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Adopting no-till techniques will save soil but won't appreciably reduce your fertilizer use. I'd even go so far as to say if you do it right the soil will be h
by rmason 5y ago
Adopting no-till techniques will save soil but won't appreciably reduce your fertilizer use. I'd even go so far as to say if you do it right the soil will be healthier.
But if you use cover crops and especially rotate out of alfalfa you can safely reduce nitrogen use because of the carryover of nitrogen in the soil.
- TaylorAlexander 5y agoAll the no till people I follow don’t use chemical fertilizer(eg JM Fortier). They do add compost to their soil but that’s not fertilizer.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- throwawaylinux 5y agoZero till is a mainstream commercial cropping technique and has been for decades.
- TaylorAlexander 5y agoI guess I am referring to regenerative organic no-till in particular.
- throwawaylinux 5y agoOkay. Cropping requires nutrient inputs though, and there's not much way around that. Nitrogen fixing and such are helpful but not able to supply all requirements. Composting and this kind of organic farming is a nice boutique niche, but realistically it would be unable to sustain the food requirements of the world without being prohibitively expensive. Fertilizers based on petroleum and other mined minerals is the only options for that.
- TaylorAlexander 5y agoI’m making a solar powered farming robot that is open source and designed to help perform some of the labor that makes these processes more expensive. (See my profile). There are other ways to solve the problems currently solved by chemical inputs. And there are many examples of functional biodynamic organic farming systems all over the world that suggest we can scale it if we want to. We’ve just been addicted to cheap fertilizer. It’s interesting to think about where the money goes in our society. Let’s say we never broke up unions in the USA, and wages rose along with productivity instead of stagnating after 1980. Then we could be using more expensive farming methods, which make healthier communities, and yet people would be able to afford it. This is perhaps more similar to how things are done in France, for example. There’s a lot that goes in to making any commodity relatively cheap or expensive. I think probably healthy soils and healthy foods are worth paying more, but we should make sure our economy functions in a way that everyone can afford food, of course.
- throwawaylinux 5y ago> There are other ways to solve the problems currently solved by chemical inputs. What is one way? > And there are many examples of functional biodynamic organic farming systems all over the world that suggest we can scale it if we want to. We’ve just been addicted to cheap fertilizer. People need food to live and lots of people don't have much money. It's very easy to say we're addicted to cheap fertilizer when you can afford to pay premiums for your biodynamic organic food. Billions of people do not have that privilege.
- TaylorAlexander 5y agoI had intended to suggest that solar powered farming robots are one way to reduce costs. As far as people’s ability to pay, you seem to have glossed over my section where I point out that it is policy decisions, not some natural occurrence, that leaves so many unable to pay more. This is true both for within the United States where I live, and for the world at large. Whether or not people can afford higher food prices is something we have control over. We could ease restrictions on collective bargaining and unions could petition for their wages to increase. You may think that is a bad idea, but nonetheless you’d have to agree that is a policy decision that could result in higher wages. And so, whether or not “we” can afford to buy more expensive food is not out of our control.
- timeon 5y agoNo till people I follow (just few in USA and one in Ireland) ended up with adding huge amount of compost. Mulching with compost. Almost like starting with a new plot. For this you need to import compost. Where I live you can buy compost as much as you want but quality varies. So I wonder how this can work at scale. Maybe using different no till techniques I do not know.
- TaylorAlexander 5y agoIt’s true. Sometimes called no-dig by Charles Dowding or “deep compost mulch system” but folks in the USA, that doesn’t scale well. For JM Fortier and Curtis Stone for example though, they do a minimal tillage system with soil amendments but I don’t believe they do heavy application of compost regularly. They do take advantage of a flail mower and a power harrow to compost leftover green matter on site, which reduces waste. And I love RED Gardens in Ireland!
- andscoop 5y agoGabe Brown goes a step further than a simple no-till philosophy. He promotes a very dense grazing of cows as well as cover crops which do bring fertilizer back to the soil. This is the most relevant quote I could find on his website. I can guess that some may quibble over the "chemical" modifier in front of fertilizer, but I remember his book going more into discussing the reduction in fertilizer use, so I'd start there if you are curious. > The misuse of chemical inputs (pesticides, chemical fertilizer and herbicides) is also detrimental to soil life. For this reason we do not use synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, fungicides, GMOs, and glyphosate. We are working hard to eliminate the use of herbicide. http://brownsranch.us/soil-health/ http://brownsranch.us/soil-health/