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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 compellin

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.
- adityaathalye 5y ago
  > It's clear these practices don't scale. Citation needed. Agriculture is one of humanity's largest-scale activities.[1] The vast majority of the world's farmland is smallhold. [2] The practices in Fukuoka's books are fundamentally smallhold practices. My friend's farm is a wee 10 acre plot. > Also you make no mention of profitability, most farms are for profit and need to generate positive cash flow, regardless of practices. Depends on how you look at it. If you see the state of agriculture worldwide, the evidence points to the contrary. Farming is unsustainable sans debt. As a system, farmland does not obey economic laws. In my opinion, the state of US agriculture is telling. 1% of the country's population operating giant farmlands needing super-high direct input costs, benefiting from just the massive available landmass not yet homesteaded, and indirectly beholden to subsidy that goes to Oil & Natural gas. The sector flounders under crippling debt. [3] Perhaps the purely profit-oriented standpoint is worth questioning. What would the world look like if agriculture, like education, healthcare, air, and water be thought of as a public benefit enterprise rather than a private profit-driven enterprise? And might this public-benefit attitude also change labour dynamics? It is hard work, but plenty of people are happy working with their hands. Many would live peacefully, if the economic and social environment weren't so hostile to human labour. The contrarian viewpoint is this: The reason why agriculture is hard is because it is capital intensive and wide open to tail risks. The antidote would be to minimize capital investment, and diversify the "portfolio" in holding size, crops, trees, communities and so forth. [1] https://ourworldindata.org/global-land-for-agriculture https://ourworldindata.org/global-land-for-agriculture [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smallholding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smallholding [3] https://time.com/5736789/small-american-farmers-debt-crisis-extinction/ https://time.com/5736789/small-american-farmers-debt-crisis-...
  - kickout 5y ago
    There are plenty of citations demonstrating organic practices cannot realistically replace even 50% of current production. You clearly know how to Google. This comment reads like socialism fan-fic. How well did communal/collective farms work for the Soviet Union and or China? The only way that has been proven to not starve millions of people has been to incentive food production in a pseudo-capitialistic manner (and yes, they are usually heavily subsidized for great reasons). If you made millions doing ad tech in silicon valley and want to play farmer on your 10 acre plot, great. Agriculture and food production are scaled to the gills currently. They got this way through incredible innovation. People were doing 'organic practices' for hundreds of years. It didn't scale. Mechanization, synthetic fertilizer, and plant science _did_ scale, however and that's why our systems looks like they do. The innovations needed to accomplish this were truly mind bending from several disciplines. Instead of celebrating these achievements, the conversation has been hijacked/lost because for profits companies took advantage of murky/poor regulation and are currently rent-seeking to squeeze every last dollar out of the system. Those problems can be fixed, but nobody is focusing on that, there too busy imagine some irrational alternate that simply cannot exist with ~9 billion people, many of which will begin eating more calories and more input intensive calories (meat) as time moves forward. Embrace that scale, and innovate from there.
    - adityaathalye 5y ago
      Hm, to clarify, I'm coming at it from a systems point of view. Available energy limits populations. Suppose the green revolution didn't happen, where would world population be? It's not possible to A/B test these things, of course. Also I did not say anything about the type of economic system. I'm just doing scenarios here. If you have credible research to back up your claims, I'll be more than happy to alter my opinion. (edit: typos)
      - Retric 5y ago
        From a systems point of view the changes where dramatic. "Farmers today grow five times as much corn as they did in the 1930s – on 20 percent less land. That is 13 million acres or 20,000 square miles, twice the size of Massachusetts. The yield per acre has skyrocketed from 24 bushels in 1931 to 154 now, or a six-fold gain. And the Agriculture Department expects the average yield per acre to double in the next 25 years." https://mjperry.blogspot.com/2011/05/corn-yields-have-increased-6x-since.html https://mjperry.blogspot.com/2011/05/corn-yields-have-increa... “From 1866, the first year USDA began to publish corn yield estimates, through about 1936, yields of open-pollinated corn varieties in the U.S. remained fairly stagnant and averaged about 26 bu/ac (1.6 MT/ha) throughout that 70-year period. Amazingly, the historical data indicate there was no appreciable change in productivity during that entire time period (Fig. 1), even though farmers’ seed-saving practices represented a form of plant breeding.” https://agfax.com/2017/05/25/corn-historical-grain-yields-for-the-u-s/ https://agfax.com/2017/05/25/corn-historical-grain-yields-fo... PS: Of of note in 1927 there where 2 billion people worldwide and starvation was still common. Growing from 1 billion in 1804 or doubling in 123 years the difference largely came down to an increase in the amount of farmland and a slow increase in productivity.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
camgunz 5y ago
This reminds me of this video I watched about a farming family in Wisconsin. It's obviously high-level and anecdata, but I think it's along the same lines as your post and OP: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRPP4Ilpxso https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRPP4Ilpxso
colechristensen 5y ago
When the description of your book includes "purifying the human spirit" the immediate reaction is that you've found a way to sell books to hippies, and your advice on farming is perhaps suspect. There is a lot of speculation out there about how things might be done, but the reality is how things have actually been done were with the Green Revolution a.k.a. conventional farming. A few individuals with a hobby farm selling food to rich people isn't a solution to world agriculture problems. Most of these techniques are labor heavy and replacing machines with people either creates an underclass of slave-like labor or makes food cost a huge portion of where your income goes to. They also often use fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, etc. but ones which are considered "natural" but not necessarily (and often definitely not) any less poisonous than synthetic alternatives. Like I said before, there are techniques, opportunities to improve, but these things aren't going to come from hippies thinking their garden is going to save the world or there 1/8 of an acre operation is going to scale to thousand acre farms. Their plans usually would involve completely reorganizing the world economy in infeasible ways only possible if everybody was an angel and shared exactly the same ideas.
- adityaathalye 5y ago
  Yours is a valid critique. I'm not a fan of woo language either. At the same time, it's hard to ignore the results I've seen first-hand. Let's ignore the woo language and ignore the book and ignore my suggested misunderstanding of how any of it is supposed to work. What is the long-range systems outlook of current ag practices? Is it sustainable? If not, what scale of economic policy change will we have to undertake to make it work sustainably? We are of course talking about the entire system and not a few oddball smallhold farmers.
  - colechristensen 5y ago
    >sustainable This is a bit of a weasel word overloaded by usage without much understanding of what is meant. Agriculture is not one thing. A whole lot of modern practices are indeed quite sustainable over very long periods, some others... less surely so, some, like burning down rain forests to farm for a few years and then moving on, obviously not. A whole lot of people get a little bit of information and just keep repeating "modern practices are unsustainable, we need to do X!" but this is vague and involves almost no understanding. What you need is actual scientists studying particular practices in particular areas commenting on the long term viability of certain behaviors and how they might be changed. But like many things the popular narrative is a good vs. evil where one vague thing is seen as bad and another good without really getting into what they're talking about. It's a complex field, I'm no expert but I know more than enough to see when somebody doesn't know anything, and unfortunately most of the conversations are by people who don't know anything. There are a lot of things which could be better and are indeed getting better. Automation needs to get better for non-grain farming so that the ratio of grains vs. other foods is altered in production and consumption. Automation could get better so you could have large fields growing multiple species at the same time without intensive human labor. Automation could get better so that weeds could be mechanically picked instead of whole fields getting sprayed with herbicides, so individual weeds could be sprayed with herbicides instead of crop plants. Understanding of soil fungi interactions with minerals and plants and how to grow and maintain this fungi and how to select for species of fungi which result in higher yields. There's a lot, it involves knowing and understanding specifics with an interest towards long term and not attaching broad labels to vague terms.

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.

adityaathalye 5y ago
> It's clear these practices don't scale. Citation needed. Agriculture is one of humanity's largest-scale activities.[1] The vast majority of the world's farmland is smallhold. [2] The practices in Fukuoka's books are fundamentally smallhold practices. My friend's farm is a wee 10 acre plot. > Also you make no mention of profitability, most farms are for profit and need to generate positive cash flow, regardless of practices. Depends on how you look at it. If you see the state of agriculture worldwide, the evidence points to the contrary. Farming is unsustainable sans debt. As a system, farmland does not obey economic laws. In my opinion, the state of US agriculture is telling. 1% of the country's population operating giant farmlands needing super-high direct input costs, benefiting from just the massive available landmass not yet homesteaded, and indirectly beholden to subsidy that goes to Oil & Natural gas. The sector flounders under crippling debt. [3] Perhaps the purely profit-oriented standpoint is worth questioning. What would the world look like if agriculture, like education, healthcare, air, and water be thought of as a public benefit enterprise rather than a private profit-driven enterprise? And might this public-benefit attitude also change labour dynamics? It is hard work, but plenty of people are happy working with their hands. Many would live peacefully, if the economic and social environment weren't so hostile to human labour. The contrarian viewpoint is this: The reason why agriculture is hard is because it is capital intensive and wide open to tail risks. The antidote would be to minimize capital investment, and diversify the "portfolio" in holding size, crops, trees, communities and so forth. [1] https://ourworldindata.org/global-land-for-agriculture https://ourworldindata.org/global-land-for-agriculture [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smallholding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smallholding [3] https://time.com/5736789/small-american-farmers-debt-crisis-extinction/ https://time.com/5736789/small-american-farmers-debt-crisis-...
- kickout 5y ago
  There are plenty of citations demonstrating organic practices cannot realistically replace even 50% of current production. You clearly know how to Google. This comment reads like socialism fan-fic. How well did communal/collective farms work for the Soviet Union and or China? The only way that has been proven to not starve millions of people has been to incentive food production in a pseudo-capitialistic manner (and yes, they are usually heavily subsidized for great reasons). If you made millions doing ad tech in silicon valley and want to play farmer on your 10 acre plot, great. Agriculture and food production are scaled to the gills currently. They got this way through incredible innovation. People were doing 'organic practices' for hundreds of years. It didn't scale. Mechanization, synthetic fertilizer, and plant science _did_ scale, however and that's why our systems looks like they do. The innovations needed to accomplish this were truly mind bending from several disciplines. Instead of celebrating these achievements, the conversation has been hijacked/lost because for profits companies took advantage of murky/poor regulation and are currently rent-seeking to squeeze every last dollar out of the system. Those problems can be fixed, but nobody is focusing on that, there too busy imagine some irrational alternate that simply cannot exist with ~9 billion people, many of which will begin eating more calories and more input intensive calories (meat) as time moves forward. Embrace that scale, and innovate from there.
  - adityaathalye 5y ago
    Hm, to clarify, I'm coming at it from a systems point of view. Available energy limits populations. Suppose the green revolution didn't happen, where would world population be? It's not possible to A/B test these things, of course. Also I did not say anything about the type of economic system. I'm just doing scenarios here. If you have credible research to back up your claims, I'll be more than happy to alter my opinion. (edit: typos)
    - Retric 5y ago
      From a systems point of view the changes where dramatic. "Farmers today grow five times as much corn as they did in the 1930s – on 20 percent less land. That is 13 million acres or 20,000 square miles, twice the size of Massachusetts. The yield per acre has skyrocketed from 24 bushels in 1931 to 154 now, or a six-fold gain. And the Agriculture Department expects the average yield per acre to double in the next 25 years." https://mjperry.blogspot.com/2011/05/corn-yields-have-increased-6x-since.html https://mjperry.blogspot.com/2011/05/corn-yields-have-increa... “From 1866, the first year USDA began to publish corn yield estimates, through about 1936, yields of open-pollinated corn varieties in the U.S. remained fairly stagnant and averaged about 26 bu/ac (1.6 MT/ha) throughout that 70-year period. Amazingly, the historical data indicate there was no appreciable change in productivity during that entire time period (Fig. 1), even though farmers’ seed-saving practices represented a form of plant breeding.” https://agfax.com/2017/05/25/corn-historical-grain-yields-for-the-u-s/ https://agfax.com/2017/05/25/corn-historical-grain-yields-fo... PS: Of of note in 1927 there where 2 billion people worldwide and starvation was still common. Growing from 1 billion in 1804 or doubling in 123 years the difference largely came down to an increase in the amount of farmland and a slow increase in productivity.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

camgunz 5y ago

This reminds me of this video I watched about a farming family in Wisconsin. It's obviously high-level and anecdata, but I think it's along the same lines as your post and OP: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRPP4Ilpxso https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRPP4Ilpxso

colechristensen 5y ago

When the description of your book includes "purifying the human spirit" the immediate reaction is that you've found a way to sell books to hippies, and your advice on farming is perhaps suspect. There is a lot of speculation out there about how things might be done, but the reality is how things have actually been done were with the Green Revolution a.k.a. conventional farming. A few individuals with a hobby farm selling food to rich people isn't a solution to world agriculture problems. Most of these techniques are labor heavy and replacing machines with people either creates an underclass of slave-like labor or makes food cost a huge portion of where your income goes to. They also often use fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, etc. but ones which are considered "natural" but not necessarily (and often definitely not) any less poisonous than synthetic alternatives. Like I said before, there are techniques, opportunities to improve, but these things aren't going to come from hippies thinking their garden is going to save the world or there 1/8 of an acre operation is going to scale to thousand acre farms. Their plans usually would involve completely reorganizing the world economy in infeasible ways only possible if everybody was an angel and shared exactly the same ideas.

adityaathalye 5y ago
Yours is a valid critique. I'm not a fan of woo language either. At the same time, it's hard to ignore the results I've seen first-hand. Let's ignore the woo language and ignore the book and ignore my suggested misunderstanding of how any of it is supposed to work. What is the long-range systems outlook of current ag practices? Is it sustainable? If not, what scale of economic policy change will we have to undertake to make it work sustainably? We are of course talking about the entire system and not a few oddball smallhold farmers.
- colechristensen 5y ago
  >sustainable This is a bit of a weasel word overloaded by usage without much understanding of what is meant. Agriculture is not one thing. A whole lot of modern practices are indeed quite sustainable over very long periods, some others... less surely so, some, like burning down rain forests to farm for a few years and then moving on, obviously not. A whole lot of people get a little bit of information and just keep repeating "modern practices are unsustainable, we need to do X!" but this is vague and involves almost no understanding. What you need is actual scientists studying particular practices in particular areas commenting on the long term viability of certain behaviors and how they might be changed. But like many things the popular narrative is a good vs. evil where one vague thing is seen as bad and another good without really getting into what they're talking about. It's a complex field, I'm no expert but I know more than enough to see when somebody doesn't know anything, and unfortunately most of the conversations are by people who don't know anything. There are a lot of things which could be better and are indeed getting better. Automation needs to get better for non-grain farming so that the ratio of grains vs. other foods is altered in production and consumption. Automation could get better so you could have large fields growing multiple species at the same time without intensive human labor. Automation could get better so that weeds could be mechanically picked instead of whole fields getting sprayed with herbicides, so individual weeds could be sprayed with herbicides instead of crop plants. Understanding of soil fungi interactions with minerals and plants and how to grow and maintain this fungi and how to select for species of fungi which result in higher yields. There's a lot, it involves knowing and understanding specifics with an interest towards long term and not attaching broad labels to vague terms.