11 ms·

Farms that create habitat key to food security and biodiversity

204 points by momirlan 3y ago

meristohm 3y ago
Trees are also nice places to rest under during farm work.
- tap-snap-or-nap 3y ago
  So is concrete.
- randomdata 3y ago
  Not nearly as nice as an air-conditioned tractor cab.
Phileosopher 3y ago
Full disclaimer: I'm an industry amateur, went with the WWOOF program for 6 months, have kicked around what it'd take to make a living in agribusiness, and live in Iowa where the farm reports are on the level of celebrity gossip. The trouble with biodiversity isn't about lower yield-per-acre, but more that it's not the most affordably scalable. It's not hard to set up and configure planting a homogeneous crop across a vast range of acreage, then hit each stage of the process (fertilizing, weed-killing, harvesting) with vastly powerful equipment in what's effectively an array. It takes more work to create an interdependent system that uses nature to fix nature, but many communities have done it for centuries (e.g., the Mennonites). The one risk of scaling is that it's a short-term gain with a specific technical debt with the soil: too many repeat seasons of the same monoculture will create weaker yields from the decreased essential minerals for that specific plant. There are a host of existing solutions to this, with varying degrees of implementation and effectiveness: 1. Plant different monocultures in that location each year, though this isn't so useful if the entire region is configured for a particular plant. Iowa may be better for corn and Kansas for wheat, for example, meaning the market yield will be diminished for functionally the same product. 2. Employ the ancient method of "letting it rest" by not planting it every 7th year or so. Cuts back on profits, but lets the land heal from simple non-use (e.g., bugs and birds do their thing). The article implies this one, but with strips of rainforest in the middle of the acreage. 3. Rotational farming with grass seed and ruminants. Roaming cattle are literally the answer to climate stability, for multiple reasons. As it stands, farming at scale works that way because it's been the cheapest way to get the most crops. There are only several ways to improve food availability: 1. selective breeding and (now) gene-splicing, which makes the food more resistant to damage, larger, sweeter, etc. at the cost of quality 2. government incentives for "good old-fashioned non-GMO organic produce", since most people will not pay an additional $1/lb for apples The trouble with the article is that it abides by what I call the "Fragile Earth Theory", which posits that any aberrant act by humanity could send the entire planet into a downward spiral that renders us all extinct. There's enough scientific evidence to disprove that idea, but it's not politically fashionable to argue it and not the hill I want to die on. The article is interesting regarding biodiversity, but food security is now more a political issue than a yield issue.
- motohagiography 3y ago
  In your experience, is it accurate that farming practices are a function of labour costs, and what is the time horizon where robotics changes the game for high density farming with diverse crops? There is a video about using machine vision and lasers for weeding, and I'm wondering whether we are close to full automation and don't need nearly as much land to generate higher yields. Something like what these people do (shipping container farms) https://www.cropbox.co/ https://www.cropbox.co/ seems like we're really close to being able to run restaurants off them.
  - rocqua 3y ago
    Why start on labor costs, and then end on land usage? If healthy farming is limited by labor costs, the result of automation would hopefully be the pickup of healthy farming. The benefits going to quality of produce, long term soil sustainability, reduced usage of fertilizer and water, and other crucial benefits. Taking the advantage and focusing on land usage seems short-sighted to me.
  - Phileosopher 3y ago
    You're definitely on the right track. Over here in Iowa, the dumb labor I've seen has almost exclusively moved to factories, with the full-automation tractors spacing out planting according to prior moisture and soil composition tests run over it by a prior-day tractor. Micro-farming is definitely a hot thing, too. The plants are now getting smaller, but producing huge yields. Food sustainability in someone's suburban backyard is almost here, though I do believe it's a bit more fiddly than the standard old-fashioned greenhouse-then-transfer for personal farming that we've seen for a long time. There's a business model waiting to happen for uninformed city-dwellers who want to get into the space, though it's more about selling education than a tangible product. But, if you're creative and savvy in the biology/botany/ecology space (I'm not), I've seen all sorts of neat configurations. One of the most interesting organic farming techniques I heard of was a guy who had a fish pond on one side, which cycled water to the other side that had a hydroponics setup, meaning it was essentially a micro-ecosystem.
- asfasdfaaaaaaa 3y ago
jv22222 3y ago
Check out a documentary called "The Biggest Little Farm" for a US based farm that created true bio-diversity/ecosystem, and used it instead of pesticides to grow food.
- agomez314 3y ago
  Great documentary!!
- myshpa 3y ago
  Very good movie. I'd also recommend Syntropic Agriculture, an agroforestry method pioneered by Ernst Gotsch. He personally reforested 500 hectares of degraded pastures and doesn't use any external resources such as pesticides and fertilizers. Instead, he employs methods like maximizing photosynthesis and selective pruning. As a result, his land now stands as one of the most fertile and biodiverse regions within the Atlantic rainforest, achieving even higher yields than traditional farms. As syntropic farmers often say, they grow the soil to grow the food. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ST9NyHf09M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ST9NyHf09M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSPNRu4ZPvE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSPNRu4ZPvE https://agendagotsch.com/en/what-is-syntropic-farming/ https://agendagotsch.com/en/what-is-syntropic-farming/ Another example would be the Natural Farming method pioneered by Masanobu Fukuoka. He also practices farming without the use of pesticides and herbicides, and his yields also surpass those of traditional farms. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nzs8iFGNdBo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nzs8iFGNdBo
  - cnity 3y ago
    If the yield is better, why don't more do it? Is it just because it takes more skill, basically? In other words, what are the economic incentives working against adopting this farming method? I'm very interested because this type of farming sounds wonderful to me.
    - helpfulContrib 3y ago
      It takes attention and skill and involvement. And I think the point where more will do it, is at the border and fence-line. Once a neighbor starts growing a food forest, that idea can rapidly spread. It does take years, though...
cyberax 3y ago
Ugh. Science by press-release. This may all sound nice, but modern farms already deal with pollination by just bringing in bees. The same applies to birds, just a few species can control pests. "Nature" has an article about that: https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms8414 https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms8414 There are certainly arguments for increased biodiversity, but food security doesn't appear to be one of them.
- Cthulhu_ 3y ago
  "Food security" is only one aspect though, that sounds like min/maxing things - and that has brought us excess nitrogen (fertilizer), mass extinctions and health problems (pesticides), food poverty (quantity over quality), and ecosystem decimation. It's great for short-term profit, not long-term sustainability. I don't see life or nature when I see miles and miles of corn or wheat, I see a factory.
  - cyberax 3y ago
    > "Food security" is only one aspect though, that sounds like min/maxing things - and that has brought us excess nitrogen (fertilizer), mass extinctions and health problems (pesticides), food poverty (quantity over quality) JFYI, pesticides in food are not linked with health problems. It's a more complicated story for people who apply pesticides, as they are exposed to 100-1000x greater amounts. Fertilizer runoff is a problem. And it's being solved, modern fertilizer application practices (e.g. direct ammonia injection) try to minimize it. > and ecosystem decimation. Wait until you hear about what Native Americans did with the ecosystems on the American continent. The current agriculture is long-term sustainable in most places. It's unsustainable only when there's not enough water available (e.g.: California).
- rocqua 3y ago
  Modern farms don't handle water infiltration, and soil degradation very well. It takes more than one plant to hold water in the soil rather than letting the water (and soil) run off immediately once it rains. Similarly to keep soil in a state where it supports plant life, you need more than one kind of plant that is maximized for extraction.
asu_thomas 3y ago
How do such farms do with profit?
- Cthulhu_ 3y ago
  That's the kicker, isn't it? Their output will be lower than an industrial farm of equal size. However, the quality of product will be higher (this is an assumption btw), and they will be able to charge more for the product for being grown organically and using less pesticides and the like. There may also be subsidies involved, depending on the location. But profit should not be the goal. It's necessary, but it shouldn't be the target.
  - asu_thomas 3y ago
    [flagged]
  - randomdata 3y ago
    > But profit should not be the goal. I'm not sure it is a goal. It certainly hasn't been the goal of most farmers since I started farming, and I am not sure it ever was. The goal of most farmers is to build wealth. Much like tech startups, they are willing to forego profit in the name of growth. Asset rich, cash poor is the name of farming. > It's necessary It's more or less necessary for a farmer to find profit somewhere, but that doesn't have to come from the farm. Most farmers also have off-farm jobs.
- rocqua 3y ago
  You might counter that modern farms have massive hidden internal costs in depreciation of soil quality, with long term yields being suppressed, and vulnerability to drought massively raised. Hence these better farms should do much better on financing costs.
  - Biologist123 3y ago
    I’d give this comment more upticks if I could. The hidden internal costs of the modern farm is the unit scale example for all our environmental problems. I’d add that many of these costs exist beyond the discount horizon and are therefore not factored into land-use decisions.
1letterunixname 3y ago
We get it. Don't have 100% of farmland as monocultural industrial ag megafarms. Leave strips of fallow land here and there. I tried reducing the insect population around my moms home situated in a plot of formerly fallow land adjacent to farmland. The bug zapper killed piles of flying insects every night until she didn't want to keep cleaning it anymore and gave up on an un-enclosed porch. I suggested she ought to do what most Texans do and have an enclosed porch. Just leaving the land alone does wonders for the food chain of critters. Although, when paper wasps pitch their tents on the eaves of your place, you have to convince them to move along.
anhner 3y ago
A little punctuation or an extra word would do wonders for this title's legibility... "Farms that create habitat - key to food security and biodiversity" "Farms that create habitat, key to food security and biodiversity" "Farms that create habitat are key to food security and biodiversity"
- ssss11 3y ago
  You telling me there’s no habitat key? This whole time I’ve been lied to…..
  - alternatetwo 3y ago
    Terraria has Biome Keys, and you can create auto farms to get them ... so, close enough?
- lukas099 3y ago
  I think it's a standard for news headlines to omit linking verbs like 'are'.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
lucidguppy 3y ago
I would think that inter-cropping would be more possible with GPS and robotics. I heard it cuts down on pests (confuses the bastards, and also attracts predators). Our farms have to more and more resemble natural ecosystems to increase resiliency.
- bluGill 3y ago
  intercropping is done, but there are significant downsides. Farmers do it once in a while, but this is an area that is still very experimental and so any intelligent farmer (most are not stupid!) will try it in a small field for a few years, or watch someone else try it. Tall plants shade the shorter ones, so you lose yield for the shorter plants, and this may or may not be made up by the taller ones (which have to put more energy into supporting that height). Intercropping means pests can live and thrive in your crops. Farmers will sometimes plant one crop 3 years in a row because that means the pests don't have anything to live on and in turn they die off. Intercropping means there is always a host species for the pest to live off of and so they in turn thrive. I think there are other downsides as well that I can't remember. There may also be unknown downsides - since this is not common there may be downsides were are not aware of. This is why we need scientific research and small trails before rolling out something new in mass - it may be worse than what we have.
  - bluGill 3y ago
    By planting for 3 years in a row, pests that target something else in your rotation will die off. Of course the trade off is pests that target the crop you are planting 3 years in a row will have more opportunity to grow.
fjfaase 3y ago
A few months ago, I have become member of a farming co-op just 8 minutes biking from where I live (in the Netherlands). The co-op aims at sustainable food production with some livestock. Increasing bio-diversity is one of the primary goals. The co-op leases about 30ha hectares which in the past decades were primarily used for producing corn to feed cows. There are about 18 farming co-ops like this in the Netherlands [1]. I very much enjoy helping with the weeding. [1] https://www.herenboeren.nl/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Herenboeren-Engels.pdf https://www.herenboeren.nl/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Herenb...
- spiderfarmer 3y ago
  There is a lot of criticism about Herenboeren initiatives though: - The lack of knowledge (or wilful ignorance) results in them not requesting permits like other farmers have to, resulting in frustrated neighbours and a bad reputation. - The lack of knowledge (or plain arrogance) results in trying to turn soil that is unsuitable for vegetable cultivation into vegetable gardens, resulting in failed harvests and wasted money. It's fine to experiment, but throwing money away while well meaning neighbouring farmers are proactively giving you all information you need to know is something else entirely. - Some farmers that are employed by the communities are frustrated because of endless meetings and politics. - Like with a lot of homesteading initiatives, the end goal often seems to be make money on rent and knowledge sharing and not creating a sustainable business based on produce. The same goes for Youtube channels of people promoting the lifestyle. Without ad money it's unsustainable. Overall my gut feeling is that initiatives like these will only result in glorified allotment gardens and it will never be able to achieve its goal of reinventing food production. It would be way better to let existing farmers incorporate better practices at scale.
  - Valgrim 3y ago
    I'm curious. What makes a soil suitable for growing vegetables? What can we grow in a soil that isn't? Is it possible to transform an unsuitable soil into a good one?
    - 3y ago
flagrant_taco 3y ago
(I can only speak to the US, though I expect it's similar in many other western countries as well) The unfortunate truth is that we have so heavily subsidized and centralized food production that anyone focusing on biodiversity, sustainability, or even animal welfare can compete economically. If we care at all about any of these goals, let alone all three, the only solution seems to be a much more localized food system. Large-scale ranching and farming is heavily dependent on monoculture, i.e. growing only one type of crop or raising only one type of animal. Without this a farmer has a much harder time mechanising the process with heavy equipment, and that's a must give that exceedingly few people are willing to work on a farm. Even then, most farmers eek out a living based heavily on government subsidies and crop insurance. I'm raising a small herd of cattle on pasture, I don't have as much experience farming crops so I'll stick with ranching here. Our cows are entirely grass fed and we don't use pesticides, herbicides, or antibiotics. We don't even own a tractor because it's not economically viable to take on the upfront or maintenance costs of modern tractors. No matter how I do the math I could never sell meat or dairy at prices that come close to grocery store prices. And no, scale wouldn't solve the financial challenge. Raising healthy cattle on pasture requires much more land per head than industrial cattle production offers. Fertilizers, antibiotics, and pesticides are all additional inputs that require expensive equipment to apply properly and ultimately are just bandaids attempting to squeeze out more head per acre than the land can actually support. At the end of the day we would end up raising more cattle, but our expenses and risk would continue to grow at least as fast and we'd end up working harder and stressing out more just to make sure something doesn't go wrong and bring the entire house of cards down.
- lukas099 3y ago
  Isn't centralized agriculture more efficient on a calories-per-acre basis? You even say that you can't raise as many cattle as industrial cattle production. Also, the more people we can feed with land in places like the US Midwest, the less land we need to use in places like the tropics which are more important from a biodiversity standpoint.
  - BiteCode_dev 3y ago
    Yes but we are past the point where calory price is the problem. That's solved. Now we need better food.
gdubs 3y ago
I said this on a similar thread yesterday, and I'll say it again – these farms will become profitable if and when we start acknowledging the negative externalities of industrialized agriculture. The public pays a price in both health and biodiversity loss, and the increasing cost of extreme weather events due to Climate Change. Governments subsidize these losses either by directly supporting conventional practices, or by allowing big agriculture to use chemically intensive processes. The reason small farms struggle to make a living using sustainable practices is largely because at the moment, there is little incentive. The public is fairly ignorant of where food comes from, or what it takes to grow it. Even less informed when it comes to why someone would even want to plant a diversity of plants rather than maximize yields.

204 points by momirlan 3y ago

meristohm 3y ago

Trees are also nice places to rest under during farm work.

tap-snap-or-nap 3y ago
So is concrete.
randomdata 3y ago
Not nearly as nice as an air-conditioned tractor cab.

Phileosopher 3y ago

Full disclaimer: I'm an industry amateur, went with the WWOOF program for 6 months, have kicked around what it'd take to make a living in agribusiness, and live in Iowa where the farm reports are on the level of celebrity gossip. The trouble with biodiversity isn't about lower yield-per-acre, but more that it's not the most affordably scalable. It's not hard to set up and configure planting a homogeneous crop across a vast range of acreage, then hit each stage of the process (fertilizing, weed-killing, harvesting) with vastly powerful equipment in what's effectively an array. It takes more work to create an interdependent system that uses nature to fix nature, but many communities have done it for centuries (e.g., the Mennonites). The one risk of scaling is that it's a short-term gain with a specific technical debt with the soil: too many repeat seasons of the same monoculture will create weaker yields from the decreased essential minerals for that specific plant. There are a host of existing solutions to this, with varying degrees of implementation and effectiveness: 1. Plant different monocultures in that location each year, though this isn't so useful if the entire region is configured for a particular plant. Iowa may be better for corn and Kansas for wheat, for example, meaning the market yield will be diminished for functionally the same product. 2. Employ the ancient method of "letting it rest" by not planting it every 7th year or so. Cuts back on profits, but lets the land heal from simple non-use (e.g., bugs and birds do their thing). The article implies this one, but with strips of rainforest in the middle of the acreage. 3. Rotational farming with grass seed and ruminants. Roaming cattle are literally the answer to climate stability, for multiple reasons. As it stands, farming at scale works that way because it's been the cheapest way to get the most crops. There are only several ways to improve food availability: 1. selective breeding and (now) gene-splicing, which makes the food more resistant to damage, larger, sweeter, etc. at the cost of quality 2. government incentives for "good old-fashioned non-GMO organic produce", since most people will not pay an additional $1/lb for apples The trouble with the article is that it abides by what I call the "Fragile Earth Theory", which posits that any aberrant act by humanity could send the entire planet into a downward spiral that renders us all extinct. There's enough scientific evidence to disprove that idea, but it's not politically fashionable to argue it and not the hill I want to die on. The article is interesting regarding biodiversity, but food security is now more a political issue than a yield issue.

motohagiography 3y ago
In your experience, is it accurate that farming practices are a function of labour costs, and what is the time horizon where robotics changes the game for high density farming with diverse crops? There is a video about using machine vision and lasers for weeding, and I'm wondering whether we are close to full automation and don't need nearly as much land to generate higher yields. Something like what these people do (shipping container farms) https://www.cropbox.co/ https://www.cropbox.co/ seems like we're really close to being able to run restaurants off them.
- rocqua 3y ago
  Why start on labor costs, and then end on land usage? If healthy farming is limited by labor costs, the result of automation would hopefully be the pickup of healthy farming. The benefits going to quality of produce, long term soil sustainability, reduced usage of fertilizer and water, and other crucial benefits. Taking the advantage and focusing on land usage seems short-sighted to me.
- Phileosopher 3y ago
  You're definitely on the right track. Over here in Iowa, the dumb labor I've seen has almost exclusively moved to factories, with the full-automation tractors spacing out planting according to prior moisture and soil composition tests run over it by a prior-day tractor. Micro-farming is definitely a hot thing, too. The plants are now getting smaller, but producing huge yields. Food sustainability in someone's suburban backyard is almost here, though I do believe it's a bit more fiddly than the standard old-fashioned greenhouse-then-transfer for personal farming that we've seen for a long time. There's a business model waiting to happen for uninformed city-dwellers who want to get into the space, though it's more about selling education than a tangible product. But, if you're creative and savvy in the biology/botany/ecology space (I'm not), I've seen all sorts of neat configurations. One of the most interesting organic farming techniques I heard of was a guy who had a fish pond on one side, which cycled water to the other side that had a hydroponics setup, meaning it was essentially a micro-ecosystem.
asfasdfaaaaaaa 3y ago

jv22222 3y ago

Check out a documentary called "The Biggest Little Farm" for a US based farm that created true bio-diversity/ecosystem, and used it instead of pesticides to grow food.

agomez314 3y ago
Great documentary!!
myshpa 3y ago
Very good movie. I'd also recommend Syntropic Agriculture, an agroforestry method pioneered by Ernst Gotsch. He personally reforested 500 hectares of degraded pastures and doesn't use any external resources such as pesticides and fertilizers. Instead, he employs methods like maximizing photosynthesis and selective pruning. As a result, his land now stands as one of the most fertile and biodiverse regions within the Atlantic rainforest, achieving even higher yields than traditional farms. As syntropic farmers often say, they grow the soil to grow the food. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ST9NyHf09M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ST9NyHf09M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSPNRu4ZPvE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSPNRu4ZPvE https://agendagotsch.com/en/what-is-syntropic-farming/ https://agendagotsch.com/en/what-is-syntropic-farming/ Another example would be the Natural Farming method pioneered by Masanobu Fukuoka. He also practices farming without the use of pesticides and herbicides, and his yields also surpass those of traditional farms. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nzs8iFGNdBo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nzs8iFGNdBo
- cnity 3y ago
  If the yield is better, why don't more do it? Is it just because it takes more skill, basically? In other words, what are the economic incentives working against adopting this farming method? I'm very interested because this type of farming sounds wonderful to me.
  - helpfulContrib 3y ago
    It takes attention and skill and involvement. And I think the point where more will do it, is at the border and fence-line. Once a neighbor starts growing a food forest, that idea can rapidly spread. It does take years, though...

cyberax 3y ago

Ugh. Science by press-release. This may all sound nice, but modern farms already deal with pollination by just bringing in bees. The same applies to birds, just a few species can control pests. "Nature" has an article about that: https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms8414 https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms8414 There are certainly arguments for increased biodiversity, but food security doesn't appear to be one of them.

Cthulhu_ 3y ago
"Food security" is only one aspect though, that sounds like min/maxing things - and that has brought us excess nitrogen (fertilizer), mass extinctions and health problems (pesticides), food poverty (quantity over quality), and ecosystem decimation. It's great for short-term profit, not long-term sustainability. I don't see life or nature when I see miles and miles of corn or wheat, I see a factory.
- cyberax 3y ago
  > "Food security" is only one aspect though, that sounds like min/maxing things - and that has brought us excess nitrogen (fertilizer), mass extinctions and health problems (pesticides), food poverty (quantity over quality) JFYI, pesticides in food are not linked with health problems. It's a more complicated story for people who apply pesticides, as they are exposed to 100-1000x greater amounts. Fertilizer runoff is a problem. And it's being solved, modern fertilizer application practices (e.g. direct ammonia injection) try to minimize it. > and ecosystem decimation. Wait until you hear about what Native Americans did with the ecosystems on the American continent. The current agriculture is long-term sustainable in most places. It's unsustainable only when there's not enough water available (e.g.: California).
rocqua 3y ago
Modern farms don't handle water infiltration, and soil degradation very well. It takes more than one plant to hold water in the soil rather than letting the water (and soil) run off immediately once it rains. Similarly to keep soil in a state where it supports plant life, you need more than one kind of plant that is maximized for extraction.

asu_thomas 3y ago

How do such farms do with profit?

Cthulhu_ 3y ago
That's the kicker, isn't it? Their output will be lower than an industrial farm of equal size. However, the quality of product will be higher (this is an assumption btw), and they will be able to charge more for the product for being grown organically and using less pesticides and the like. There may also be subsidies involved, depending on the location. But profit should not be the goal. It's necessary, but it shouldn't be the target.
- asu_thomas 3y ago
  [flagged]
- randomdata 3y ago
  > But profit should not be the goal. I'm not sure it is a goal. It certainly hasn't been the goal of most farmers since I started farming, and I am not sure it ever was. The goal of most farmers is to build wealth. Much like tech startups, they are willing to forego profit in the name of growth. Asset rich, cash poor is the name of farming. > It's necessary It's more or less necessary for a farmer to find profit somewhere, but that doesn't have to come from the farm. Most farmers also have off-farm jobs.
rocqua 3y ago
You might counter that modern farms have massive hidden internal costs in depreciation of soil quality, with long term yields being suppressed, and vulnerability to drought massively raised. Hence these better farms should do much better on financing costs.
- Biologist123 3y ago
  I’d give this comment more upticks if I could. The hidden internal costs of the modern farm is the unit scale example for all our environmental problems. I’d add that many of these costs exist beyond the discount horizon and are therefore not factored into land-use decisions.

1letterunixname 3y ago

We get it. Don't have 100% of farmland as monocultural industrial ag megafarms. Leave strips of fallow land here and there. I tried reducing the insect population around my moms home situated in a plot of formerly fallow land adjacent to farmland. The bug zapper killed piles of flying insects every night until she didn't want to keep cleaning it anymore and gave up on an un-enclosed porch. I suggested she ought to do what most Texans do and have an enclosed porch. Just leaving the land alone does wonders for the food chain of critters. Although, when paper wasps pitch their tents on the eaves of your place, you have to convince them to move along.

anhner 3y ago

A little punctuation or an extra word would do wonders for this title's legibility... "Farms that create habitat - key to food security and biodiversity" "Farms that create habitat, key to food security and biodiversity" "Farms that create habitat are key to food security and biodiversity"

ssss11 3y ago
You telling me there’s no habitat key? This whole time I’ve been lied to…..
- alternatetwo 3y ago
  Terraria has Biome Keys, and you can create auto farms to get them ... so, close enough?
lukas099 3y ago
I think it's a standard for news headlines to omit linking verbs like 'are'.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

lucidguppy 3y ago

I would think that inter-cropping would be more possible with GPS and robotics. I heard it cuts down on pests (confuses the bastards, and also attracts predators). Our farms have to more and more resemble natural ecosystems to increase resiliency.

bluGill 3y ago
intercropping is done, but there are significant downsides. Farmers do it once in a while, but this is an area that is still very experimental and so any intelligent farmer (most are not stupid!) will try it in a small field for a few years, or watch someone else try it. Tall plants shade the shorter ones, so you lose yield for the shorter plants, and this may or may not be made up by the taller ones (which have to put more energy into supporting that height). Intercropping means pests can live and thrive in your crops. Farmers will sometimes plant one crop 3 years in a row because that means the pests don't have anything to live on and in turn they die off. Intercropping means there is always a host species for the pest to live off of and so they in turn thrive. I think there are other downsides as well that I can't remember. There may also be unknown downsides - since this is not common there may be downsides were are not aware of. This is why we need scientific research and small trails before rolling out something new in mass - it may be worse than what we have.
- bluGill 3y ago
  By planting for 3 years in a row, pests that target something else in your rotation will die off. Of course the trade off is pests that target the crop you are planting 3 years in a row will have more opportunity to grow.

fjfaase 3y ago

A few months ago, I have become member of a farming co-op just 8 minutes biking from where I live (in the Netherlands). The co-op aims at sustainable food production with some livestock. Increasing bio-diversity is one of the primary goals. The co-op leases about 30ha hectares which in the past decades were primarily used for producing corn to feed cows. There are about 18 farming co-ops like this in the Netherlands [1]. I very much enjoy helping with the weeding. [1] https://www.herenboeren.nl/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Herenboeren-Engels.pdf https://www.herenboeren.nl/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Herenb...

spiderfarmer 3y ago
There is a lot of criticism about Herenboeren initiatives though: - The lack of knowledge (or wilful ignorance) results in them not requesting permits like other farmers have to, resulting in frustrated neighbours and a bad reputation. - The lack of knowledge (or plain arrogance) results in trying to turn soil that is unsuitable for vegetable cultivation into vegetable gardens, resulting in failed harvests and wasted money. It's fine to experiment, but throwing money away while well meaning neighbouring farmers are proactively giving you all information you need to know is something else entirely. - Some farmers that are employed by the communities are frustrated because of endless meetings and politics. - Like with a lot of homesteading initiatives, the end goal often seems to be make money on rent and knowledge sharing and not creating a sustainable business based on produce. The same goes for Youtube channels of people promoting the lifestyle. Without ad money it's unsustainable. Overall my gut feeling is that initiatives like these will only result in glorified allotment gardens and it will never be able to achieve its goal of reinventing food production. It would be way better to let existing farmers incorporate better practices at scale.
- Valgrim 3y ago
  I'm curious. What makes a soil suitable for growing vegetables? What can we grow in a soil that isn't? Is it possible to transform an unsuitable soil into a good one?
  - 3y ago

flagrant_taco 3y ago

(I can only speak to the US, though I expect it's similar in many other western countries as well) The unfortunate truth is that we have so heavily subsidized and centralized food production that anyone focusing on biodiversity, sustainability, or even animal welfare can compete economically. If we care at all about any of these goals, let alone all three, the only solution seems to be a much more localized food system. Large-scale ranching and farming is heavily dependent on monoculture, i.e. growing only one type of crop or raising only one type of animal. Without this a farmer has a much harder time mechanising the process with heavy equipment, and that's a must give that exceedingly few people are willing to work on a farm. Even then, most farmers eek out a living based heavily on government subsidies and crop insurance. I'm raising a small herd of cattle on pasture, I don't have as much experience farming crops so I'll stick with ranching here. Our cows are entirely grass fed and we don't use pesticides, herbicides, or antibiotics. We don't even own a tractor because it's not economically viable to take on the upfront or maintenance costs of modern tractors. No matter how I do the math I could never sell meat or dairy at prices that come close to grocery store prices. And no, scale wouldn't solve the financial challenge. Raising healthy cattle on pasture requires much more land per head than industrial cattle production offers. Fertilizers, antibiotics, and pesticides are all additional inputs that require expensive equipment to apply properly and ultimately are just bandaids attempting to squeeze out more head per acre than the land can actually support. At the end of the day we would end up raising more cattle, but our expenses and risk would continue to grow at least as fast and we'd end up working harder and stressing out more just to make sure something doesn't go wrong and bring the entire house of cards down.

lukas099 3y ago
Isn't centralized agriculture more efficient on a calories-per-acre basis? You even say that you can't raise as many cattle as industrial cattle production. Also, the more people we can feed with land in places like the US Midwest, the less land we need to use in places like the tropics which are more important from a biodiversity standpoint.
- BiteCode_dev 3y ago
  Yes but we are past the point where calory price is the problem. That's solved. Now we need better food.

gdubs 3y ago

I said this on a similar thread yesterday, and I'll say it again – these farms will become profitable if and when we start acknowledging the negative externalities of industrialized agriculture. The public pays a price in both health and biodiversity loss, and the increasing cost of extreme weather events due to Climate Change. Governments subsidize these losses either by directly supporting conventional practices, or by allowing big agriculture to use chemically intensive processes. The reason small farms struggle to make a living using sustainable practices is largely because at the moment, there is little incentive. The public is fairly ignorant of where food comes from, or what it takes to grow it. Even less informed when it comes to why someone would even want to plant a diversity of plants rather than maximize yields.