The fungi guys will tell you that running out of mineral fertilizer is bullshit on roughly 95% of the arable land because all of the minerals your food needs are right there in the sand and clay. I once heard it described that conventional agriculture is essentially a hydroponics system using partially sterilized soil as the substrate.
Nearly every symbiotic relationship fungi make is based on buying sugars from plants by selling them minerals from biological weathering of rock (particles). What happens in conventional agriculture is that we murder all of the fungi.
There are a few places with strange soil compositions that are actually lacking in particular minerals. We could either elect to do something else with that land, or transition everyone but them to a post-green-revolution strategy.
Most of the nitrogen in currently living humans was captured from the atmosphere via the Haber Bosch process.
That is the primary contribution of synthetic fertilizer, and there aren't scalable natural processes to match it. Countries used to go to war over nitrogen stores (such as islands covered in bat guano).
I know farmers who grow velvet beans and other nitrogen fixers and have huge yields. They’re somewhere between permaculture and organic farmers, though, so not industrial scale. It’d be nice if we could come up with a good way to scale permaculture.
I was getting curious recently if there was a suitability for running mini Haber Bosch equipment in small batches that would serve a neighborhood or town, or a homestead. Not sure really but it was interesting to contemplate distributing that load over many folks.
It did indeed make more sense to me to go to war for a strategic, scare and faraway military resource than to go through all that effort for fertilizer.
Food to feed your troops (and workers in armament factories) is a strategic military resource.
You have to either grow it yourself or import it. Artificial fertilizer allows you stop importing nitrogen (which could be blocked by embargoes) and make it locally, which would allow you to potentially grow food locally and not import it either (again, embargoes).
Yea the way we do mass farming now is MASSively flawed. It produces huge yields but has tons of fragility - monoculture crops being a huge flaw as well.
The one that fascinates me the most is the way the Mayans did it - Chinampas. That and aquaculture growing lots of smaller fish seems like a create combo if we could get small backyard pond/farms going
I dream of having land with a pond. Properly managed, it could produce about 50 pounds of bluegills, etc from a 1/2 pond every year, with little input and infrequent work.
Maybe we are eating different fish. Stocked trout is pretty bland and somewhat mushy. I've never had truly wild trout, so maybe they are better. The bluegills here taste a lot better than farmed tilapia (do they even sell wild?) - mild, a little sweet, and flakes well. I agree bluegills are better than catfish, but depending on the catfish I prefer them over tilapia.
I hear that water quality and, to a lesser extent, water chemistry has a huge impact on taste. I've sort of noticed that in certain lakes compared to others.
That's probably a personal preference or maybe due to water quality. They're one of my favorite. There's a great TED talk our there about water quality and fish flavor, but I don't remember the person.
I agree, but I think it's hard for us non-farmers to grasp the scale of industrial agriculture. I would love it we switched over to another way of doing things, but with 8 billion people, there is no feasible way back to an earlier, organic way of life.
How are we going to feed another 2 billion people let alone those that we have without fossil fuel inputs? Maybe biotech will save us, but I am skeptical.
Stop eating cows & dairy. Immediately you've reduced the scale by 75%. If the world adopted a plant-based diet we would reduce global agricultural land use from 4 to 1 billion hectares [https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets].
In our modern society where many people require less calories than our ancestors, because most don't do as much physically intensive labour, it's somewhat tricky to get enough protein from food _without_ taking in too many calories.
Yes, plants do contain protein. But sort the above linked table for "complete protein" and you'll see of the 9 "complete protein" foods, only 5 are plant foods. And of those 5, only Quinoa appears to have no limiting amino acid.
It seems that animals have had an important role in recent times of concentrating plant protein to levels such that humans can get enough protein without taking in more calories than they require per their lifestyles.
Let people who are used to meat/dairy diets adopt plant-based diets and I wouldn't be surprised if this leads to more of them becoming overweight.
Imo it's a good thing when people try to eat less meat/dairy but they shouldn't think it's an easy thing to do that comes without caveats.
David Raubenheimer is said to have conducted an experiment where people's behaviour showed that protein content is what disproportionately determines how much people eat until they feel saturated.
> Let people who are used to meat/dairy diets adopt plant-based diets and I wouldn't be surprised if this leads to more of them becoming overweight.
I think that the exact opposite is true. Most new vegans lose weight quickly.
There are no overweight fruitarians (imho - not my cup of tea). And not many vegans. But there are many ways how to do things - if you're eating a lot of fats, processed foods, junk food ... you'll be overweight, vegan or not.
Also, you can't replace meat/dairy with single protein source (e.g. tofu) and think that you're ok. That's not the way it works with the plants.
For me vegan diet means whole foods, minimum fats, as diverse diet as possible, almost no junk/processed food, 30-50% raw vegetables. It's not easy to gain weight this way.
> Imo it's a good thing when people try to eat less meat/dairy but they shouldn't think it's an easy thing to do that comes without caveats.
You're making it sound scary :) It is easy, certainly not hard, but you're right, new vegans have some things to learn.
The only supplement you'll certainly need is vitamin B12.
In the end what you'll want is fruits, vegetables and lentils of various kind. If you have a diverse diet, you'll have no problems.
Yes, it means trying (a lot of) new things and recipes and some learning (how to substitute meat/dairy with plant-based alternatives), but it's not hard and in the end it's very satisfying process. I'm always hunting for new recipes.
> David Raubenheimer is said to have conducted an experiment where people's behaviour showed that protein content is what disproportionately determines how much people eat until they feel saturated.
We have to learn how to use what we have (atmosphere, rhizosphere, pigs, poultry, humans), that what does not destroy forests and wildlife (cows), and avoid that that kills and poisons the nature (pesticides & herbicides). Then we have a chance.
That's interesting, but a slight oversimplication since nitrogen isn't coming from the minerals. As long as nitrogen fixation can still occur (via decomposition of something organic, etc), I think the general principle seems reasonable, though not an expert.
I'm not the one oversimplifying, it's 'modern' agronomists that are oversimplifying.
Nitrogen is 70% of our atmosphere. When you remove all other plant life in order to get the last 20% of theoretical yield from your land, you end up having to manually provide all of the services that were provided by the plants you killed. The Green Revolution is a petrochemical revolution. Cooking allows us to use lignin calories to recover more calories from our existing food supply. Livestock do the same, either by converting grasses (ungulates) or recycling unpalatable foods (pigs).
When the petrochemicals become expensive we will have to go forward and/or backward to some other solution (most likely old solutions with new twists). The sibling comment with the huge bibliography points to some of the more coherent voices in the world of polyculture agriculture, although Gabe Brown exists in a sort of grey area between aggressive crop rotation and polyculture.
Or from crop rotations of legumes with nitrogen fixing microbes. But that too would require a move away from intensive industrialized agricultural practices.
Toby Hemenway forwarded a notion that water cycles are sufficient to transport nitrogen from nitrogen-rich plants to their neighbors as a continuous basis instead of on an annual one. The model he builds from research he had read goes something like this:
After a rain, as the soil goes from waterlogged to dry, there are phases that are hostile to root hairs and ones that are conducive. So the plant roots pulse with these cycles, advancing and retreating, sometimes arriving at places vacated by other plants. By this mechanism, any plant can scavenge some of the nitrogen left in the decaying root hairs of their neighbors.
I would also warn that thinking nitrogen=legume is a potentially limiting strategic error. While something like 7% of all plants fall into the Fabaceae (legume) family, some other pockets of the Fabales order also have root nodules, in particular, alder, and up into the Rosids clade (buckthorn, ceanothus), and then a few odd stragglers like borage, which makes me wonder if it's a taxonomic problem, parallel evolution, or what.
And then there's mondo grass (asparagaceae), which nobody expects to have root nodules. I knew about that plant for about two decades before someone pointed out it's nitrogen fixing, and that's not even in the wikipedia article. And in fact I'm having a dickens of a time finding a citation for that.
"Fifty-six percent of all land used for corn, soybeans, wheat, and cotton was on farms that
used no-till/strip-till on at least part of their cropland in 2010-11: 23 percent of land was on
farms that used no-till/strip-till on all land in these crops while 33 percent was on farms that
used a mix of no-till, strip-till, and other tillage practices." (From the report summary.)
Yes. Nitrogen fixing bacteria (i.e. R. leguminasarum, s. meliloti) love the sugar exchange legumes offer. Cover cropping and inter cropping have potential to rethink the 113-year old haber-bosch solution.
I don't know if this is my theory or just heavily implied but rarely stated in the literature: chemical fertilizers are giving plants something for 'free' that they used to pay for, and the reason the crops get bigger is not strictly because of the fertilizers, but because they get to spend those calories on more fruit.
There have even been a few studies that warn that some strains of conventional crops are losing the ability to make this exchange. When we hit peak phosphorous and start taxing anhydrous ammonia production, these strains are at risk of going extinct (hopefully not enough of any crop to take us with them).
The wrong question is, "how many calories of <X> can I get out of this field in a year?" The right question is "how many calories can I get total out of this field in a year" and there are a number of people out there demonstrating that they can get about 50% of the conventional yield from an acre, but for 4 different crops, and a few other things thrown in to get over 2x the total yield.
The "problem", in scare quotes, is that these solutions take more thinking and knowing than scourging your fields every year. But since running a farm practically takes a bachelor's degree these days, that's not really a problem of lack of resource in that area. It's more a problem of perspective and focus.
> The "problem", in scare quotes, is that these solutions take more thinking and knowing than scourging your fields every year. But since running a farm practically takes a bachelor's degree these days, that's not really a problem of lack of resource in that area. It's more a problem of perspective and focus.
I agree on this point. Every successful farmer I've met has been of notably above average intelligence. However at the family farm scale it's a very fragile business. A small increase in input costs can greatly reduce or eliminate profitability. While I think permaculture, no-till, and other such techniques are great, we have to acknowledge that they require considerably more labor than running a combine harvester over corn or soy fields. The labor shortage is bad enough that even generally immigration skeptical rural areas welcome H-2A migrant workers. And while the best American farm workers are every bit as hard-working as the best Mexican seasonal workers, the average Mexican that comes to the USA in the program is considerably more reliable than the average American these days.
Gabe Brown seems to be pulling it off, but then again he’s not growing fruit. I’d be curious to see how much Shepard is spending on harvesting his fruit and nuts.
The claim that people and companies are leaving a 2x yield on the floor (well, field) just because they're stupid does not seem plausible to me, so I suspect you missed some aspect of it.
(The most obvious could be that nobody want to buy some of the other crops, so while you could get the calories out, you can't get the dollars out, and the calories would go to waste if everyone did that.)
> there are a number of people out there demonstrating that they can get about 50% of the conventional yield from an acre, but for 4 different crops, and a few other things thrown in to get over 2x the total yield.
A lot of US agriculture is done on by contract operators. Bill Gates seems to work mostly in that model.
I mention Gates because what he says suggests that he'd love to see that claim pan out on a large scale. Also, he's known for insisting on high dollar yields.
And yet, we're talking about demonstrations and not actual significant experience.
Maybe Gates is lying about his social goals AND also isn't profit-maximizing.
But, if he isn't, why aren't the demonstrators doing good and doing well (2X production is a big bucks) by doing this stuff at scale somewhere in Gates-land?
"Cover crops were in use on less than 2 percent of total cropland (for all crops) during 2010-11 (6.8 million
acres), with adoption rates higher in some regions (e.g., the Southern Seaboard and the Mississippi Portal).
Although the benefits of cover crops and no-till/strip-till are enhanced when these practices are used on the
same fields, the low cover crop adoption rate suggests that these benefits are realized on few acres." (From the report summary.)
Cover crops have come into style though since then. They are a lot more common. Not nearly as common as they should be, but they still a lot more than 10 years ago.
I think you should look at what's going on with agriculture in India right now. There was a lot of bankrupt farmers in the US in the 80's, and that's happening in India over the last decade. Graphically, some farmers are taking their lives by drinking leftover pesticides when they realize they can't afford their crops this year.
India is, by many accounts, likely to switch to a new-new form of agriculture sooner than some of the rest of us. The combination of bigger problems and a shallower 'tradition' of western farming practices makes that easier.
There was a post here about California covering its irrigation canals with solar panels. A couple of us politely pointed out that a couple of provinces in India have already been doing this for a while.
Farming in India has been perilous for centuries because it depends on the Monsoon. Improved irrigation, better seeds and yes artificial fertilizers have all significantly improved farm incomes.
Nevertheless, structural issues remain. Farmer suicides are not even remotely new and it's disingenous to suggest otherwise. And it has to be pointed out that the suicide rate amongst Indian farmers is lower than the national average.
You'll have to pry Western farming methods from the cold dead hands of Indian farmers. Even the urban intelligencia has shut up about organic/traditional farming after seeing what's happening across the Palk Strait.
> You'll have to pry Western farming methods from the cold dead hands of Indian farmers. Even the urban intelligencia has shut up about organic/traditional farming after seeing what's happening across the Palk Strait.
The indian itelligencia? I'd like to hear more about the commonalities here between equivalent folks in the uhmmm "west"
I think he means people like Vandana Shiva (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vandana_Shiva). She's been on plenty of western interviews, talks, etc. advocating organic farming.
Financial viability of farming as a business is independent of yield across all farms in a market. The consequence of radical improvements in agricultural yields lower prices (as a % of unskilled labor income) and usually means that most farmers go out of business (or export most of their crop). The upside is that the society overall gets much much wealthier.
It's an interesting point, but using China as an example of rational agricultural planning is a pretty poor choice considering how recently the famines resulting from the Great Leap Forward were at that point in time.
They could prove their case by actually doing it at commercial farm scale. But as far as I know, no one has. Which, to me anyway, shows they're probably (but not certainly) wrong.
Gabe Brown manages about 5000 acres, with a skeleton crew.
On paper Mark Shepard seems to have about 106 acres around his house, which I think is a gross branding mistake, because he farms a lot more land than just his homestead. I have to find this interview again because it was kind of shocking and I'm afraid I may be misquoting it. One interviewer got him talking about all of the land he owns elsewhere, leases, or consults on and he makes some comment about he may actually be managing more farmland than anyone east of the Mississippi.
Most of us are on the internet all day regardless. We downplay the incremental cost of both doing things, bragging about it online, and getting it on people's radars, like it's simple but we mostly think about the people who are good at it and not all of the ones who quietly disappeared without most of us ever learning about it.
Farming is exhausting. Farming is remote. Farming is slow, and experiments take years to prove to be more than dumb luck. The gap between killing it and selling your audience on the notion that you are killing it is much, much wider. Talk enough, and you have to stop doing, which means you're now selling ideas that you can't back up.
Not to sound contrary... but if their techniques are better, why haven't they been replicated widely? If they can output just 20% better financial return, they will double the profits for most farmers.
Understand that it is my wish and hope that these sort of low/no fertilizer organic techniques can work better than "traditional" heavy-fertilizer/irrigation farming the west now mainly employs. It's just that vaguely recall hearing about this sort of thing 30 years ago. And 20 years ago. And 10 years ago.
There is a tremendous market of corporate interests that have a very vested interest in farming staying the way it is. From custom GMO seeds to input(fertilizer, fungicides, pesticides) producers to implement manufacturers they all want farming to stay the same. A regenerative approach removes a massive amount of those needs and profits.
Entrenched interests would be a driver as well as conventional wisdom here to date imo. That said there are indeed millions of acres in the mid-west (US) and beyond operated by commercial growers whom leverage the benefits of inoculating their acres with beneficial microbes. Ultimately mother nature dictates yield mainly thru moisture availability (acres under a pivot excluded) so growers focus on risk mitigation and nutrient efficiencies to achieve profitability. The paradigm is shifting away from heavy synthetics due to costs, generational transitions in operation management and our understanding of the rhizosphere. Beneficial microbes are not the only answer but leveraging their inherent capabilities is an effective tool and currently available.
What is harder?
Go ahead and try to convince people.
I have created fully automated systems for indoor that control everything except harvest. It is impossible to convince people due to the cost I am pretty sure.
Thusly? Money printer really does not go brr for this.
The comment farther up the thread (at this point anyhow)[1] references Gabe Brown. He is using very little to no commercial fertilizer on his farm and has been for years. I am guessing his audience among cash strapped young desperate farmers has increased a lot in the last 3 months.
There are a couple of particularly noteworthy things about Gabe. His philosophy was a baptism by fire. He ran out of money via a combination of bad decisions and getting hit by a statistical cluster of bad years where the world seemed to be saying Fuck You in Particular (there were 4 years with catastrophic hail storms, and none of his neighbors got hit by more than 3 of them).
Some of his crops are targets of opportunity. They're a cover crop and if the weather is just right and he gets it planted in time, he might be able to harvest it, or at least graze some livestock on it, but if not, then that's fine too, because the dividends still made it worth doing.
He is a very frugal farmer, both in resources and energy. Mark Shepard, in contrast, seems to be more interested in the energy side of frugality, and is so open in his disdain for people throwing good money/time after bad that it's practically his personality. In particular he likes to rant about how utterly mathematically unsound the idea of rain barrels is, and the kind of cognitive dissonance it takes to keep telling yourself otherwise.
The 55 gallon rain barrels are near useless for small plot irrigation. Larger containers can hold a meaningful amount of water to be useful during sporadic dry spells.
No, the problem is that to get half an inch of water to cover your fields takes a giant storage tank and a giant collection area. Install a hard scape big enough to provide any notable amount of water storage and lack of arable becomes your primary issue.
Rain barrels make a tiny bit of sense in a small urban lot with a large roof. They make no goddamned sense at all in most agricultural contexts.
Microbiome needs to be a more commonly known word.
I bought some property that was practically concrete at the beginning of the dry season. I hurt my hand and damaged a tool trying to take a soil sample to send to the lab. A couple years later you'd never know, except that past me was apparently smart enough to take a video that I found when trying to free up some disk space.
Plants, bacteria and fungi all manipulate soil PH for better or for worse, and you can steer that. And keeping soil covered, especially with tall plants, can drop the temperature tens of degrees Celsius. A forest floor is much closer to ground temperature, for a host of reasons.
OK, that may be, however, that doesn't change that our method of agriculture is about to come up short, and that to switch to other approaches will take time.
Nearly every symbiotic relationship fungi make is based on buying sugars from plants by selling them minerals from biological weathering of rock (particles). What happens in conventional agriculture is that we murder all of the fungi.
There are a few places with strange soil compositions that are actually lacking in particular minerals. We could either elect to do something else with that land, or transition everyone but them to a post-green-revolution strategy.