricultural ponzi scheme, every year you're repaying all your debts with more of what is slowly reducing yields. It might have saved millions of people from starvation during the population boom but now it is most definitely a giant risk to the future crops that must grow. I'll link sources later but generally, all pesticide use is slowly increasing due to diseases becoming resilient against the safest pesticides and because monoculture growing (large single crop farms) is inherently bad at managing disease. I hate to bring up Coronavirus but people must learn that despite our intelligence, viruses, bacteria and parasites are most definitely still smarter than our defences. especially when it comes down to basic chemicals we spray everywhere or dare I say it, vaccines. Failing to understand how to use the tools available to us risks losing the very tools upholding society. We saw it with antibiotics, we're seeing it with pesticides and we're going to see nature out-evolving us if we're not cognizant of the dangers.

searine 5y ago
Biological resistance is inevitable if there is a mild single mode of action. It doesn't matter if you are organic, permaculture or conventional. If you use a single mode of action that lets some survive, it will be resisted eventually. Did you know insects can develop resistance to crop rotations and spring burns? Resistance isn't limited to chemicals. How do you fix this? Multiple, overlapping modes of action. If we can effectively control HIV and it's extremely high mutation rate, we handle a few weeds.

davesailer 5y ago

Good read... "Dirt to Soil One Family's Journey into Regenerative Agriculture", by Gabe Brown, 2018 Gabe Brown didn't set out to change the world when he first started working alongside his father-in-law on the family farm in North Dakota. But as a series of weather-related crop disasters put Brown and his wife, Shelly, in desperate financial straits, they started making bold changes to their farm. Brown―in an effort to simply survive―began experimenting with new practices he'd learned about from reading and talking with innovative researchers and ranchers. As he and his family struggled to keep the farm viable, they found themselves on an amazing journey into a new type of farming: regenerative agriculture. Brown dropped the use of most of the herbicides, insecticides, and synthetic fertilizers that are a standard part of conventional agriculture. He switched to no-till planting, started planting diverse cover crops mixes, and changed his grazing practices. In so doing Brown transformed a degraded farm ecosystem into one full of life―starting with the soil and working his way up, one plant and one animal at a time. In Dirt to Soil Gabe Brown tells the story of that amazing journey and offers a wealth of innovative solutions to our most pressing and complex contemporary agricultural challenge―restoring the soil. The Brown's Ranch model, developed over twenty years of experimentation and refinement, focuses on regenerating resources by continuously enhancing the living biology in the soil. Using regenerative agricultural principles, Brown's Ranch has grown several inches of new topsoil in only twenty years! The 5,000-acre ranch profitably produces a wide variety of cash crops and cover crops as well as grass-finished beef and lamb, pastured laying hens, broilers, and pastured pork, all marketed directly to consumers. The key is how we think, Brown says. In the industrial agricultural model, all thoughts are focused on killing things. But that mindset was also killing diversity, soil, and profit, Brown realized. Now he channels his creative thinking toward how he can get more life on the land―more plants, animals, and beneficial insects. "The greatest roadblock to solving a problem," Brown says, "is the human mind." One source: https://u1lib.org/book/5283239/7bd9a9 https://u1lib.org/book/5283239/7bd9a9 38.14 MB About the Author Gabe Brown is a pioneer of the soil-health movement and has been named one of the twenty-five most influential agricultural leaders in the United States. Brown, his wife, Shelly, and son, Paul, own Brown’s Ranch, a holistic, diversified 5,000-acre farm and ranch near Bismarck, North Dakota. The Browns integrate their grazing and no-till cropping systems, which include cash crops and multispecies cover crops along with all- natural, grass-finished beef and lamb, pastured pork, and laying hens. The Brown family has received a Growing Green Award from the Natural Resources Defense Council, an Environmental Stewardship Award from the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, and the USA Zero-Till Farmer of the Year Award.

deeviant 5y ago

Small farms use absurd amounts of labor, the cost of which in the developed countries would go far beyond "economically infeasible" to "actually impossible". The modern world is not going to go back to subsistence farming, nor should it. Agriculture does need a revolution, but not in the direction that this article wants it. As far as what direction to take Ag, my company is working on technology that reduces herbicide usage by 70+% in the largest sector: row crops, and it's going to hit the fields in a big way very soon. Leveraging the advances in robotics and AI to treat each plant individually and efficiently as possible will revolutionize Ag. Crop inputs can be reduced, new chemistries even organic ones may be unlocked for large scale use, the changes that will be wrought when this technology reaches maturity and large-scale market penetration will change Ag fundamentally, for the better.

colechristensen 5y ago
It is doubtful that crop input costs will be reduced as companies like yours will seek to capture the savings in chemical costs by charging for the usage of the machinery. I’m not saying that’s necessarily bad.
- deeviant 5y ago
  Since the more advanced machinery costs more, a customer would not buy it unless it saves them money, thus a significant enough amount of the savings must be realized by the customer after the increased cost to have any reasonable chance of market success: the farmer must win as well or the product is doomed. In this way, the market does keep a company honest. Farmers are absolutely incredible businessman, they will have nothing to do with technology that only makes money for somebody else. Also, we generally sell our equipment and the vast majority is customer or Ag service provider owned.
hinkley 5y ago
Many of these people are trying to get the farm animals to do the labor, rather than humans. These conveniences and petrochemicals and predicated in an infinite supply of fossil fuels. Something has to change, and if we don’t change it then Time will do it for us.

carapace 5y ago

I've been doing small backyard-scale experiments with soil-building the last few years and I've come around to the viewpoint that soil should be thought of as a kind of distributed organism. (Someone once called this the "Gaia hypothesis writ small".) The soil organism is made up of myriad species of fungi, bacteria, insects, etc., but it seems to work as a whole (cf. Michael Levin's work, like "What Bodies Think About: Bioelectric Computation Outside the Nervous System - NeurIPS 2018" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjD1aLm4Thg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjD1aLm4Thg ) In any event, what I've found is that the health of the crops is most easily influenced by looking after the health of the soil (duh?) and that, if you get the soil right, the plants seem like they can't help but grow vigorously.

pohl 5y ago
Not more than a month ago I spent almost an hour trying, unsuccessfully, to google that Michael Levin talk, having forgotten his name, the title, the forum, etc. Thank you, thank you for the link!
vollmarj 5y ago
Me too! Could you say more about what kinds of experiments you've been doing and how you are measuring the results? I've been using the Haney Soil Test along with Phospholipid Fatty Acid Analysis (PLFA) to understand how my management practices have been impacting overall soil health and microbe communities. I've been thinking about how I wish I could collaborate more with others on research to help build a dataset that can be used to quantify the effects of regenerative farming.
- hazza_n_dazza 5y ago
  Measuring humus is a great start to measuring soil quality. Simply looking at the 'black' left on ones hands after feeling the soil is a great start. It is an established science (soil management), just not applied in commercial farming very often.
- carapace 5y ago
  I haven't done anything quite that sophisticated! I have only "anecdata" to contribute. We are basically on sand dunes here and our "soil" is what I call "dirty sand". I had a bunch of wood chips with some chicken manure and feathers in it and I spread that about six inches deep over a bare patch of sand. I added potatoes and kept it moist. Now, a year and a half later, there's a layer of rich living soil between the sand and the wood chips. There are lots of worms and other critters living in there, and I have plants growing well. It's January and I've got broccoli, blooming nasturtiums, fava beans, and potatoes of course, plus a lot of other things. Mushrooms appear regularly too. I don't add any fertilizer or anything.

joe_the_user 5y ago

National Research Council study quoted in article: "A well-managed alternative farming systems nearly always use less synthetic chemical pesticides, fertilizers, and antibiotics per unit of production than conventional farms." There's a certain disingenuousness in this rhetoric. A skilled, professional bicycle frame builder can build a frame that's stronger with less materials than the frames that come out of semi-automated plants in Korea. But that doesn't mean the framebuilder is "more efficient". Industrial agriculture is far more efficient in terms of labor. That's what matters in the process of transforming society. Notably, the labor freed up by industrial agriculture can be used to very efficiently accumulate more resources to be put into agriculture and even more knowledge. Which isn't to say small scale farms don't some virtues but let's be clear what's going on.

TaylorAlexander 5y ago
I don’t think it’s disingenuous to say that certain types of farms use less harmful chemicals. But if you know that they take more labor then one could ask, how can we reduce the labor requirements of small farms to make those benefits scale? For my part I’m designing a solar powered farming robot that is totally open source, with the hope that this will lead to low automation costs for small regenerative organic farms. https://community.twistedfields.com/t/a-closer-look-at-acorn-our-open-source-precision-farming-rover/108 https://community.twistedfields.com/t/a-closer-look-at-acorn...
nithril 5y ago
It requires far more knowledge: an in depth understanding of the agriculture relating sciences. But less pesticides, less fertilizers, no-till certainly reduces the labor.
- jazzyjackson 5y ago
  > But less pesticides, less fertilizers, no-till certainly reduces the labor. How do you figure? Pesticide, Fertilization, Tilling and Harvesting are precisely the types of labor that has been automated and is now done 60-feet wide by 4 miles an hour.

chubot 5y ago

I really liked this documentary! Kiss the Ground (2020) https://www.netflix.com/title/81321999 https://www.netflix.com/title/81321999 Some striking pictures of two fields next to each other, and really inspiring grit by intelligent farmers

dghughes 5y ago

Common sense in politics is also key. My Canadian province grows different crops but potatoes are the big crop here 25% of all potatoes bought in Canada. This summer was perfect and in the fall it was a bumper crop it was amazing. But then two fields out of hundred tested positive for a plant virus called potato wart. It's an ugly fungus on the potato but it's harmless to humans. There are now millions of pounds of perfectly fine potatoes that can't be sold. The biggest market the US will not buy them. It was just a few potatoes out of millions of pounds. The remaining are for food only and can't grow into a plant. Even Puerto Rico which buys a lot of potatoes grown here (30%?). They don't grow potatoes in Puerto Rico so a fungus is not a threat. But it is not permitted to buy any potatoes from Canada (archaic shipping laws don't help) but specifically no potatoes from here PEI. They can't even give them away since it takes too long to ship them and who will pay the labour costs, or the fuel to ship them? They need to be disposed of before they rot. So even if you as a farmer grow a crop and lots of it there are laws that can ruin your day. And that's after you spent 18 hour days all summer growing a good crop.

jazzyjackson 5y ago
Can rotting potatoes not be used in building soil? It won't be profitable, but its better than landfilling... what is the manner of disposal anyway?
- dghughes 5y ago
  Here is what my local government has about disposal: Can potato waste be buried in abandoned or operating excavation pits? No. Potato waste is organic and being that all excavation pits have exposed bedrock in them, which creates an easy access to the groundwater table, the organic waste can contaminate it. https://www.princeedwardisland.ca/en/information/agriculture-and-land/guidelines-disposal-cull-potatoes https://www.princeedwardisland.ca/en/information/agriculture... Some farmers are using tractors with snowblower attachment to shred the potatoes. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/prince-edward-island/pei-potatoes-destroying-memories-1.6286477 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/prince-edward-island/pei-pota...
halpert 5y ago

Ericson2314 5y ago

Once read a very scary prediction on HN that if the planet warms all the temperate soils will decompose to gases and non-bidodegrable stuff instead of accumulating, and so we'll have lousy tropical soil everywhere and way more greenhouse gases.