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> 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 farm

> 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.
    - guerby 5y ago
      https://www.no-tillfarmer.com/articles/8651-long-term-no-till-soil-health-focus-boosts-yields?v=preview https://www.no-tillfarmer.com/articles/8651-long-term-no-til... "No-till practices weren’t doing enough to improve his soil resource. So Montel shifted his priorities to building soil health and it’s paying off: Montel harvested an average of 197 bushels of corn per acre across the farm last fall," https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378429015300228 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S037842901... "No-till yields matched conventional tillage yields for oilseed, cotton, and legume crop categories. Among cereals, the negative impacts of no-till were smallest for wheat (−2.6%) and largest for rice (−7.5%) and maize (−7.6%). No-till performed best under rainfed conditions in dry climates, with yields often being equal to or higher than conventional tillage practices. Yields in the first 1–2 years following no-till implementation declined for all crops except oilseeds and cotton, but matched conventional tillage yields after 3–10 years except for maize and wheat in humid climates. Overall, no-till yields were reduced by 12% without N fertilizer addition and 4% with inorganic N addition." Changing farming practices does not seem to lower the yield per acre in a significant way, so it does not mean going back to 1936 level yields.
xyzzyz 5y ago
> 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? Some of us know that, because we lived through exactly that. It would look like evil empire of Soviet Union. The “public benefit enterprise” of Communist farming pushed for collectivization and reduction of small holding, precisely for the same reason as profit-oriented private farming had: to maximize productivity. It still had not been enough to actually feed the people: shortages were constant, famines were common (though most of them were manufactured methods of genocide), and Soviet Union imported massive amounts of grain from United States. At the same time, in Communist state, “public property” meant in practice “nobody’s property”, and so Soviet Union oversaw environmental destruction on a massive scale, limited only by ineptness and inefficiency of the entire communist enterprise. So no, I’m not particularly excited about the prospect of making farming a “public benefit enterprise”, thank you very much. For an activity to actually benefit the public, you need to do more than declare it “public benefit, not for profit”. At the same time, for-profit enterprises have benefitted people immensely, so much so that people don’t even notice that anymore, as it became a constant, basic element of reality.
- adityaathalye 5y ago
  I'm not sure how you've gone from a suggestion of public benefit to an ideological extreme. Plenty of public benefit stuff in the world is compatible with profitable economic activity. Universal education, for instance. As another example, science itself suffers today from the lack of public benefit thinking, does it not? Anecdotally it is extremely hard to find funding for total blue-sky research. University departments are cost-optimizing to adjunct faculty or contractors. The resulting publish-or-perish environment arises from said scarcity and feeds back into it to create a vicious downward spiral.

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.
  - guerby 5y ago
    https://www.no-tillfarmer.com/articles/8651-long-term-no-till-soil-health-focus-boosts-yields?v=preview https://www.no-tillfarmer.com/articles/8651-long-term-no-til... "No-till practices weren’t doing enough to improve his soil resource. So Montel shifted his priorities to building soil health and it’s paying off: Montel harvested an average of 197 bushels of corn per acre across the farm last fall," https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378429015300228 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S037842901... "No-till yields matched conventional tillage yields for oilseed, cotton, and legume crop categories. Among cereals, the negative impacts of no-till were smallest for wheat (−2.6%) and largest for rice (−7.5%) and maize (−7.6%). No-till performed best under rainfed conditions in dry climates, with yields often being equal to or higher than conventional tillage practices. Yields in the first 1–2 years following no-till implementation declined for all crops except oilseeds and cotton, but matched conventional tillage yields after 3–10 years except for maize and wheat in humid climates. Overall, no-till yields were reduced by 12% without N fertilizer addition and 4% with inorganic N addition." Changing farming practices does not seem to lower the yield per acre in a significant way, so it does not mean going back to 1936 level yields.

xyzzyz 5y ago

> 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? Some of us know that, because we lived through exactly that. It would look like evil empire of Soviet Union. The “public benefit enterprise” of Communist farming pushed for collectivization and reduction of small holding, precisely for the same reason as profit-oriented private farming had: to maximize productivity. It still had not been enough to actually feed the people: shortages were constant, famines were common (though most of them were manufactured methods of genocide), and Soviet Union imported massive amounts of grain from United States. At the same time, in Communist state, “public property” meant in practice “nobody’s property”, and so Soviet Union oversaw environmental destruction on a massive scale, limited only by ineptness and inefficiency of the entire communist enterprise. So no, I’m not particularly excited about the prospect of making farming a “public benefit enterprise”, thank you very much. For an activity to actually benefit the public, you need to do more than declare it “public benefit, not for profit”. At the same time, for-profit enterprises have benefitted people immensely, so much so that people don’t even notice that anymore, as it became a constant, basic element of reality.

adityaathalye 5y ago
I'm not sure how you've gone from a suggestion of public benefit to an ideological extreme. Plenty of public benefit stuff in the world is compatible with profitable economic activity. Universal education, for instance. As another example, science itself suffers today from the lack of public benefit thinking, does it not? Anecdotally it is extremely hard to find funding for total blue-sky research. University departments are cost-optimizing to adjunct faculty or contractors. The resulting publish-or-perish environment arises from said scarcity and feeds back into it to create a vicious downward spiral.