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Tilling requires less cognitive and logistical effort: you just apply calories to drag a blade through the soil and then dump seed in it. No-till requires thing
by altairprime 7mo ago
Tilling requires less cognitive and logistical effort: you just apply calories to drag a blade through the soil and then dump seed in it. No-till requires things like “tracking the soil’s water retention levels”, “planting cover crops or even giving a field a year off”, and other such steps that in general can be summarized as “cost centers”.
Given the economic climate, few non-corporate farmers can afford that investment without the collapse of their farm, and few corporate farmers (none at nationwide scale, afaik) are willing to invest in cost centers that threaten to decrease, rather than increase, their rate of profit growth year-over-year. One could absolutely make a case that regulatory investment in such things be imposed upon megacorp farms first, with their processes and technology made available by subsidy to smaller farms; it would be enough to structure the subsidy as inversely proportional to the acreage reaped for value, with some language ensuring that the cost of investment into land farmed by contract to a megacorp is paid to the land operator. To prevent certain abuses, they’d also have to modify farming contract law to make maintaining long-term use of the land an inalienable right, so that unsustainable output-quota farming contracts are unenforceable.
This is an unlikely outcome in the U.S., but I still appreciate the researches providing more evidence in support of it.
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- lurk2 7mo ago> Tilling requires less cognitive and logistical effort: you just apply calories to drag a blade through the soil and then dump seed in it. No-till requires things like “tracking the soil’s water retention levels”, “planting cover crops or even giving a field a year off”, and other such steps that in general can be summarized as “cost centers”. No-Till is one of those ideas like permaculture or Modern Monetary Theory that attracts emphatic advocates while going against conventional practice. It isn’t clear why it would just be being adopted now if it actually worked. Do you have any actual experience farming?
- arthurbrown 7mo agoWhat an odd response. We have centuries of evidence for minimal disturbance agriculture supporting civilizations. What evidently does NOT work is the quite new practice of industrial tilling and fertilizer, which is causing rapid breakdown of our natural environment and future potential for food production.
- altairprime 7mo agoIdeally, industrial farming will use this new data to min/max tilling intervals for higher production per acre, which is still wildly suboptimal but at least provably better than arbitrary downtime practices (or even none) that they would otherwise settle on. If nothing else, that’s language their shareholders will listen to: “use fewer resources to produce more goods” is the holy grail of corporations, and fertilizer must be the death of their opex today.
- thrownthatway 7mo agoWhat do you mean “does not work”? The industrial practices that have enable us to feed a population of 8 billion, with surplus - a lot of food is thrown out as waste because we have so much of it we really don’t have to be super strict with it. The industrial practices that have allowed the majority of the population to do something other than be directly involved in agriculture. What part of that isn’t working? The sky is falling, co2 will cook the planet, industrial agriculture is poisoning the land, over fishing will collapse fish stocks. We’ve been told these things for, what, at least sixty years now. Now we can add A.I. will de-employment everyone. I don’t believe any of it.
- arthurbrown 7mo agoWhat's the point of this? You are saying that you will not accept any new information that goes against your belief system. The evidence is there. Read something. Watch a video. The resources are readily available and abundant. Make a garden patch and experiment for yourself if you refuse to accept any outside information. This video is 15 years old. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q1aR5OLgcc0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q1aR5OLgcc0
- adabyron 7mo agoGiving a field a year off and cover crops have been done for hundreds of years by farmers who also till. There are a lot of different combinations of variables done for both tilling and not tilling depending on many factors.
- pixl97 7mo agoYears off don't work great when coupled with high land prices and taxes.
- dylan604 7mo ago> Giving a field a year off and cover crops have been done for hundreds of years Even the old testament talks about letting the land sit fallow for a whole year, so thousands not just hundreds of years.
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