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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'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]

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]