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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
by 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 agoIn 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 agoWhy 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 agoYou'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> 3. Rotational farming with grass seed and ruminants. Roaming cattle are literally the answer to climate stability, for multiple reasons. Source please. I've only seen Big Meat selling this point before and all info i've read on it points to it being very false. The one guy who has famously promoted this idea also killed 40,000 elephants in Africa [0] to learn that he was wrong so i'm not going to take his slightly updated idea that cows will fix it instead... [0] https://www.fastcompany.com/2681518/this-man-shot-40000-elephants-before-he-figured-out-that-herds-of-cows-can-save-the-planet https://www.fastcompany.com/2681518/this-man-shot-40000-elep...