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I'm not sure why the general tone of HN seems to be that modern farming isn't changing at all. Erosion has been on everyone's radar for decades. We went from p

I'm not sure why the general tone of HN seems to be that modern farming isn't changing at all. Erosion has been on everyone's radar for decades. We went from plow -> till -> low till -> no till. Believe me, the folks who do this talk about plowing practices and cover crops. They also discuss GMO crops and the crazy legal restrictions around seed that come with it. > Brown earth has a deep top layer where most of the nutrients are and biological activities take place. At around 20 centimetres deep Fun fact, where I grew up there is over 10 feet of black dirt before you hit bedrock. A lot of the Midwestern US is like that. Even with all that runway those guys _still_ discuss erosion.

ilostmyshoes 4y ago
What they don't seem to be talking about is learning from indigenous farming communities who use things like diversity in crops and rotation to keep soil quality high. These problems were solved decades ago, just not by the industrial farming community
- peteradio 4y ago
  Crop rotation is a standard practice. Sugar beats cannot be grown year after year on the same plot.
- tnel77 4y ago
  Crop rotation seems to be pretty widespread. I remember as a kid learning about it and knowing I’d see different crops each year to help the soil for future harvests.
- hedgehog 4y ago
  Like the rest of industrial age development, farm automation has historically been built around treating everything uniformly (even distribution of seeds bred for easy harvest in evenly spaced rows evenly fertilizied with no rocks etc etc). Moving away from that introduces all kinds of complexity, mechanical problems, data problems, etc, which are not easy to solve even when you have historical existence proofs of potentially better ways to do things. It's happening though.
  - lotsofpulp 4y ago
    It introduces trying to sell your crops for 5x what your competitor is and no buyer is going to pay 5x for “sustainable” produce.
    - hedgehog 4y ago
      What I'm getting at is things like applying fertilizer based on estimated need from imaging data, using robots with lasers to kill weeds, mechanized intercropping, etc. Not something consumers will necessarily see any direct impact from but that improve the quality and economics of production.
      - lotsofpulp 4y ago
        > which are not easy to solve even when you have historical existence proofs of potentially better ways to do things. It's happening though. What I am getting at is if these “proofs” existed, they would already be proven by lower priced goods at the market.
        hedgehog 4y ago
        A historical existence proof of a system or technology working has essentially nothing to do with whether it's being practiced in industry today, and whether it's being practiced today has very little to do with the product or pricing you see when you for example stop by KFC to eat a piece of chicken that's largely created out of corn, soy, and methane. That's the beauty of capitalism and commodity markets, John Deere can roll out technology for say computer-controlled planting that improves efficiency and the dividends get spread across the value chain without everyone having to know about it or change what they're doing.
- sleton38234234 4y ago
  Crop diversity is great. And you also need lots of organic matter to go on top of the soil: to build life in the soil. that's much better than trying to duct tape the matter with fertilizer.
  - mattpallissard 4y ago
    > Crop diversity is great. Crop rotation has been standard practice my entire life. One of the many kickers though is soybeans are the fallback crop for really wet springs. Many crops need to be planted by a certain date or the growing season will be too short. Soybeans can "make up for lost time", so to speak. If your first planting gets flooded, or if it's too wet to get any crop in, you can wait until it's dry and toss in some soy to recoup some of the cost. Thing is soybeans use a lot of nitrogen. > And you also need lots of organic matter Manure spreaders are still a thing.
    - randomdata 4y ago
      Many years ago one of my neighbours tried not rotating is crops. It worked out okay the first couple of years, but it wasn't long before his yields nosedived and within the five years he was bankrupt.
      - eru 4y ago
        Why did your neighbour try?
        randomdata 4y ago
        Soy on soy (on soy, on soy...). Disease soon sets in if not regularly rotated.
        ilostmyshoes 4y ago
        But why did they try it
- tengbretson 4y ago
  It's like everyone who's ever watched a YouTube video about planting a 3 sisters garden has an opinion for the people actually staking their livelihood on this now.
  - algoatecorn 4y ago
    No kidding, and furthermore it's as if they don't take a second to consider scalability, yield, commodity-market efficiency, and labor-force.
  - codingdave 4y ago
    It is more about that fact that people talking about sustainable food production do not share many goals with commodity farmers exchanging corn and soybeans for as much cash as possible.
    - tengbretson 4y ago
      At least farmers have the humility to not go on the internet and smear you based on their opinion of your use of a document database over a relational database.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - ilostmyshoes 4y ago
    Or they've read up on anthropology, this is common knowledge in the field
  - refurb 4y ago
    "I've never farmed in my life, but I'm pretty sure I know more than the guy who has been doing it for decades and whose entire livelihood is based on it."
- randomdata 4y ago
  We do. Perhaps you may not recognize our lingo. For example, around here we humorously refer to wheat as 'poverty grass' because there is no money in growing it but recognize it as a necessity to keep in the rotation for the ecological health benefits it provides.
  - Scoundreller 4y ago
    There’s money in growing it, but usually where nothing else profitably grows, which is a lot of places. Hugely mechanized though which makes it work when you have enough crop land. But yeah, $/hectare yield is going to be low.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
- kortilla 4y ago
  Pretending indigenous communities “solved” this is a farce. If we switched to their methods 90% of the population would need to die because they don’t scale.
  - willcipriano 4y ago
    What percentage of indigenous people were involved in farming? 100%? It's less than 3% today.
    - throwaway4aday 4y ago
      So your solution is to give up your job and return to subsistence farming? Let us know how that works out.
      - willcipriano 4y ago
        No, my point is everyone would to do it that way.
        LarryMullins 4y ago
        Without experience, land, and modern industrial farming techniques? No, "everybody" would not start subsistence farming. There would be massive famines, billions would starve and die.
        midasuni 4y ago
        I think everyone’s on the same page. But if you ignore the labour demands per mouth fed, the education needed, the amount of land to feed current western population to sustainable replacement level, the requirement to maintain advanced defence systems to prevent land being taken or otherwise destroyed, the issues with the global climate affecting whatever you do in this agrarian society, could it be done?
    - HDThoreaun 4y ago
Spooky23 4y ago
I think people see a sea of corn and don’t appreciate nuance. The bigger issue that farmers are ignoring is water.
- eru 4y ago
  > The bigger issue that farmers are ignoring is water. Of course, whether that's an issue depends on where you are in the world. It's gonna be different in California vs Germany.
- kortilla 4y ago
  > The bigger issue that farmers are ignoring is water. Ironically a statement without nuance. Western US farmers are ignoring water. This is not an issue in the East.
- tomatotomato37 4y ago
  Farmers are well aware of water and the sustainablity of its sources. It just so happens that the equilibrium point they aim for is sustainability for them, not them & everybody else that happens to live downstream
  - adrianN 4y ago
    The rate of depletion of large aquifers suggests that farmers don't care very much about sustainability of their water source. I think price is pretty much the only signal that farmers can afford to care about.
    - lettergram 4y ago
      Depends where you live, but farmers around me are always monitoring everything — rainfall, water retention in the soil, aquifer levels, river and creek levels, etc. That said, you’re right, they’re running a business. What they tend to do is use the smallest amount of water to produce good yields. The only real thing a farmer can control are what they plant, when they water, when they fertilize and what they harvest (plus some maintenance, like weeding, but water isn’t impacted). What farmers tend to do is water when necessary (between rain periods). They’ll also select different plants to grow based on price and watering schedule. That said; I’ve also seen farmers try to improve water retention (through tilling in cover crops and / or adding organic material). They’ve also built dams, etc to capture rain water and reduce erosion. As far as I can tell, farmers do indeed try to conserve and utilize what they can. At the same time, water is being subsided by government and / or regulated. So places like California have a weird things like building farms in the desert. If the water prices were more free and people still build farms, I don’t see an issue frankly. They’re just using every drop before it gets to the sea. As the water depletes (ie too many farms) I imagine farmers will go elsewhere or change crops to become more efficient. To be honest, I don’t see water management being too much of an issue at the moment. Plants have become increasingly drought resistant and we have the ability to breed and genetically modify them more so.
LarryMullins 4y ago
> I'm not sure why the general tone of HN seems to be that modern farming isn't changing at all. Indeed. Perhaps somewhere out there is a parallel forum filled with farmers opining about computer programming, with equally inane remarks like "Have those programmers ever thought about making languages that translate into machine code instead of writing everything out as ones and zeros?"
- AA-BA-94-2A-56 4y ago
  > Sutor, ne ultra crepidam If you are a shoemaker, be careful not to pass judgement beyond the making of shoes.
  - mecsred 4y ago
    You can pass all the judgement you want. You should just be more ready for it to be inaccurate the further you get from things you practice.
- lettergram 4y ago
  Most of those forums (which I have visited) are in person; they’re almost always complaining about the proprietary locked down code. Frankly, farmers are a more libertarian bunch than programmers.

ilostmyshoes 4y ago

What they don't seem to be talking about is learning from indigenous farming communities who use things like diversity in crops and rotation to keep soil quality high. These problems were solved decades ago, just not by the industrial farming community

peteradio 4y ago
Crop rotation is a standard practice. Sugar beats cannot be grown year after year on the same plot.
tnel77 4y ago
Crop rotation seems to be pretty widespread. I remember as a kid learning about it and knowing I’d see different crops each year to help the soil for future harvests.
hedgehog 4y ago
Like the rest of industrial age development, farm automation has historically been built around treating everything uniformly (even distribution of seeds bred for easy harvest in evenly spaced rows evenly fertilizied with no rocks etc etc). Moving away from that introduces all kinds of complexity, mechanical problems, data problems, etc, which are not easy to solve even when you have historical existence proofs of potentially better ways to do things. It's happening though.
- lotsofpulp 4y ago
  It introduces trying to sell your crops for 5x what your competitor is and no buyer is going to pay 5x for “sustainable” produce.
  - hedgehog 4y ago
    What I'm getting at is things like applying fertilizer based on estimated need from imaging data, using robots with lasers to kill weeds, mechanized intercropping, etc. Not something consumers will necessarily see any direct impact from but that improve the quality and economics of production.
    - lotsofpulp 4y ago
      > which are not easy to solve even when you have historical existence proofs of potentially better ways to do things. It's happening though. What I am getting at is if these “proofs” existed, they would already be proven by lower priced goods at the market.
      - hedgehog 4y ago
        A historical existence proof of a system or technology working has essentially nothing to do with whether it's being practiced in industry today, and whether it's being practiced today has very little to do with the product or pricing you see when you for example stop by KFC to eat a piece of chicken that's largely created out of corn, soy, and methane. That's the beauty of capitalism and commodity markets, John Deere can roll out technology for say computer-controlled planting that improves efficiency and the dividends get spread across the value chain without everyone having to know about it or change what they're doing.
sleton38234234 4y ago
Crop diversity is great. And you also need lots of organic matter to go on top of the soil: to build life in the soil. that's much better than trying to duct tape the matter with fertilizer.
- mattpallissard 4y ago
  > Crop diversity is great. Crop rotation has been standard practice my entire life. One of the many kickers though is soybeans are the fallback crop for really wet springs. Many crops need to be planted by a certain date or the growing season will be too short. Soybeans can "make up for lost time", so to speak. If your first planting gets flooded, or if it's too wet to get any crop in, you can wait until it's dry and toss in some soy to recoup some of the cost. Thing is soybeans use a lot of nitrogen. > And you also need lots of organic matter Manure spreaders are still a thing.
  - randomdata 4y ago
    Many years ago one of my neighbours tried not rotating is crops. It worked out okay the first couple of years, but it wasn't long before his yields nosedived and within the five years he was bankrupt.
    - eru 4y ago
      Why did your neighbour try?
      - randomdata 4y ago
        Soy on soy (on soy, on soy...). Disease soon sets in if not regularly rotated.
        ilostmyshoes 4y ago
        But why did they try it
tengbretson 4y ago
It's like everyone who's ever watched a YouTube video about planting a 3 sisters garden has an opinion for the people actually staking their livelihood on this now.
- algoatecorn 4y ago
  No kidding, and furthermore it's as if they don't take a second to consider scalability, yield, commodity-market efficiency, and labor-force.
- codingdave 4y ago
  It is more about that fact that people talking about sustainable food production do not share many goals with commodity farmers exchanging corn and soybeans for as much cash as possible.
  - tengbretson 4y ago
    At least farmers have the humility to not go on the internet and smear you based on their opinion of your use of a document database over a relational database.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- ilostmyshoes 4y ago
  Or they've read up on anthropology, this is common knowledge in the field
- refurb 4y ago
  "I've never farmed in my life, but I'm pretty sure I know more than the guy who has been doing it for decades and whose entire livelihood is based on it."
randomdata 4y ago
We do. Perhaps you may not recognize our lingo. For example, around here we humorously refer to wheat as 'poverty grass' because there is no money in growing it but recognize it as a necessity to keep in the rotation for the ecological health benefits it provides.
- Scoundreller 4y ago
  There’s money in growing it, but usually where nothing else profitably grows, which is a lot of places. Hugely mechanized though which makes it work when you have enough crop land. But yeah, $/hectare yield is going to be low.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
kortilla 4y ago
Pretending indigenous communities “solved” this is a farce. If we switched to their methods 90% of the population would need to die because they don’t scale.
- willcipriano 4y ago
  What percentage of indigenous people were involved in farming? 100%? It's less than 3% today.
  - throwaway4aday 4y ago
    So your solution is to give up your job and return to subsistence farming? Let us know how that works out.
    - willcipriano 4y ago
      No, my point is everyone would to do it that way.
      - LarryMullins 4y ago
        Without experience, land, and modern industrial farming techniques? No, "everybody" would not start subsistence farming. There would be massive famines, billions would starve and die.
        midasuni 4y ago
        I think everyone’s on the same page. But if you ignore the labour demands per mouth fed, the education needed, the amount of land to feed current western population to sustainable replacement level, the requirement to maintain advanced defence systems to prevent land being taken or otherwise destroyed, the issues with the global climate affecting whatever you do in this agrarian society, could it be done?
  - HDThoreaun 4y ago

Spooky23 4y ago

I think people see a sea of corn and don’t appreciate nuance. The bigger issue that farmers are ignoring is water.

eru 4y ago
> The bigger issue that farmers are ignoring is water. Of course, whether that's an issue depends on where you are in the world. It's gonna be different in California vs Germany.
kortilla 4y ago
> The bigger issue that farmers are ignoring is water. Ironically a statement without nuance. Western US farmers are ignoring water. This is not an issue in the East.
tomatotomato37 4y ago
Farmers are well aware of water and the sustainablity of its sources. It just so happens that the equilibrium point they aim for is sustainability for them, not them & everybody else that happens to live downstream
- adrianN 4y ago
  The rate of depletion of large aquifers suggests that farmers don't care very much about sustainability of their water source. I think price is pretty much the only signal that farmers can afford to care about.
  - lettergram 4y ago
    Depends where you live, but farmers around me are always monitoring everything — rainfall, water retention in the soil, aquifer levels, river and creek levels, etc. That said, you’re right, they’re running a business. What they tend to do is use the smallest amount of water to produce good yields. The only real thing a farmer can control are what they plant, when they water, when they fertilize and what they harvest (plus some maintenance, like weeding, but water isn’t impacted). What farmers tend to do is water when necessary (between rain periods). They’ll also select different plants to grow based on price and watering schedule. That said; I’ve also seen farmers try to improve water retention (through tilling in cover crops and / or adding organic material). They’ve also built dams, etc to capture rain water and reduce erosion. As far as I can tell, farmers do indeed try to conserve and utilize what they can. At the same time, water is being subsided by government and / or regulated. So places like California have a weird things like building farms in the desert. If the water prices were more free and people still build farms, I don’t see an issue frankly. They’re just using every drop before it gets to the sea. As the water depletes (ie too many farms) I imagine farmers will go elsewhere or change crops to become more efficient. To be honest, I don’t see water management being too much of an issue at the moment. Plants have become increasingly drought resistant and we have the ability to breed and genetically modify them more so.

LarryMullins 4y ago

> I'm not sure why the general tone of HN seems to be that modern farming isn't changing at all. Indeed. Perhaps somewhere out there is a parallel forum filled with farmers opining about computer programming, with equally inane remarks like "Have those programmers ever thought about making languages that translate into machine code instead of writing everything out as ones and zeros?"

AA-BA-94-2A-56 4y ago
> Sutor, ne ultra crepidam If you are a shoemaker, be careful not to pass judgement beyond the making of shoes.
- mecsred 4y ago
  You can pass all the judgement you want. You should just be more ready for it to be inaccurate the further you get from things you practice.
lettergram 4y ago
Most of those forums (which I have visited) are in person; they’re almost always complaining about the proprietary locked down code. Frankly, farmers are a more libertarian bunch than programmers.