No-till no-herbicide farming system in trial since 1981
rodaleinstitute.org
rodaleinstitute.org
In short, I would just ask people to remember that there are quite a few farmers who would love to stop paying for fertilizer if it didn't impact their yields: all of them in fact. It's one of their biggest costs generally. When an organization says "The Farming Systems Trial was started by Bob Rodale, who wanted scientific backing for the recommendations being made to the newly forming National Organic Program in the 1980s" they've incorporated confirmation bias into their heart.
I'm certainly biased, I'm the CTO of a company that's trying to improve agricultural inputs by financing access to smallholders in subsaharan Africa (Apollo Agriculture, we're actually a YC F1 company also,) but it's worth noting that this is research that's quite a bit outside the normal recommendations that ag scientists believe. I also worked at The Climate Corporation before, to put all my potential biases out on the table.
Or is it better to sequester carbon that land? The world is not short of maize supply
If these humans are thriving thanks to Western technology and aid, I think we have the right to dictate their population levels and environmental impacts.
Then the answer is no, not any time soon at least. Plenty of other land is available.
- SSA has ~ 1.25B hectares of agricultural land.[0]
- The total harvested area under maize in Africa was around 38.7 million hectares in 2018.[1]
- Less than %10 of the Guinea Savannah region (a region where crops much more lucrative than maize can be grown, ~600M hectares) was farmed as of 2009.[2]
[0]https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/AG.LND.AGRI.K2?end=2016...
[1]https://www.mordorintelligence.com/industry-reports/african-...
[2]https://image.slidesharecdn.com/60366271-evolution-economic-...
I think you are over simplifying here. Of course simply stopping artificial fertiliser will hit yields. The question is whether other methods can be introduced that will sustain yields with fewer detrimental environmental impacts.
Which would be amazing if true, since it basically means "hey, free money". But as you say, it feels a little over simple.
I'd be curious to know what the catch is.
The system like the ones in the linked article are complicated, and the stated yields and profits likely represent an idealized top 1% percentile.
Most people outside farm country dont even consider farming to be a viable career. Just look at the comments here. High cost of entry to compete on an industrial scale and razor thin margins. Who would want to even try. But a small farm run like the article can be very profitable.
Other things can happen, too, of course: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_Bowl
Seems like erosion has more to do with farming technique, independent of fertilizer use or not.
The soil erosion of the Dust Bowl area was addressed through improved technique. Fertilizers were not a key component of that.
The American Dust Bowl was a combination of things, but the frequency of tilling was a big part of it. Farmers now till at least one fewer times per year, which makes quite a bit of a difference.
It's complex, because our annual crops are almost all prairie soil plants, prairie soils are typically bacterial dominant anyway, but fungi typically provide a lot of the soil stability. Tilling pretty much kills all of the fungus, and the bacteria run wild breaking down soil carbon (fungal and crop roots).
If it wouldn't cause another dust bowl, a lot of farmers would probably plant only corn since its much more profitable.
Basically sand with a tiny bit of organic fluff.
Firstly sand blows away, secondly it doesn't hold water anywhere near as well. This means that you need more drainage channels, which means you get more runoff, which means you need more fertiliser.
_proper_ soil, with plenty of organic matter is both more porous _and_ able to absorb more water.
Also if you want to get the most out of your fertilizer you will automatically be trying to reduce erosion. No one wants to put investment into soil that is going to disappear or be lost.
There is also an increasing amount of regulation around controlling runoff of fertilizers in order to control water quality in lakes, rivers etc. Follow what is happening in Ohio and Lake Erie for example.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process
Roughly 50% of the nitrogen in average humans was extracted from the atmosphere using this process; it is well-established.
Still, if we had to change to renewable sources of energy to run these processes tomorrow,the price would likely jump so enormously that their value would be mostly in niche applications.
I live on a 54 acre property: I can picture 12 acres as about a quarter of my property. If I further divide that into 72 plots, I end up with a bunch of little gardens.
What works in a small garden plot is usually totally unscalable at crop production volumes. My experience (over decades) is I couldn't sustain my family for a year on a 1-acre garden plot even if I had the time to work it intensively and used nothing but recycled organic byproduct (compost and, uh, other stuff) as fertilizer. Even if we tried to reproduce the great Kampuchean agricultural experiment of the mid-1970s and put everyone to work in the fields full time we could not feed the world this way.
I don't have a problem with folks idly dallying in this kind of research, and I think useful practices could possibly be revealed, but scale and practicality need to be taken into account when interpreting results.
Aside: it seems we've long been able to feed the world (in terms of meeting caloric and nutritional needs) based on American farm capacity alone, it's just that nobody wants to pay for it.
That suggests that there's a middle ground, where we shift to more labor-intensive practices to grow some more expensive but better produce that's less hard on the environment, without dismantling the entire industrial system. People could introduce more fresher foods, while still growing vast amounts of highly-processed-maize-and-soybeans for people who can only afford that.
There are a lot of dimensions to that. It's not easy to prove that eating this way is necessarily healthier or easier on the environment. But we do know that the Western diet is bad for people's health, and we do know that it's hard on the environment, so it's worth considering alternatives.
This is a good thing. Let's not screw it up, but rather improve on it.
>where we shift to more labor-intensive practices
Who is going to do the work? We already struggle filling these jobs. Those jobs that are filled are unsafe and low-paying.
So yes, we should improve it. This is one suggestion for how to do so. It costs more money, but we no longer have to make price the #1 objective, not in a world where people are willing to spend $4 and up on a cup of coffee or pay a 50-100% premium for a dubious "organic" label (a term that has drifted very, very far from what it meant when Rodale coined it).
That makes more money available for farm labor, to improve safety and pay workers better. It would take only a small increase in costs to make a large increase in wages: they receive only a few percent of the final consumer cost of the product.
Okay. Who is paying for it?
Farming is razor thin margins already. Most people aren't on techie salaries that can afford organic food. Raising the price is just a tax on the poor.
More workers (jobs) raises food costs, not lowers. Our savings with food crops is found mostly in the scale of production and automation.
The concept of self-sustaining farming and ranching is as old as dirt itself, with various implementations including crop rotation or fallow fields, but it typically means that the are of land dedicated to a staple crop (such as oats or wheat for the exemplar GM) drops dramatically, as would the profits.
Nothing in the linked literature disagrees with this notion or comments on the different costs (other than the grants for a farm that's trying it).
Source: I dated a literal farmer's daughter and talked with him a fair bit about the economics of his farm (corn, soybeans, and dairy, plus associated by-products) and farms larger than his. He was sharp on the numbers in addition to being sharp on the biology.
Watch any of Gabes talks on YouTube. They are usually to small crowds of farmers looking to improve their operation. People are learning but the easy path is to continue doing what you know. Gabe has said he would have done the same if he wasnt flat broke when he inherited his farm. He simply didnt have the money to buy inputs. His choice was find a different way or sell the farm.
Growing up in the UK in the 80s most people were eating a post war inspired limited diet.
> But we do know that the Western diet is bad for people's health, and we do know that it's hard on the environment, so it's worth considering alternatives.
The western diet is all things to all men. In my circle the "Mediterranean" diet is largely what people aspire to on a daily basis with everything else enriching their food experience on a less frequent basis.
Check out “The Market Gardener”[0] if you need help learning how to do far, far better than this. We need more, smaller farms. Biointensive farming and permaculture can save our planet.
- Gabe Brown, 20+ years at it, 4 or 5000? acres, mixed grasses (grains) and broadleaf crops, cover crops, livestock (beef, pigs, etc.), land getting better each year, saves hugely on synthetic fertilizer and pesticide (see a chart in his Treating The Farm as an Ecosystem video), profits better too, and higher than his synthetic-using and tilling neighbors and state averages (ND, USA), and going up the value chain, so getting more of the final consumer dollar vs. middlemen. The average take for "conventional" US farmers is quite low, he says. Oh, and he does not need or take govt. farm subsidies, as many others do.
Has many videos too, search for his name. Check the comparative stats and photos.
- Richard Perkins, Sweden. Not sure of area, but above a few acres at least, maybe 25. Mixed stuff again. High profits again. Videos again. Many years' good results again.
- Last but one of the best, Geoff Lawton (NSW, AU), long time permaculture expert (learned from Bill Mollison), doer, 66 acre Zaytuna Farm, is real mixed farm plus demonstration site, yearly trains many interns, consultant (to small orgs through to countries). Ditto for many of above points like axes, diversity, profits, improving over time, cost savings, etc. etc.
Edited for typos.
Gabe runs his operation with only a handful of people, maybe 4 total, plus a few interns, who are more of a liability than asset, so also say Richard and JM - at least initially :)
And Gabe uses some machines for scale, including a few he and friends innovated / improvised, IIRC.
Almost all the farmers I mentioned above, quote her work with respect and apply it in their operations, and consider it key to their results. She (along with many other researchers, over years, not a sudden thing) has come out with some rather startling results that, as I said, are being applied by these guys and many others. A key result is that it is the quantity and diversity of the life in the soil that is as (or more) important to soil health and hence farm results (now and long term) as the actual levels of plant nutrients in the soil. And this is because it is the soil life (they use the term "biology" for it, but okay, go with the prevailing term the experts use) that makes the chemical nutrients available in forms that plants can actually use, via a deep symbiosis and mutual helping that happens between plants and the soil biology, which includes bacteria, fungi, archaea, nematodes, arthropods and small animals.
Another quite surprising / non-intuitive result is her saying that most or all soils on earth, already have many times more the amounts of nutrients than plants need, like 1000x more, including macro (e.g. N, P, K) and micro ones (like trace elements), so the limiting factor is really the soil biology, which depends a lot on soil organic matter content (all those critters need to eat), humidity and temperature, all of which are helped by organic farming, permaculture and regenerative agriculture practices like applying organic fertilizer (manure, compost, etc.), mulching, and cover cropping (according to her, more for the organic matter than for the nutrients per se).
Check her video below in which she talks about all these things.
Watch "The Roots of Your Profits - Dr Elaine Ingham, Soil Microbiologist, Founder of Soil Foodweb Inc" on YouTube:
I should have said that Les Fermiers is in French - Quebec dialect, ha ha, they pronounce oui (French for yes) as way instead of wee, for example, but it has English subtitles, so English speakers can easily understand it.
Nowadays doing more training work and helping others in the area to bootstrap community permaculture gardens, since there is much more interest in food security, local food, lowering food miles, traditional-but-forgotten-plants-as-food, weeds as food, etc., since the coronavirus pandemic started.
By manage separately the same tractor crosses over each one in a field, but each subsection gets a different amount of fertilizer, seed, and other chemical based on all the data they can get. Sometimes they even have more than one seed/chemical tank so they can apply different amounts of each in one pass.
When you have poor and good soil in the same field (all fields have this to some extent) you want to put the minimum money into the poor areas, while it is worth putting more into the productive areas. (People often ask about building up the bad soils - this is done too, but you can't really change the sand/clay ratio)
I find this surprising. I help run an Atlanta-area non-profit that has a ~1 acre organic farm that donates everything it produces. For the year 2020 we have already donated 3120 lb / 1415 kg of food.
We're not trying to produce a nutritionally complete output on the farm, but that's still ~70 lb / 31.7 kg of food a week on average.
Now, let's assume a family of three - an average person needs around 2,000 kcal a day. That's 2,000 * 365 * 3, or around 2,200,000 kcal a year. So, you come quite a bit short. And that's on a good year; you're gonna have bad years, too.
Also a function of climate and soil. In the 19th century, settlers in the plains - Nebraska, Wyoming, etc - often couldn't make it work on 640 acres granted by the government. In contrast, there are eastern states where 20 acres would be more than enough.
(Farming in the West is now much more viable thanks to deep wells and mechanical irrigation, but that's a capital-intensive and resource-intensive approach that works best at a scale.)
The problem with your math is that it assumes the 3k lb yield from gp comment is for potatoes. Your crop yield depends a lot on the crop. Aparently you can get between 10-30 tons of potatoes per acre (that range is from beginner yields to expert) which would be 7-21 million calories per year. Plenty of room, then, to grow a number of other crops to eat a balanced diet.
Boring as hell after a while but it'd keep you alive.
Currently the US produces about twice the calories it requires. There are so many calories produced in forms of corn that the industry has made huge efforts to find new ways to use those calories (hfcs, ethanol, etc) in order to justify corn industry practices. The one liner is that we need to be able to feed the people, but obesity is at an all time high. People need more nutrition, not more calories.
The "they" who decided to export were not the "they" who starved.
Others couldn’t pay their rent and were evicted. Millions of Irish didn’t flee to the slums of NYC, etc for kicks.
On a typical day in 1844, the average adult Irishman ate about 13 pounds of potatoes. At five potatoes to the pound, that’s 65 potatoes a day. The average for all men, women, and children was a more modest 9 pounds, or 45 potatoes.
https://slate.com/culture/2001/03/putting-all-your-potatoes-...
While there are people who doubt these figures, eating 10 lbs of potatoes per day is definitely more plausible than your comment indicates.
Cooking time doesn't strike me as a problem. Boiling 30 potatoes does take somewhat longer than boiling 1 potato because the mass is greater, but it's pretty much boil and forget. Also, the boiling can probably be done by one of those women or children who are only eating 10 potatoes a day!
Update: Found where I read it - Wikipedia:
[ The Celtic grazing lands of ... Ireland had been used to pasture cows for centuries. The British colonised ... the Irish, transforming much of their countryside into an extended grazing land to raise cattle for a hungry consumer market at home ... The British taste for beef had a devastating impact on the impoverished and disenfranchised people of ... Ireland ... pushed off the best pasture land and forced to farm smaller plots of marginal land, the Irish turned to the potato, a crop that could be grown abundantly in less favorable soil. Eventually, cows took over much of Ireland, leaving the native population virtually dependent on the potato for survival.[41] ]
That quote is from the section:
Potato dependency
in:
Of course, the yields could probably be improved in order to get the 140 or so lbs needed to feed a family of 3
We refer to kilocalories with capital-C "Calorie". I don't know why.
10 lbs of potatoes is only 3,500 calories. Which, while far in excess of a "normal" sedentary lifestyle, is completely reasonable for people working heavy labor jobs if that's their primary food source.
I have some family members who devoted about an acre and a half to a mix of crops, squashes mostly as they grow the best where they live, and for a family of 5 still had to supplement their diet pretty significantly.
At the same time, they ate more healthily than they ever had before, and often had too much of certain crops that they gave away or sold at the local farmer's market.
I'm in Boulder county, and many offer(ed) those programs and seed banks but access to Community Gardens has always been limited here. The wait lists can be pretty long and during the pandemic and shortages people ran to local farms and bought out their CSA memberships and meat pre-sales (happening now actually for most livestock) in record timing.
California has it, too. UC Davis is quite involved in Biodynamics in the region and offers classes for winemaking using the practices. These fires have really put a strain on the local economy and programs so I'm not sure what it will look like after this, but I hope it prevails.
With that said, the results of this study are not really that surprising to me and follow my own observations: I did a Biodynamic horticulture apprenticeship in Europe and managed a Biodynamic farm in Maui.
The issue is with the subsidies that distort the prices and perverts the incentives to keep farmers dependent on such a vile system, and this is all over the Western world, and much of the East, in my experience. We should be encouraging our youth that are aware of the climate change they will face to get involved in restorative Ag and offering them low to no interest loans on land and equipment while systematically removing the subsidies for corn, soy and other non profitable crops that heavily rely on dangerous external inputs which only consolidates the Industry more in the hands of large chemical corps.
If I'm honest people should see the transition to organic/ biodynamic Ag as one of not just viable Soil Biology and ethics but also of Climate Science, Carbon sequestration from Ag can make significant in-roads in reducing the atmospheric carbon. Hemp is an incredibly amazing crop at capturing carbon from the atmosphere and building top soil, it sheds most of its foliage throughout the season and create a high canopy to reduce water requirements after 7-10 weeks after germination depending on regions and cultivar. It is a heavy feeder and will require crop rotation, but as seen with the green-rush of CBD products, these have massive Value added Market potential.
While I studied the significance of other plants throughout my apprenticeship none captured my attention as much as hemp and I mainly went to Europe as hemp was legal in the EU and many products were being made from it while it was still illegal in the US at the time (2011-2014).
With that said, I really hope COVID disrupted the paradigm we had been operating for so long and makes people look at these problems with solutions that some of us had been involved in and advocating for nearly decades now.
That should give you between 4 tons (for wheat) and 25 tons (for potato) of produce. Surely that's enough?
Also, US yield for wheat is ~45 bushels per acre, wheat is 60 lbs per bushel, for 2700 lbs. This is 1.3 tons, not 4.
And this is done with large scale, high yield processes that do not scale down to an acre.
Where did you get 4 tons?
https://www.statista.com/statistics/190356/wheat-yield-per-h...
As for diet: yield of carrots and many vagetables is usually higher than for wheat, but yes getting any real variery from that hectar would be unrealistic.
http://www.farmbusiness.co.uk/business/2019-farm-output-esti....
>Are we measuring different stuff?
Apparently.
Also, why use UK numbers to compare to a story on US agriculture, especially without mentioning you switched countries? Can I cite numbers from Congo without noting it?
>Surely yield in Uk can't be 3 times higher.
Sure it can - variation in wheat production has well over a 50x variation among countries. Not every country has the UK climate, or even the uniformity that the UK has. The climate and rainfall in the UK are very well suited to wheat production.
Also, I just posted the values. And here's [1] another place you can look. From this place you can select countries to compare them. The US is ~1/3 the output. The UK has exceptionally high numbers, nearly the highest in the world.
Pretty much every source I find is similar.
[0] https://www.allaboutfeed.net/Raw-Materials/Articles/2020/8/U... [1] https://ourworldindata.org/crop-yields
For potatoes, about 1 ton of (commercial) fertilizer would be required, and a lot of water (around 2,800m3 of water), which is fine if you live in the mid-west with lots of rain, less fine in the desert portions of California.
Everything from fungus and nematodes to weevils, mice, rabbits, birds, deer, and bears all want what's in my garden. I have seen berry and tomato plants completely stripped of all leaves in less than a day by caterpillars. You can spend a day picking Colorado bugs off your potatoes and start again the next day picking off the same number.
There is no end of work that can't be easily and cheaply replaced by a tank of chemicals and some petroleum-powered equipment to give better yields of better-looking food.
They have 3 x 2 = 6 different approaches being evaluated
It is divided into 3 overarching systems: organic manure, organic legume, and conventional.
Each system is further divided into two: tillage and no-till, for a total of 6 systems. There are a total of 72 experimental plots.
It is likely that the 6 main approaches have been divided into smaller plots to act as a control for natural soil variations within the area, or, e.g. one side of the field being nearer to a river than the other. This is normal for agricultural experiment design I believe.
I'm no expert, but you cannot maintain a healthy soil without putting stuff back in it - manure, biomass / mulch, etc.
Anecdotal and incomparable, but my backyard (just a few m2 of exposed soil) has had an overhaul in the past year or two; it was very sandy and kinda boring, but mixing in mulch / soil improver made it a lot better. There's worms in the soil now, that kinda thing.
But yeah, you need some kind of fertilizer or the soil will just 'die'. Leave the clippings after harvesting, yeet a load of other biomass on there in between harvests, let it lie fallow, etc.
But I think an issue is that biomass in whatever form is actually quite difficult to get in significant quantities, or hard to balance, so artificial fertilizer is used instead.
Organic fertilizer is generally cow poop. Cows are fed almost exclusively grain corn (and then are admittedly grass finished, but generally the manure you could get is from the grain feed period.) That grain corn is... made with inorganic fertilizer.
To keep making more food, someone has to introduce nitrogen into the system. You can use bat guano (which we actually used to use before inorganic fertilizer) or you can use nitrogen fixing crops (great but typically fix much less nitrogen into the soil then people think!) or something that comes from inorganic fertilizer, whether it's been green washed through a cow's GI tract.
It's also a logistical nightmare as it's much less dense, but that's a separate problem. A huge fraction of the problems of soil health in rural places are logistical.
Isnt that the job of nitrogen fixing bacteria? You know, the microbes that probably dont do so well in modern farm soil. Presumably that's part of the reason crops do well in the organic plots.
In the UK, we have a terrible problem with runoff. Its not that we don't have enough nitrogen to put on the fields, its that the soil is so degraded that when it rains it all runs off into ditches and eventually out to sea.
In the netherlands its even more pronounced. There are cow farmers that have bought land especially for dumping effluent on.
So its not a problem of enough, its a problem of keeping it in the right place.
Problem is people laugh at that concept and then complain we have overproduction, dwindling soil health, and poor water quality.
Please explain how synthetic fertilizer reduces the yield of nutrient dense food. I can't find anything to support this in my cursory searches.
It’s also really easy to make organic and untasty things, as any struggling gardener will tell you. :)
I do appreciate you pointing out your previous work with The Climate Corporation, but it’s probably also useful to point out that they are a subsidiary of Monsanto.
Why would that be useful?
Yes, but only if you start with degraded soil in the first place. Adding fertilizer to healthy soil just messes it up.
Even when you start with degraded soil, the fertilizer and modern agricultural practices only help up to a point and then diminishing returns set in.
Check out what Gabe Brown is doing on his land: "Treating the Farm as an Ecosystem with Gabe Brown Part 1, The 5 Tenets of Soil Health" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUmIdq0D6-A
I bring this up mainly because one of my first thoughts in discussing, e.g., US corn agriculture versus Subsaharan agriculture is whether or not you'd even be able to compare them well because the crops optimally suited to each would often be entirely different. I think often probably so, but at the same time I wonder if things would look different if the same volume of money and resources were put into things that assume different consumption preferences.
I'm not opposed to conventional agriculture, and don't believe in pointing fingers when it comes to food sustainability (in an ecological as well as humanistic sense). I do sometimes wonder, though, if conventional practices are often driven by assumptions or factors that are unwarranted or problematic in themselves.
Joel Salatin has been doing no-till, no fertilizer farming at scale for years and his videos are really eye opening on what is possible. As a layman with a small home garden I do not have the expertise to say if this would work for more people but it is interesting to read about.
I'd just like to point out that these are two different continents with completely different conditions, soils, microbiota, seeds, pests, and climate. So apples and oranges.
Also, you count wrong because you don't count the number of acres needed to produce fertilizer.
> I'm certainly biased, I'm the CTO of a company that's trying to improve agricultural inputs by financing access to smallholders
At this point, yeah, your financial incentives pretty much color your entire worldview. If you stand to make O(millions) and this is your primary line of work, that's a one massive grain of salt.
The number of acres to make fertilizer are minimal. It’s very, very small relative to agricultural land under cultivation.
In regards to financial incentives, I mention this specifically so you know I could have a bias and am leaving references to the science so you can make your own judgement. I’m not really in this line of work for the money though.
So if a practice reduced yield by 50%, for the US it would mean reducing the calorie yield by 1B people? (Ethanol, feed for animals and the like ignored). How much surplus is in the system to support alternative practices?
(To give a few examples of books that have changed my mind, I was a very conservative libertarian growing up in the school of Nozick, but ended up being much more liberal as a result of reading Foucault and his rather compelling recasting of how power dynamics work. I found Peter Singer, Nussbaum and Sen to all be compelling enough writers to basically convince me of what I should spend my life doing. If you have suggestions for science based books, I’d love to read them, but I find religious fiction generally leaves me unmoved and uninterested.)
You see, keeping cattle takes a lot of work. Constant vet bills for inoculations, treatments when they get sick. Corn-feeding, to maximize their size, means buying a lot of corn. Constant attention and work. And my parents' friend, well, he was tired of it.
So he put his cattle out into a field. And he did nothing. If one got sick, it went to the dog food place. They ate grass that grew in the field. They didn't get as big and he didn't make as much money, but he also got to take things a bit slower, easier.
Then, organic beef became a big deal. He did not give a shit about 'organic' or whatever these strange hippies were talking about. But he was more than happy if they wanted to pay him extra for his laziness.
(Note: I am paraphrasing a second-hand story and while I grew up rural, I didn't raise cattle- mistakes are being made here, forgive me.)
For example, a more intensive version of the lazy farmer's method would be to set timed gates around the property to induce herd movement for optimal grazing.
At a talk on regenerative farming, one speaker estimated he was making about $150 an hour based on how little time it took to set and maintain a well designed gate system. This was on leased land.
Over the past century, increases in agricultural productivity (due to high-intensity farming) in North America and Europe have allowed for the 're-wilding' of an area almost as large as France.
I don't know how he's competing on size, but the claim is that grazing down to the ground is less efficient for cattle, and you should move them long before they get to the bottom of the grass stalks.
[1]: https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/arab...
In terms of your link, it looks like it’s not counted as farmland if it’s abandoned (no intention to farm it in the future). Some of that land may no longer be able to be cultivated, but I’d assume that’s not the only driver of the decrease.
The changes you are citing are miniscule. A rounding error.
Older methods absolutely destroyed arable land because they had no robust method of replacing what the crops took besides manure. For example, in the US, as soil east-coast farms were depleted by intensive farming in the 1700s and 1800s, people struck out west for fresh soil. This culminated in the dust-bowl era, and a rethinking of farm management.
With modern fertilizer and testing, farmers can replace and renew their soil in detail with the specific macro and micronutrients which are lacking. Furthermore, no-till methods keep the soil anchored in place while more advanced methods of manure and residue use allow for building up organic matter.
There isn't any more land. Farmers are no longer migrant. It is in their bests interests to protect the vitality of their soil, and they are doing that.
Note that I said for a price. Farmers who buy that stuff and let it run off lose money in the long run and go bankrupt.
Until about 1870 it wasn't possible to "intensively" farm land. Intensive requires mechanisation. Practically that requires internal combustion engines.
Intensive farming started when tractors became cheap enough for everyone to use. As soon as it was practical to plough hundreds of acres in a day, thats when "intensive" was a thing.
In the US thats roughly the 20s.
The second revolution was cheap pesticides with short half-lives. That was Glyphosate in the 70s.
No sane farmer who derives their living from farming is going to take such a huge risk when annualized corn-soy production is heavily subsidized by the government (rightly or wrongly) on the _possibility_ of these practices maybe paying off (someday).
https://thinkingagriculture.io/incentivizing-regenerative-ag...
edit: There is a carefully crafted statement on the OP link saying increased yields in dry years. Outside of 2020 and 2012, the Midwest has been anything but dry. Can't expect people to adapt unprofitable practices
Milk is very subsidized as well. You could pair local dairies with local farmers participating in similar programs.
What the subsidies do is subsidize insurance. Buy insurance and if you have a crop failure you get paid as if you had the average yield over the past 10 years. However your average goes down as well for the next failure so better not have too many bad years in a row.
Organic despite the name is not the best thing for the environment. Some of it is, that quickly is normal farming. What is left is not using safe chemicals, instead using much more harmful - but natural - ones, or tillage to control weeds. (Note that this article is pushing no-till which is conventional farming today)
The 'niche' guys may make good money, but their complexity is probably 1x-5x (maybe more) a 'stereotypical' row crop farmers farmers. That has to factor in somewhere.
You still quite easily can if you own the land outright, even in the grain business. The problem is that you need multi-millions to buy 100-200 acres, which nobody wanting to start farming has, save situations of inheritance. That means, for most, the vast majority of the potential profit turns into servicing debt or paying rent to the actual landowner. When you are only receiving a small portion of the pie that the land is actually generating, that's when you need thousands of acres to accumulate enough.
To put it another way: The going rate for rent for farmland around here is around $300/acre. $300 * 200 acres = $60,000. If you own the land and don't have to pay rent, that alone is a decent living; more than most people make. And that is ignoring the profit that someone renting would expect to make off the land.
The reason people don't do this isn't because they aren't aware of such practices, they don't do it because you have to thread a needle as far as precise management is concerned to simply turn a profit. Not that much room for margin in today's agriculture landscape
Solve this problem and you can really change the system.
Don't single out ag please
Food Production is a greater societal need than travel most people would agree.
Food production is a greater societal need and a lot of corn goes into making ethanol for cars to burn instead of food.
We don't have to outlaw ICE cars to make it more expensive to drive them, we just have to make corn ethanol more expensive for gas companies to cut their fuel with, and food corn cheaper for humans.
Also: We need to grow less corn overall. We make way, way more of it than we need and not enough of other better veg.
Yea we need to grow less corn. But we can't outlaw it. You just removed the livelihood for the Midwest. The current economic incentive structure is to grow corn (there literally is no downside). A solution that changes that has to include benefits for farmers, landowners, consumers, and society. It's not going to be easy (or cheap).
https://thinkingagriculture.io/incentivizing-regenerative-ag...
We could be making so many other things instead. A tax on ethanol & cattle feed would do more to shift things than making it illegal. Make it cheap to grow for humans, but allow other forms of food crop to have a fighting chance.
In that model there is almost no incentive structure for soil maintenance, environmental stewardship, diversification, etc.
Most landowners here aren't even leasing it for the revenue, which is pretty peanuts for cash cropping on smaller plots, but for the indirect benefit of being able to claim farm tax rate instead of regular residential tax rates.
For many years my vineyard, garden, etc. suffered from herbicide drift from next door -- but there was not a single contact I could go to to talk about this, everyone just points the finger, or you can't find the party involved. Responsibility too distributed, etc.
There needs to be economic incentives for farmers AND landowners to adapt these practices. It WILL cost money. See a link to my blog I posted in a different post. I talk about this in semi-depth.
https://thinkingagriculture.io/innovation-efficiency-chemica...
Mark Shepard likes to brag about how he gets less half a harvest of six+ different species in the same field. He's still getting 2-3x as much food out of the space. Most importantly, I believe (and he agrees), when you monocrop you go for broke. If something goes wrong, you have very little to sell at the end of the year. If it's a bumper crop year, prices will be depressed if it's a good year for everybody. In either scenario, the dealer (bank) always wins.
With six crops, the standard deviation between good years and bad years is reduced, which makes farming less of a trip to Vegas. That he gets more out of the same land brings up his average expected income. It's more work, yes, but he points out that many farmers have to take a side job to make ends meet, and he theoretically doesn't (he speaks and consults), so he can invest that time into increasing his farm's productivity.
One of the appeals then of broad spectrum herbicides that you scorch the earth and plant what you want in the space. And despite some very loud protestations of horse owners, people who try to garden with horse manure have to contend with herbicides.
Mechanical pest/weed management is still a very powerful tool. And maybe some day we can have robots do that for us, but we don't have to wait that long to get much of the benefit.
In order to kill a weed, you first have to see the weed. Rather than putting all of this onto a drone, there's plenty of utility to be gained by having a system that looks for these plants and geotags them. Then a centralized identification system (possible, the farmer's eyeballs) can filter down the false positives and they can send someone out to dispatch the weeds by hand, and/or adjust their graze rotation patterns to reduce exposure.
And something organic gardeners learn intimately is that every weed has intervals where they are most expensive to deal with. Seedlings may be too labor intensive. Blooming weeds are priority 1. But depending on soil profile, some weeds are easier to kill once their stalks and roots have become more robust - strong enough that you can grab the stalk and pull.
So on any given day you may be aware of a hundred weeds, but only twenty of them are on the priority queue.
The increased yields from input-heavy factory farming can essentially be seen as a loan of yield from the future. If you are overleveraged, and your capital (in this case the nutrients in the soil) is finite then when capital is depleted (leeching into the environment in this case) getting back to square one will require investment or continued increase in leverage.
They have shown conventional soil will return to normal after 1 growing season, which is pretty wild.
They even reimburse farmers that make the switch, but don't see the same yields.
My mother gave me some years ago a late 80s/early 90s copy of the “Rodale book of composting,” which was excellent and I recommend. I have been applying the principles in my own home garden but was unaware of the larger context.
This is one article I read a while back: https://ourworldindata.org/is-organic-agriculture-better-for...
Can someone point to more good literature on this topic?
In that vein, see your own link:
The organic-conventional debate often detracts from other aspects of dietary choices which have greater impact. If looking to reduce the environmental impact of your diet, what you eat can be much more influential than how it is produced. The relative difference in land use and greenhouse gas impacts between organic and conventional systems is typically less than a multiple of two. Compare this to the relative differences in impacts between food types where, as shown in the charts below, the difference in land use and greenhouse gas emissions per unit protein between high-impact meats and low-impact crop types can be more than 100-fold. If your primary concern is whether the potato accompanying your steak is conventionally or organically produced, then your focus is arguably misplaced from the decisions which could have the greatest impact.
While we are talking hopes & dreams, I also have my fingers crossed that a growing higher-end market for fruits & vegetables could push back on some of the consolidation & commodification happening in US farmland, which has not been good for small farmers.
Take a capitalistic system and leave it running for a long time, company structures will inevitably gravitate towards these giant over-optimized organizations living off the tiniest margins that no smaller competitor can compete with. Try to change things locally, your neighbour will blow you out of the water.
I think our best chance is utilizing the social contract. Push for legislative change, taxes/subsidies to control for changes that no single individual/organization would ever have incentive to make. It seems like a boring and daunting task, but isn't this the only way to effect actual change? And we need the changes on a global scale. How should we make our markets less efficient if other countries don't?
I think this over-optimization/homogenization is a general problem of humanity now, and it appears in seemingly unrelated areas too like social media, advertising, even music and tv. Perhaps our best chance is to try to introduce some sort of fragmenting force that reintroduces heterogeneity. Inefficiency is not such a bad thing, it's more robust to change, redundant, and ultimately just more interesting.
Getting quite philosophical and ranty now, but I was also thinking, didn't this very change happen already, in nature, many millions of years ago, when lifeforms evolved the ability to die naturally? Species that don't die have smaller chances to survive environmental changes and adapt to resource scarcity. Doesn't this hint at the kind of decisions we need to make as a species? Introduce some notion of organizational death, or renewal, or limiting force, to make room for differentiation?
I suspect that the input of cow manure is not sustainable, or not scalable, or not economic. That part of the article is a bit whiffy-washy to me.
Using cow poop is actually very smart. We (society) want meat so it is good to ensure efficient use of everything in that supply chain, using cow poop as a fertilizer is a great way to do that.
Also getting in grazing animals does a great job of prepping land for new growth.
about Ruth Stout and her no-till garden & farming approach.
Admittedly, during her initial year of the garden, she tilled the plot. Subsequent years she used mulch cover (and perhaps some strategic cover crops).
We have to grow good soil and eliminate manual and low paying jobs in Ag. Protect water sheds. Environment and labour...that should be the priority.
And we need to stop making food a speculative game.
The listed caveat that it takes years to return to previous yields is important. Healthy soil doesn't happen overnight. Farmers that already have a lot of debt will struggle to make this switch.
"The Call of the Reed Warbler" is a book that has extensive case studies and stories about people applying regenerative agriculture to their farms. It is especially focused on Australia.
Reposting a comment I made a few weeks ago:
A brain dump:
I've been investigating a few systems of agriculture.
- There's Small Plot INtensive (SPIN) which is specialized for market production, emphasizing minimizing labor and maximizing market crops.
https://spinfarming.com/ (Be aware that these folks are selling their system as a course, and this is a sales site not an info site. You can get the details from reading carefully and watching the videos that practitioners have made.)
https://www.transitionculture.org/2011/09/05/spin-farming-ba...
Quitting Your Job To Farm on a Quarter Acre In Your Backyard? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJx1SPClg6A
Backyard Farming: 2 Year Market Garden Update of Nature's Always Right Farms https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zpn1oGkQrrg
Profitable Farming and Designing for Farm Success by JEAN-MARTIN FORTIER https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92GDHGPSmeI https://www.themarketgardener.com/
Neversink Farm in NY grosses $350,000 on farming 1.5 acres (area in production). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5IE6lYKXRw
- Then there's the "Grow Bioinstensive" method which is designed to provide a complete diet in a small space while also building soil and fertility. They have been dialing it in for forty years and now have a turn-key system that is implemented and functioning all over the world.
http://growbiointensive.org/ (These folks are also selling their system, but they also have e.g. manuals you can download for free. I find their site curiously hard to use.)
- Permaculture (which could be called "applied ecology" with a kind of hippie spin. I'm not a hippie but I'm sometimes mistaken for one.) and a similar school (parallel evolution) called "Syntropic" Agriculture.
Both of these systems aim to mimic natural ecosystems to create "food forests" that produce crops year-round without inputs (no fertilizer, no irrigation.) The process takes 5-15 years or so but then is self-sustaining and regenerative.
For Permaculture I find Toby Hemenway's (RIP) videos very good:
https://tobyhemenway.com/videos/how-permaculture-can-save-hu...
https://tobyhemenway.com/videos/redesigning-civilization-wit...
There's a very lively and civil forum at https://permies.com/forums
For Syntropic agriculture: https://agendagotsch.com/en/what-is-syntropic-farming/
(FWIW, I find Gotsch's writing (in English) to be impenetrable, even though I pretty much know what he's doing. Anyway, his results are incontrovertable.)
I'm afraid I don't have a good link in re: Food Forests and eco-mimetic agriculture yet. This "Plant Abundance" fellow's youtube channel might be a good place to start, in any event it's a great example:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEFpzAuyFlLzshQR4_dkCsQ
- If you really wanted to maximize food production and aren't afraid of building insfrastucture (like greenhouses and fish tanks) there's the (sadly now defunct) Growing Power model:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growing_Power
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vs7BG4lH3m4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jV9CCxdkOng
They used an integrated greenhouse/aquaculture/compost system to produce massive amounts of food right through Milwaukee winters.
- Then there is the whole field (no pun intended) of regenerative agriculture, e.g.:
"Treating the Farm as an Ecosystem with Gabe Brown Part 1, The 5 Tenets of Soil Health" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUmIdq0D6-A and "Symphony Of The Soil" Official Trailer - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXRNF_1X2fU
This is very much non-hippie, very much grounded in (often cutting-edge) science (ecology, microbiology, etc.) and ecologically and economically superior to artificial methods (e.g. Brown makes money. It's actually weird that more people aren't adopting these methods faster. You make more money, have fewer expenses, and your topsoil builds up year-on-year rather than washing away in erosion.)
I currently have two spaces that I have established to try to take advantage of this low water use method. One is a keyhole garden [1] where I currently have a bunch of strawberry plants growing. This is the first time in 20 years of living here that I have strawberry plants that are still alive after summer heat is done. Something is working right.
The other space is one I just completed constructing last week. It is an orchard space using hugelkultur concepts of mounded compostable debris. I don't yet have any idea how that will work but hopes are as high as the summer temperatures in Texas.
I had a lot of logs, branches, limbs, and twigs from various weather events and several piles of composted wood chips and composted yard waste that I used to build the mounds. I had to buy some topsoil since that is in short supply on my place and I bought some composted manure too. I rented a skid steer to manage the construction so that part was easy. Doing what I did with a wheelbarrow would've been a huge job or one requiring multiple weak minds with strong backs or maybe promises of lots of free beer and smoked brisket.
I have a variety of fruit trees planted (avocado, plum, pomegranate, apple, moro orange, lemon, fig) and will be covering the mounds with various deer-resistant plants. Some of the plants will be garden plants - onion, garlic, etc. Others are herbs for home use - mullein, saffron crocus, yarrow, hollyhocks, hyssop, and others.
I chose this method since it seems well adapted to the challenges of growing in rocky soil in an environment where temperatures can get high for extended periods of time, like North Texas. I live on a rock outcrop and nothing grows unless it is in raised beds or heavily irrigated. I get all my potable water from my water well so I'm not inclined to waste it and very much prefer to plant things that are adapted to the area. I have killed off many non-native plants and invasive weeds since I moved here and allowed native grasses and flowers to take over. This saves a huge amount of maintenance since I don't water anything water the first year. It either lives with what the sky gods provide or it becomes a dry twig. I've had my share of dry twigs.
My greenhouse and garden area use rainwater harvested from the greenhouse roof and collected in a tank. The pump we use to fill water buckets is powered by a solar panel with a battery backup. The greenhouse itself is my kids' enclosed sandbox building (I built that a long time ago) modified to a greenhouse since the kids have grown up.
I have followed the Rodale's work since back in the early 90's and have used that over the years to guide my gardening plans and have found information gained to be very useful for those like myself who want to have small gardens for their family use. I'm glad to see they have carried out their long-term tests successfully though I don't know how much uptake they'll get among larger farmers. I do know that the method of maintaining soil fertility is a solid way to guarantee success.
[0] https://richsoil.com/hugelkultur/ - General introduction to Hugelkultur and the construction of the mounds
[1] https://gardeningmentor.com/keyhole-garden/ - Good introduction to Keyhole gardens and their construction
I'll add hugelkultur to the list.
Greg Judy and Gabe Brown being some bigger names but Chris from Sylvanaqua Farms is a good Black/Indigenous voice to start listening too.
They’ve made great strides domesticating a perennial cousin of wheat which allow use of existing equipment for harvest and doesn’t require replanting each season. It’s Actually a real product called “kerenza” and I have half a pint of kerenza flour sitting on my counter right now (tastes like regular flour)
They have a number of other projects with a lot of potential too!
They’re on Amazon smile also, without even doing anything different than I otherwise would have, (for better or worse) we gave $200 to them via Smile.
They could use your support any way you are able to contribute!
So.. by no-till they mean occasional till?
My naive thought on no-till is that, in addition to reducing erosion, the soil gains a poorly understood yet very beneficial network of information and nutrient sharing that builds over time (eg mycelium). Tilling destroys that. Also I read it works best with diverse, cooperative planting instead of mono-crop factory farming.
https://geog.ucsb.edu/the-lawn-is-the-largest-irrigated-crop...
“The analysis indicates that turf grasses, occupying about 2% of the surface of the continental U.S.,”
“Agricultural land (% of land area) in United States was reported at 44.37 % in 2016”
90 million acres of corn are planted each year but less than 10 million are irrigated.
TL;DR: focus on soil health and diversify your crops. His results are stunning.
Weeds? There are very few natural weed killers - hank pick? Robot machine weed picking is getting better and better.
I doubt that this scales. There just isn't enough manure (organic or not) to build soil.
Phosphorus is plentiful, current methods give us a 300+ year supply and other options exist. Potassium is a little more questionable we are likely to need to mine the ocean floors fairly soon which would spike prices, but it could ultimately be a closed loop where we are collecting the runoff.
The US for example has seen a significant reduction in runoff without that much pushback from farmers. That said, there is a point where with wasted fertilizer costs less than the methods of avoiding runoff, which changes the dynamics.
Would everyone composting solve this?
If anyone was unaware, urine is high in nitrogen and when added to compost is like "adding gas to fire, but slower". I never had an issue with Nitrogen in my compost.
I can see nitrogen going to waste if food ends up in a landfill, but I imagine our sewage systems recycle this for profit.
Is this manageable with habit changes?
There is another article on this site about how corn will uptake far more nitrogen than it needs, so cheap, abundant nitrogen isn't really as necessary as we believe.
That said, the remaining 10% market is probably a 100B-1T market opportunity (seriously). Not many startups either.