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The farmers already know regenerative ag and are executing certain aspects of it, but for most of the US the financial incentives aren't aligned and the mineral

• tastyfreeze 2y ago
  From many examples I have seen of farms that have switched to regenerative practices it takes about 3 years to bring the soil back to life. Some of those had been corn for generations. Living soil consumes rock minerals making them available to plants. It doesn't matter if all the previously released minerals all washed away. As long as there is sand, silt, clay and living soil the minerals are available for plants.
  • blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
    Aren’t those minerals depleted by higher and higher yield crops that are industrially farmed and then shipped all over (along with the water)? How does the regenerative practice add back an equivalent amount? Wouldn’t it need additives that are equal in mass to all the plants previously farmed?
    • debacle 2y ago
      It doesn't. After a few years, the scant resources (phosphates, magnesium, manganese) run out again. Most small-scale regenerative ag farms are bringing in a lot of outside material to add those minerals back in. My farmland hasn't been farmed for 50 years. If I clear an area and put a veggie bed in, I get 1 year of great yield, 1 year of "okay" yield, and then it becomes impossible to grow anything due to nutrient deficiencies.
      • WillAdams 2y ago
        Isaac Asimov once conducted a thought experiment: "If all the earth's crust was converted into bio-mass, what would be the limiting element?" Remember all those post WWII photos showing how fertilizing with phosphorous resulted in incredible crop yields? Guess what element China (which has some of the world's largest reserves) has quit exporting?
        • throwup238 2y ago
          > "If all the earth's crust was converted into bio-mass, what would be the limiting element?" I think selenium would run out long before phosphorus. The crust contains selenium at 0.05-0.09 ppm, but most plants require around 0.1-1 ppm. It's also one of the hardest nutrients to remediate because you can't just dump a bunch of selenium on the surface when 5-10 ppm starts to become toxic to lots of other organisms.
          • AStonesThrow 2y ago
            I was supplementing with selenium for various reasons, and it seemed clear that it's one of the minerals that used to be supplied via our diet, but is quite deficient now, due to exhaustion in the soil. Selenium, along with taurine, is one of the supplements which genuinely drove my physicians vehemently crazy, so I doubled up, and ensured that they were the focal point of my daily regimen.
            • waldothedog 2y ago
              When you say it drove your physicians crazy, what do you mean?
              • schmidtleonard 2y ago
                They wanted social validation for their fad diet from the doctor and didn't get it.
                • AStonesThrow 2y ago
                  No, they get pissed because the supplements can actually heal illnesses and support better health, which means they wouldn't be able to push drugs on me. Psychiatrist's parting shot was, "they're all bio-active!" Micronutrients are no fad, because guess what, they used to come in our fruits, vegetables, and meats.
            • teruakohatu 2y ago
      • chairmansteve 2y ago
        You need to return your waste to soil, maybe? Composting the food waste, and use composting toilets to create a "circular economy". That is apparently how it was done in the old days...
        • schiffern 2y ago
          See The Humanure Handbook. https://humanurehandbook.com/ https://humanurehandbook.com/ See also, Paul Wheaton criticism of The Humanure Handbook ("No, do fear your poop! Fear it!!"). Timecode link, but I recommend the whole video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vZPTPIHO8w&t=4980s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vZPTPIHO8w&t=4980s
          • NoMoreNicksLeft 2y ago
            I too am a connoisseur of dysentery.
            • schiffern 2y ago
              But seriously check out the links, especially the second one. That's precisely the point — to close the nutrient loop but still 100% interrupt the pathogen fecal-oral route.
              • idunnoman1222 2y ago
                I watched the video and all he said is that if it smells bad, it is bad but I don’t see anything about closing the nutrient loop
          • pfdietz 2y ago
            Yes, let's put human waste containing a whole Walgreens' of drug residues onto a field growing our food crops. What could possibly go wrong?
            • psd1 2y ago
              Good question. It's about unknown unknowns, right? But we could map out where those may be. I guess chemical toxicity, drugs with long half-lives that affect soil organisms, and antibiotics that promote resistance. (yeah yeah they are all chemicals.) For the chemical toxicity, it's chemicals that are harmful to plants but allowed for human consumption, or chemicals in sufficient quantity to disrupt soil balance. Doesn't seem like a real concern? With metabolic disruption to soil organisms, yes, there may be real danger there. That smells like previous environmental mistakes. Antibiotics, yeah, some danger. Livestock is exposed, and resistance-conferring genes might jump directly to human pathogens. It's worth studying. There are requirements for both sewage processing and fertilising soil, so the value of a solution would be high.
    • Retric 2y ago
      Most of the matter in food comes from water H2O or Air CO2 + N2. Nitrogen fixing bacteria are literally getting that nitrogen from the air not the soil even if they live in the soil. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nitrogen_fixation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nitrogen_fixation Modern agriculture uses fertilizer for extra nitrogen (N), phosphorus (P), and potassium (K). Plants also need a few trace minerals from soil but it’s a tiny fraction of their mass Iron, Calcium, etc and can also be added back: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock_flour https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock_flour PS: There’s some really destructive agricultural like sod that’s literally shipping soil, but the premium pays to replace the soil.
      • bluGill 2y ago
        Every unit of a crop has a specific amount of minerals forever taken away. Nitrogen comes from the air and to isn't an issue. but where are you going to get those tons of phospeous from? Farmers now have to add sulfur because while not much is needed some is taken away and needed - they used to get that from acid rain but we cleaned up that source (overall a good thing but one unexpected issue) i don't know how much iron crops need compared to what is in most soils. I know farmes are adding sulfar and other mineral.
        • schmidtleonard 2y ago
          > Nitrogen comes from the air and to isn't an issue I thought it was a huge issue because natural nitrogen fixation was slow and unreliable, and that's why Haber-Bosch was such a big deal.
          • bluGill 2y ago
            By not an issue I mean we have plenty and it is 'easy' to replace. Of course fixing is slow and so we need to add a lot but supplies won't run out.
            • schmidtleonard 2y ago
              You sure? I vaguely remember that the Green Revolution was roughly a 10x in yield. That sounds pretty significant. What's the yield difference using modern techniques?
    • tastyfreeze 2y ago
      Fungi digest rocks and make the minerals water soluble. It is the life in the soil the regenerates the fertility. Fungi are the first things to die with tilling and chemical application; breaking the nutrient cycle.
      • hwc 2y ago
        instead of mining rocks thousands of miles away, crushing them, and then spreading the result in your fields, convince local fungi to do all that work locally!
    • analyte123 2y ago
      It’s more about keeping minerals on the field. A big one is reducing erosion, which practices like no-till and cover cropping help. Tons of soil being washed away is a lot of nutrients being lost. If you look at a regenerative certification program like [1] you’ll see that you’re allowed to apply synthetic fertilizer but it has to be no more than the rate removed by harvested crops. This means, hopefully, that you aren’t losing much to erosion, runoff, or volatization, and that good soil structure is keeping them available. [1] https://s3.amazonaws.com/media.regenified.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/18191226/Final-4-10-2024-2024-Revision-Regenified-6-3-4-Verification-Standard-1.pdf https://s3.amazonaws.com/media.regenified.com/wp-content/upl...
  • schiffern 2y ago
    > Living soil consumes rock minerals making them available to plants. Thank you. This is one of those super-underappreciated biological facts. Industrial ag treats soil like it's a tank of fertility, and guess who sells the refills? Biologists know that healthy soil is a factory, making new fertility out of rock/air/rain/sun. Direct from soil microbiologist Dr Elaine Ingham: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2H60ritjag https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2H60ritjag
    • deleted 2y ago
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• darth_avocado 2y ago
  What a lot of regenerative ag proponents focus on is the value it adds to the ecosystem and the soil. But it gets dismissed because regenerative farming is objectively not capable of maintaining ag output at the level it is right now at the current prices. We need to talk more about the need for the consumption habits to change if we want regenerative ag to take over. We won't be able to farm the amount of corn and soybean we farm today, but that would mean consumers will have to consume less stuff that is a corn derivative, or even better, consume less. There's no reason we should be selling a single bag of Doritos across the country, let alone for $2.
  • jkdufair 2y ago
    Pretty sure most corn is grown for animal feed. We could help by eating less - or no - meat.
  • gruez 2y ago
    >There's no reason we should be selling a single bag of Doritos across the country, let alone for $2. Most of that is markup. The raw materials are on the order of cents.
    • jonathanlydall 2y ago
      Raw materials are very often not the biggest contributor to cost of manufacturing something. Look at CPUs, for a fabricator the cost of the silicon alone is a constant cost which is dwarfed by capital investment and yield cost. Then there are other costs like labour, administration and shipping.
  • crazygringo 2y ago
    What's wrong with corn? I definitely appreciate having corn tortillas and corn chips and cornbread to diversify what is almost entirely otherwise wheat and potatoes and rice, in terms of my starches. I need to get my calories somewhere. Don't really see what's wrong with some corn chips when I need a quick snack on the go because my last meal was five hours ago. And heck, plenty (most?) of the fresh food I eat comes from across the country, if not from other countries entirely. But corn chips, having most of their water removed, are far more environmentally friendly to transport due to being so lightweight.
• deleted 2y ago
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• ggm 2y ago
  I don't think you're wrong, A good write up of the economic incentives would be really interesting. Regenerative practices would probably initially look like a reduced high side profit, and reduced land yield intensity but at significantly reduced input costs on chemicals and pesticides. The labour costs might be higher or lower depending. Then over time, yield to use would show for area in production actual profits were better but still to a lower high point. More certainty as long as e.g. massive disease or pest risk didn't strike. And as long as organics have a higher premium price at lower yield, when the soil can pass the certification tests for residues there's a new profit highpoint. That's my sense but perhaps there are better takes on it.
  • insensible 2y ago
    Permaculture designer here. That’s a pretty good take. Biggest aspect missing is that once you abandon the “parking lot” approach to farming, you get many niches where you can profit from multiple crops on the same land. The farmer in the article is grazing under productive trees, for one example. Another opportunity is to stack a bunch of berry bushes of graduated height next to rows of trees. And to graze chickens after a larger animal, yet another enterprise on the same land. And with all the added fertility from the grazing, now you can sell a cutting of hay you didn’t have before. The profit per unit area can become very high.
    • jethkl 2y ago
      your comment introduced me to the term permaculture, looks interesting. Do you leverage numerical optimization - linear programming or integer programming for example - in your work?
    • harimau777 2y ago
      Does that scale? It seems like the planting and harvesting would be difficult to automate and/or require increased labor. However, I am definitely not an expert.
      • lukan 2y ago
• devmor 2y ago
  > This is an economics problem not a knowledge problem. This is something I have to regularly say to colleagues and contemporaries in the software and electronics space. I am sure it comes up in many fields. So many things are done inefficiently and with disregard to the future for the sake of short term profitability. In this case though it may doom us all rather than just create more work for someone a few years later.