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Comment by grive | Hacker News Reader

The general gist is interesting in order to captive the intended audience of sceptics, and the clickbait title is effective in that way.

Still, though, a clickbait title.

Furthermore, the usual consensus I hear is that we will need to change our practices drastically, we cannot let the "conventional" farming on life support indefinitely and we cannot let it destroy our sustenance. Organic farming is however still far from being enough to make us live.

The road is probably a reasonable mix of the two, which is actively researched.

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> Organic farming is however still far from being enough to make us live.

What I have seen says otherwise. There's a thing about chemical agriculture: when you first implement it, you get incredible yields. Then the soil starts dying (no more acari, no more fungi, compressed soil…), and the yields slowly go back to roughly the previous levels, only this time you need all the chemicals to sustain it.

If you suddenly say "let's go organic", you're in for a disappointment: the soil is dead, the yields you get will be terrible. Indeed not enough to feed the world. Fortunately, soils can be resuscitated. One component is rotting pieces of wood, that bring back fungi. You need other things I'm not aware of, but the idea is, in 3 years, your soil is good as new. Mostly. While you now can go organic with good yields, you still have the old chemicals dwelling in that soil. It will take 15 years before you're really free from them.

With a good (or properly resuscitated) soil, it appears organic agriculture have higher yields per unit of surface than chemical agriculture. However, it requires more labour. It would seem the yield per man-month may actually be lower.

We don't need more farming surface. We need more farmers.

I don't think the yields go back to pre-fertilizer levels, otherwise we wouldn't be able to sustain so many more mouths than before Haber-Bosch.

No they don't, not right away. You need that damn 3-years hiatus with zero yield before you can start over.

The problem (here in France) is that the number of farmers is going down hard (with suicides every day). They are currently crushed by regulations, labor costs, undercuts by products from other countries with different labor costs and regulations and the supermarkets that make big margin on their back. So your solution is good, but it is not currently applicable here in France.

> but it is not currently applicable here in France.

You point out a serious policy problem. Couldn't we apply that solution if we changed that policy?

I hope that the solution is applicable, as I hope that the policy can be changed. But that's something on the long term.

The rethoric I've heard here (Netherlands) is that France idealizes the small farm as a living unit, which leads to undersized and under-modernized farms. This is then being propped up by subsidies, but imports (and government budgets) are putting more pressure on these farms' inefficiencies than the subsidies can compensate.

I am in no position to judge either way.

"With a good (or properly resuscitated) soil, it appears organic agriculture have higher yields per unit of surface than chemical agriculture. However, it requires more labour. It would seem the yield per man-month may actually be lower."

Even leaving aside what 'organic agriculture' means, there is no evidence that yield are higher than conventional farming. Yield could be enough to sustain enough people with the same area we use now for farming, yes; but super-yield claims are unsubstantiated.

But apart from that, what's swept under the rug here is that labour is a major component of food cost; so saying 'sure we need 50 people to harvest what would otherwise be done by one guy but the per-surface unit yield is enough!' is disingenuous. It's not realistic to expect people to go back to harvesting their own food; nor is it realistic to count on huge price rises to pay for 'organic' ag (labour and packaging make up about 60% of the cost of the food on your plate).

And there are no scalable techniques for growing food in mixed ecosystems, except maybe at the very basic silvopasture level. But those aren't the ones that are going to wean us off traditional agriculture.

> super-yield claims are unsubstantiated.

I have one example of 2 japanese farmers growing rice next to each other. One is going organic (few chemicals, if at all), the other is going full conventional (machines, spray, and all).

I don't claim to understand the reason, but the organic farmer's rice plants (and number of grains) was bigger by half. So, visibly higher yield on the rice alone. But that's not all: on the same land, the organic farmer also grow fishes and ducks. The fishes feed the duck and the soil, so he can sell the ducks as well as the rice.

I was astonished by this, but if one can shoulder the heavier workload, the super-yield by surface unit does seem to hold, at least in some cases.

There are other examples where the yield per specie is lower, but because you grow multiple species on the same piece of land, the overall yield does approach this unbelievable super-yield. Again though, less automation, more labour.

> And there are no scalable techniques for growing food in mixed ecosystems,

I know of one. It's called "more farmers". A way to get them is to recruit the victims of technological unemployment —drivers come to mind. It's not miraculous, or even insightful, but it is possible.

> 'sure we need 50 people to harvest what would otherwise be done by one guy

I wouldn't know, but I expect the multiplier to be between 1.5 and 3. I'd be surprised if it were more than 5.

Clickbaity, yes, but in an obvious way. The article is a response to a criticism, and the title conveyed that well. As much as I dislike click baits, I didn't mind this one.

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