3 ms·

> 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 thi

by lurk2 6mo 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 6mo ago
What 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 6mo ago
  Ideally, 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 6mo ago
  What 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 6mo ago
    What'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
  - Saline9515 6mo ago
    Tilling with large amounts of mined fertilisers and poisons works for now, but is not especially durable. Many of us are going to discover this given that the fertilisers aren't produced anymore since the Hormuz Strait is blocked.
  - modo_mario 6mo ago
    >co2 will cook the planet, industrial agriculture is poisoning the land, over fishing will collapse fish stocks. The insect population is down a ridiculous amount where I live and also in neighboring germany. I could link the study and such but honestly it's not like these things aren't backed up by my own experiences and those of my parents and grandparents. I do find a lot lot less insects than I did when i was young. We no longer get much (if any) snow let alone the kneedeep stuff. It's harder to catch certain kinds of fish. The fishing boats where I used to visit every year go quite a bit further nowadays because those fish stocks have collapsed.
  - darkarmani 6mo ago
    > co2 will cook the planet It doesn't have to cook the planet to cause massive suffering. Do you think there hasn't been global warming? What amount of global warming would change your mind?
- lurk2 6mo ago
  Do you have experience as a farmer? If you don’t, why should I believe that farmers who continue to till their fields know less about this issue than you do?
  - arthurbrown 6mo ago
    I'm not a farmer, but you are welcome to ask a no-till farmer for their experience, or do some reading. Heck, you could read the article that we're commenting on where scientists have dedicated their career to understanding this stuff.
    - lurk2 6mo ago
      Can you explain to me why a farmer with a financial stake in this argument continues to till his soil? Can you explain the benefits of tillage, or are you arguing that it has no benefits?
      - inkcapmushroom 6mo ago
        The modern industrial farming complex is designed to treat every field as identical, and to allow as few people as possible to work as big an area as possible. That allows for standardizing methods and optimizing the output per acre. Tilling the soil is mainly for aeration: the farm equipment rolling over the fields (which is needed to massively reduce labor costs) compact them, so you need to loosen the soil again. It's also for weeding; if you till before you plant you uproot any plants already growing there (weeding by hand is extremely labor intensive). It also allows you to mix compost and other beneficial components into your soil to further aerate it and give space for roots to grow. It's all to give your field a "blank canvas" that you apply your crops to, where you can just dump about 2-3x the recommended amount of fertilizer into it and not worry about the particular conditions of the soil itself beforehand.
  - Saline9515 6mo ago
    People in a local optimums don't necessarily know about better local optimums.
altairprime 6mo ago
No, I don’t particularly care if the solution is cover crops, no tilling, a mix of both, or some other practice entirely (‘introduce groundhogs’ comes to mind as a particularly inflammatory option for mycelial networking). Advocacy for any single solution is not particularly interesting to me, so long as any practice is followed besides “dump imported nitrogen into the hopper each year until your waterways are toast”. (I am not your farmer, this is not farming advice.)
ikidd 6mo ago
We no-till farm thousands of acres in the middle of millions more acres of no-till grain farming. I don't think you have a clue what you're talking about.
- lurk2 6mo ago
  > We no-till farm thousands of acres in the middle of millions more acres of no-till grain farming. 1) Does this practice work in every circumstance? 2) If so, why do farmers continue the practice of tillage? 3) Why did the practice of tillage originate in the first place? It seems extremely unlikely that the practice was adopted and then continued to persist for no reason.
  - bluGill 6mo ago
    Tilling comes in many different forms. The old plow is out nearly everywhere because it is so bad. Debending on local climate and soil some places farmers do some tilling others do none. There are lots of little companies scattered around the world that make a tillage tool for that local area that wouldn't be useful elsewhere if they tried to sell it.
  - ikidd 6mo ago
    There are circumstances and soil types that encourage tillage, usually dealing with water. Organic farming trades spray for diesel fuel. And farmers don't like change, but no-till is so ubiquitous that it's hard to find farms that till unless it's unavoidable, such as fixing problems from harvest time.

by lurk2 6mo ago

arthurbrown 6mo ago

What 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 6mo ago
Ideally, 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 6mo ago
What 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 6mo ago
  What'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
- Saline9515 6mo ago
  Tilling with large amounts of mined fertilisers and poisons works for now, but is not especially durable. Many of us are going to discover this given that the fertilisers aren't produced anymore since the Hormuz Strait is blocked.
- modo_mario 6mo ago
  >co2 will cook the planet, industrial agriculture is poisoning the land, over fishing will collapse fish stocks. The insect population is down a ridiculous amount where I live and also in neighboring germany. I could link the study and such but honestly it's not like these things aren't backed up by my own experiences and those of my parents and grandparents. I do find a lot lot less insects than I did when i was young. We no longer get much (if any) snow let alone the kneedeep stuff. It's harder to catch certain kinds of fish. The fishing boats where I used to visit every year go quite a bit further nowadays because those fish stocks have collapsed.
- darkarmani 6mo ago
  > co2 will cook the planet It doesn't have to cook the planet to cause massive suffering. Do you think there hasn't been global warming? What amount of global warming would change your mind?
lurk2 6mo ago
Do you have experience as a farmer? If you don’t, why should I believe that farmers who continue to till their fields know less about this issue than you do?
- arthurbrown 6mo ago
  I'm not a farmer, but you are welcome to ask a no-till farmer for their experience, or do some reading. Heck, you could read the article that we're commenting on where scientists have dedicated their career to understanding this stuff.
  - lurk2 6mo ago
    Can you explain to me why a farmer with a financial stake in this argument continues to till his soil? Can you explain the benefits of tillage, or are you arguing that it has no benefits?
    - inkcapmushroom 6mo ago
      The modern industrial farming complex is designed to treat every field as identical, and to allow as few people as possible to work as big an area as possible. That allows for standardizing methods and optimizing the output per acre. Tilling the soil is mainly for aeration: the farm equipment rolling over the fields (which is needed to massively reduce labor costs) compact them, so you need to loosen the soil again. It's also for weeding; if you till before you plant you uproot any plants already growing there (weeding by hand is extremely labor intensive). It also allows you to mix compost and other beneficial components into your soil to further aerate it and give space for roots to grow. It's all to give your field a "blank canvas" that you apply your crops to, where you can just dump about 2-3x the recommended amount of fertilizer into it and not worry about the particular conditions of the soil itself beforehand.
- Saline9515 6mo ago
  People in a local optimums don't necessarily know about better local optimums.

altairprime 6mo ago

No, I don’t particularly care if the solution is cover crops, no tilling, a mix of both, or some other practice entirely (‘introduce groundhogs’ comes to mind as a particularly inflammatory option for mycelial networking). Advocacy for any single solution is not particularly interesting to me, so long as any practice is followed besides “dump imported nitrogen into the hopper each year until your waterways are toast”. (I am not your farmer, this is not farming advice.)

ikidd 6mo ago

We no-till farm thousands of acres in the middle of millions more acres of no-till grain farming. I don't think you have a clue what you're talking about.

lurk2 6mo ago
> We no-till farm thousands of acres in the middle of millions more acres of no-till grain farming. 1) Does this practice work in every circumstance? 2) If so, why do farmers continue the practice of tillage? 3) Why did the practice of tillage originate in the first place? It seems extremely unlikely that the practice was adopted and then continued to persist for no reason.
- bluGill 6mo ago
  Tilling comes in many different forms. The old plow is out nearly everywhere because it is so bad. Debending on local climate and soil some places farmers do some tilling others do none. There are lots of little companies scattered around the world that make a tillage tool for that local area that wouldn't be useful elsewhere if they tried to sell it.
- ikidd 6mo ago
  There are circumstances and soil types that encourage tillage, usually dealing with water. Organic farming trades spray for diesel fuel. And farmers don't like change, but no-till is so ubiquitous that it's hard to find farms that till unless it's unavoidable, such as fixing problems from harvest time.