Comment by mabbo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mabbo | Hacker News Reader

In the same area of thoughts, I am reminded of a farmer my parents knew many years ago. He raised cattle. And he got tired and decided to be lazy.

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.)

Joel Salatin is somewhere in the middle. He field grazes his animals but fairly aggressively moves them around. With his management practices he's getting about 2-3 times the yield per acre of land as the average for his area. The practices and equipment necessary to do that are a better investment for him than buying more land.

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.

This is what they’re researching at TomKat Ranch too.

https://tomkatranch.org/

My sense is that it's like programming in that laziness can manifest in the form of automation, limits on tech debt, and other investments in efficiency.

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.

Grass based livestock farming, or grass based with corn finishing, is pretty common in high rainfall areas of the world like Ireland & New Zealand. Considerably lower intensity than feedlots (better for the environment too), easier to handle, and generally a higher quality output so long as you're around area that can process that output & send it to the right market.

Lower intensity is a double-edged sword; you're easier on the land, but you occupy a lot more of it.

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.

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