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Time for lazy/ignorant farmers to switch to cover cropping with rotational grazing, which is just a better system as long as you're not financially dependent on

Time for lazy/ignorant farmers to switch to cover cropping with rotational grazing, which is just a better system as long as you're not financially dependent on planting your entire acreage every growing season.

pddpro 5y ago
I think that you shouldn't call other profession lazy/ignorant in general. People only tend to maximize their profits and minimize efforts, and this is natural. This, in no way, means that farmers are lazy and certainly not ignorant. A better rephrasing would be: "Time for farmers to switch ..."
- CuriouslyC 5y ago
  News flash: I'm not talking about all farmers, I'm specifically talking about farmers who are either lazy or ignorant. Rotational grazing with cover crops is vastly superior to running fields constantly by juicing them with fertilizer and tilling. It does require knowledge, however, and the will to move livestock around regularly, which a lot of bad farmers lack.
  - cal5k 5y ago
    It's common for one farmer to plant and harvest thousands of acres pretty much by himself, at least in North America. Labour, particularly up in Canada, is often in short supply which makes moving livestock around impractical - and not all of them even keep livestock, because it's not profitable unless you're keeping thousands of head.
    - CuriouslyC 5y ago
      The conventional ag model where you have one farmer monocropping a thousand acres are the reason the #1 thing most farmers grow is debt. That requires expensive specialized equipment, and much heavier application of pesticides and fertilizers than a balanced system, so both your fixed and variable costs are high. If you want to see a profitable, productive mid sized farm, check out Polyface. Joel makes a good living while treating his land and animals well.
      - randomdata 5y ago
        Thing is that conventional farming, as you call it, and startups have a lot of in common. The goal is not to earn a tidy profit each year, but instead to build up massive capital for one huge payday when you get bought out. I suspect nobody really cares to see a profitable mid-sized farm as that kind of misses the appeal of farming. If you just want a steady income there are much better paying and less stressful jobs out there.
        CuriouslyC 5y ago
        The interesting thing is that there are a lot of young(ish) people interested in farming, who really do want to run a profitable mid-sized farm. Most of these people just don't have the resources to buy into land, so most of the ones that do it have inherited derelict farms. A few of them do it with leased land, but that's risky as regenerative ag requires a time investment and getting the rug pulled out from under you can be a real bummer. I'd argue that our mega-ag model is a big part of the problem, it's given us stupidly cheap corn/soy while causing a lot of health and pollution problems, and basically ruining farming as an actual profession.
        randomdata 5y ago
        Corn and soybeans are cheap because they're really easy to handle. The process is almost entirely automated at this point, allowing one person to do what would have required thousands of people in the past. Other areas of agriculture have not been so easy to remove the human element, requiring nearly as many people today as a century ago. With reduced scaling potential, you don't see the same cost reduction.
        CuriouslyC 5y ago
        The problem is that the cost reduction is a bit of an illusion, since your fertilizer, pesticide and herbicide costs are going to go up over time as your land turns marginal, and since there are so many mega-farms running huge GPS controlled equipment you're never going to be cost competitive at a smaller scale for corn/soy, but you have to accept the market price, which leaves a razor thin margin (if any at all). The economics of farming are all fucked up, because our current farming practices have a lot of externalities that aren't priced into conventional produce, and producers who try to improve things to remove these externalities either have to take a loss versus the producers who say "fuck the future, fuck everyone who isn't me" or create new markets for their goods (which is where the whole farmer's market movement and the local food guilt thing come from).
  - randomdata 5y ago
    I plant cover crops, but have no interest in animals. I have a software job to worry about when I'm not on the land and it would be economically foolish to trade that for time spent in animal husbandry. Nobody seems to want to rent my cover crops to feed their animals either, so I'm guessing I'm not the only who doesn't see the economic value. Crops prices have priced in the increased fertilizer cost already, so it is what it is. We're used to it.
  - pddpro 5y ago
    A general advice that I have found useful in life is that if you see something that requires a change (in organization, business process, lifestyle or just about anything that has humans as a component) that doesn't directly involve yourself, then the best way to point it out is never to start with the assumption that people are just "lazy/ignorant". This is hostile and will usually have a negative effect on the willingness of the concerned individual to change. Even in this case, the farmer who are farming on their own land are under no obligation to change their way of life or farming process. Even though we know that the methods they are using may be sub-optimal and a net-negative in the long run, we simply cannot make them change it, and certainly never by labelling them negative. We can make them see the benefits, or how it plays out in the long run and help them choose a better solution but ultimately, it's them doing the choosing. At the end, if something is really really required, then it must be the Governments making regulation. This is how it generally works (I'm not saying I like it).
    - CuriouslyC 5y ago
      Let's try this: There are lazy/ignorant software engineers who write everything in a single file with no function because it's the easiest to write/initially run & test. This is a known terrible practice, but if you never have to deal with the code down the line, you wouldn't know this. There's nothing wrong with calling out the fact that these people are being lazy/ignorant. Can the bad farmers continue to farm debt (primarily)? Sure, but if they're doing it to themselves we shouldn't feel bad for them, or bail them out.
      - pddpro 5y ago
        No. If the code they write works for them, then they have done their job. People only realized that it was a bad practice once they found that the code was NOT doing their job (i.e. it was difficult to fix/debug when error occurred, it was immensely difficult to update, and it was nigh impossible to make sense of by your cohorts reading your code). People only do what a) They are taught in the first place (programming classes, reliable blogs etc.), b) Their work environment imposes on them (organizations having coding practices or standards), c) They, through some personal experiences, find out that it makes their job easier down the line, or d) It is the right thing to do. Expecting everyone to follow (d) is out of the question and in my experience all "good" work happens via (b) i.e. rules, regulations and standards that have been enforced. If some sub-optimal choice minimizes effort while maximizing rewards, then that is not sub-optimal, at least for the individual, even though it clearly could be a sub-optimal for the collective.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
Kletiomdm 5y ago
Sounds to me like reducing the overall production. What's the befit if fertilizer helps? That it looks more natural?
- CuriouslyC 5y ago
  Tilling and fertilizing gives you a great yield today, but damages the long term fertility of the land, and pollutes nearby waterways. The best analogy is buying things on credit. You might feel rich at first, but when the debt comes due and you can't afford it bankruptcy is a bitch. It does require letting some land lie fallow to regeneration, so you need to devote more total land to agriculture, and it also requires fencing and for someone to go move the livestock to a new paddock every few days (though you save on tilling/herbicide application costs). On the plus side the unit cost of everything you produce is lower, and meat is typically much more profitable than vegetables so you've diversified.
eloff 5y ago
I think there are real serious trade-offs here in income to the farmer. It's nothing about lazy or ignorance. Honestly to make a comment like that, add if you know more about their business than they do is both ignorant and arrogant - unless that really is your business and you know what you're talking about. But this feels like armchair commentary to me.
- CuriouslyC 5y ago
  Looks like you're armchair voting without subject matter knowledge. Do some research on no-till rotational grazing systems for natural fertility.
  - fennecfoxen 5y ago
    "Do some research?" Feh. Show us P&L statements for your choice of no-till rotational-grazing farm, or even this "research" is just a hobbyist diversion. Now myself, I like hobbyist diversions that involve growing food, but farmers don't farm because they want to have fun. They farm so they can make money. If they stop making money, or if they don't make enough, they have to go into some other line of work, and typically sell the farm to someone who does make money. And when you're not just selling gourmet vegetables to HN hackers making $200k+ a year, you're selling generic commodities like corn and grain and soy, where the competition is fierce. And you're selling it to a world where the poor have a hard time affording food as it is. If this can't compete with conventional fertilizer, then even if everyone switched, people would starve.
    - CuriouslyC 5y ago
      https://www.dnb.com/business-directory/company-profiles.polyface_inc.aa9bb5ff9ef2522af3cfb1a66b16330a.html https://www.dnb.com/business-directory/company-profiles.poly... Joel is the best known example of informed, conscientious farming paying the bills, but certainly not the only one.
mellavora 5y ago
So while I'd agree that no-till/rotational farming is superior in many many ways, and while I would very much like to see its wide-scale implementation, I also note your final line: >as long as you're not financially dependent on planting your entire acreage every growing season. which to me suggests that it isn't "lazy/ignorant" farmers, but rather farmers who are economically entangled in the current system. Maybe the place to start would be objecting to i.e. Monsanto, or to producer demands such as McDonalds who require only a certain kind of potato grown under certain kinds of conditions (so all the fries look the same).
bazzert 5y ago
I'm curious if you are a farmer yourself or in some other way qualified for such a pejorative statement.
dev_tty01 5y ago
I've never met a single successful farmer that is either lazy or ignorant. Most people would never last a full week working on a farm. As far as rotational grazing, if you don't think modern farmers understand nutritional cycles you are sadly misinformed.
imtringued 5y ago
They are not ignorant. They are following the discounting model imposed by "lenders".

pddpro 5y ago

I think that you shouldn't call other profession lazy/ignorant in general. People only tend to maximize their profits and minimize efforts, and this is natural. This, in no way, means that farmers are lazy and certainly not ignorant. A better rephrasing would be: "Time for farmers to switch ..."

CuriouslyC 5y ago
News flash: I'm not talking about all farmers, I'm specifically talking about farmers who are either lazy or ignorant. Rotational grazing with cover crops is vastly superior to running fields constantly by juicing them with fertilizer and tilling. It does require knowledge, however, and the will to move livestock around regularly, which a lot of bad farmers lack.
- cal5k 5y ago
  It's common for one farmer to plant and harvest thousands of acres pretty much by himself, at least in North America. Labour, particularly up in Canada, is often in short supply which makes moving livestock around impractical - and not all of them even keep livestock, because it's not profitable unless you're keeping thousands of head.
  - CuriouslyC 5y ago
    The conventional ag model where you have one farmer monocropping a thousand acres are the reason the #1 thing most farmers grow is debt. That requires expensive specialized equipment, and much heavier application of pesticides and fertilizers than a balanced system, so both your fixed and variable costs are high. If you want to see a profitable, productive mid sized farm, check out Polyface. Joel makes a good living while treating his land and animals well.
    - randomdata 5y ago
      Thing is that conventional farming, as you call it, and startups have a lot of in common. The goal is not to earn a tidy profit each year, but instead to build up massive capital for one huge payday when you get bought out. I suspect nobody really cares to see a profitable mid-sized farm as that kind of misses the appeal of farming. If you just want a steady income there are much better paying and less stressful jobs out there.
      - CuriouslyC 5y ago
        The interesting thing is that there are a lot of young(ish) people interested in farming, who really do want to run a profitable mid-sized farm. Most of these people just don't have the resources to buy into land, so most of the ones that do it have inherited derelict farms. A few of them do it with leased land, but that's risky as regenerative ag requires a time investment and getting the rug pulled out from under you can be a real bummer. I'd argue that our mega-ag model is a big part of the problem, it's given us stupidly cheap corn/soy while causing a lot of health and pollution problems, and basically ruining farming as an actual profession.
        randomdata 5y ago
        Corn and soybeans are cheap because they're really easy to handle. The process is almost entirely automated at this point, allowing one person to do what would have required thousands of people in the past. Other areas of agriculture have not been so easy to remove the human element, requiring nearly as many people today as a century ago. With reduced scaling potential, you don't see the same cost reduction.
        CuriouslyC 5y ago
        The problem is that the cost reduction is a bit of an illusion, since your fertilizer, pesticide and herbicide costs are going to go up over time as your land turns marginal, and since there are so many mega-farms running huge GPS controlled equipment you're never going to be cost competitive at a smaller scale for corn/soy, but you have to accept the market price, which leaves a razor thin margin (if any at all). The economics of farming are all fucked up, because our current farming practices have a lot of externalities that aren't priced into conventional produce, and producers who try to improve things to remove these externalities either have to take a loss versus the producers who say "fuck the future, fuck everyone who isn't me" or create new markets for their goods (which is where the whole farmer's market movement and the local food guilt thing come from).
- randomdata 5y ago
  I plant cover crops, but have no interest in animals. I have a software job to worry about when I'm not on the land and it would be economically foolish to trade that for time spent in animal husbandry. Nobody seems to want to rent my cover crops to feed their animals either, so I'm guessing I'm not the only who doesn't see the economic value. Crops prices have priced in the increased fertilizer cost already, so it is what it is. We're used to it.
- pddpro 5y ago
  A general advice that I have found useful in life is that if you see something that requires a change (in organization, business process, lifestyle or just about anything that has humans as a component) that doesn't directly involve yourself, then the best way to point it out is never to start with the assumption that people are just "lazy/ignorant". This is hostile and will usually have a negative effect on the willingness of the concerned individual to change. Even in this case, the farmer who are farming on their own land are under no obligation to change their way of life or farming process. Even though we know that the methods they are using may be sub-optimal and a net-negative in the long run, we simply cannot make them change it, and certainly never by labelling them negative. We can make them see the benefits, or how it plays out in the long run and help them choose a better solution but ultimately, it's them doing the choosing. At the end, if something is really really required, then it must be the Governments making regulation. This is how it generally works (I'm not saying I like it).
  - CuriouslyC 5y ago
    Let's try this: There are lazy/ignorant software engineers who write everything in a single file with no function because it's the easiest to write/initially run & test. This is a known terrible practice, but if you never have to deal with the code down the line, you wouldn't know this. There's nothing wrong with calling out the fact that these people are being lazy/ignorant. Can the bad farmers continue to farm debt (primarily)? Sure, but if they're doing it to themselves we shouldn't feel bad for them, or bail them out.
    - pddpro 5y ago
      No. If the code they write works for them, then they have done their job. People only realized that it was a bad practice once they found that the code was NOT doing their job (i.e. it was difficult to fix/debug when error occurred, it was immensely difficult to update, and it was nigh impossible to make sense of by your cohorts reading your code). People only do what a) They are taught in the first place (programming classes, reliable blogs etc.), b) Their work environment imposes on them (organizations having coding practices or standards), c) They, through some personal experiences, find out that it makes their job easier down the line, or d) It is the right thing to do. Expecting everyone to follow (d) is out of the question and in my experience all "good" work happens via (b) i.e. rules, regulations and standards that have been enforced. If some sub-optimal choice minimizes effort while maximizing rewards, then that is not sub-optimal, at least for the individual, even though it clearly could be a sub-optimal for the collective.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

Kletiomdm 5y ago

Sounds to me like reducing the overall production. What's the befit if fertilizer helps? That it looks more natural?

CuriouslyC 5y ago
Tilling and fertilizing gives you a great yield today, but damages the long term fertility of the land, and pollutes nearby waterways. The best analogy is buying things on credit. You might feel rich at first, but when the debt comes due and you can't afford it bankruptcy is a bitch. It does require letting some land lie fallow to regeneration, so you need to devote more total land to agriculture, and it also requires fencing and for someone to go move the livestock to a new paddock every few days (though you save on tilling/herbicide application costs). On the plus side the unit cost of everything you produce is lower, and meat is typically much more profitable than vegetables so you've diversified.

eloff 5y ago

I think there are real serious trade-offs here in income to the farmer. It's nothing about lazy or ignorance. Honestly to make a comment like that, add if you know more about their business than they do is both ignorant and arrogant - unless that really is your business and you know what you're talking about. But this feels like armchair commentary to me.

CuriouslyC 5y ago
Looks like you're armchair voting without subject matter knowledge. Do some research on no-till rotational grazing systems for natural fertility.
- fennecfoxen 5y ago
  "Do some research?" Feh. Show us P&L statements for your choice of no-till rotational-grazing farm, or even this "research" is just a hobbyist diversion. Now myself, I like hobbyist diversions that involve growing food, but farmers don't farm because they want to have fun. They farm so they can make money. If they stop making money, or if they don't make enough, they have to go into some other line of work, and typically sell the farm to someone who does make money. And when you're not just selling gourmet vegetables to HN hackers making $200k+ a year, you're selling generic commodities like corn and grain and soy, where the competition is fierce. And you're selling it to a world where the poor have a hard time affording food as it is. If this can't compete with conventional fertilizer, then even if everyone switched, people would starve.
  - CuriouslyC 5y ago
    https://www.dnb.com/business-directory/company-profiles.polyface_inc.aa9bb5ff9ef2522af3cfb1a66b16330a.html https://www.dnb.com/business-directory/company-profiles.poly... Joel is the best known example of informed, conscientious farming paying the bills, but certainly not the only one.

mellavora 5y ago

So while I'd agree that no-till/rotational farming is superior in many many ways, and while I would very much like to see its wide-scale implementation, I also note your final line: >as long as you're not financially dependent on planting your entire acreage every growing season. which to me suggests that it isn't "lazy/ignorant" farmers, but rather farmers who are economically entangled in the current system. Maybe the place to start would be objecting to i.e. Monsanto, or to producer demands such as McDonalds who require only a certain kind of potato grown under certain kinds of conditions (so all the fries look the same).

bazzert 5y ago

I'm curious if you are a farmer yourself or in some other way qualified for such a pejorative statement.

dev_tty01 5y ago

I've never met a single successful farmer that is either lazy or ignorant. Most people would never last a full week working on a farm. As far as rotational grazing, if you don't think modern farmers understand nutritional cycles you are sadly misinformed.

imtringued 5y ago

They are not ignorant. They are following the discounting model imposed by "lenders".