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Comment by goda90 | Hacker News Reader

I found this presentation[0] by a farmer talking about growing soil to be super interesting. He touches on promoting beneficial fungi as one part of it. He claims that with all the relatively easy techniques he, and other like minded farmers do, that they get high calories per acre than some conventional farmers.

[0]https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9yPjoh9YJMk

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I recently read “The One Straw Revolution” by Masanobu Fukuoka [1] and a lot of the technique seems to be around making sure the soil is cultivated for letting mycelium and bacteria do their thing. Mycorrhizal fungi seems to play a huge role in soil carbon storage, which is disrupted in modern agricultural practices [2].

[1]https://www.nyrb.com/products/the-one-straw-revolution?varia...

[2]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycorrhizal_fungi_and_soil_c...

Great book! I’ll always remember his lazy cultivation technique of creating “seed balls” consisting of various seeds and mud, and just tossing them down a hillside.

The one thing I appreciate most about Permaculture and techniques like those that Fukuoka deployed, are how the focus is on how to maximize yield and minimize effort.

Dr. Elaine Ingham talks about soil health too. I've been following her for years. I really love her work.

I read about Elaine Ingham for the first time a couple of months ago and it was a revelation to me. Her website https://www.soilfoodweb.com/ is very informative too. I wish these ideas were adopted much more broadly. It sounds like a solution to many of our problems. No fertilizer, no pesticides, no pollution, reclaimed biodiversity. What are we waiting for?

Maybe adoption is slow because the website is a clusterfuck

I think the website is rather recent. She does a much better job explaining soil health in an instructive setting.

Waiting on the article about Monsanto (ahem, I mean Bayer) patenting soil fungi

I’d second this as being interesting, and add some anecdata:

There’s a lot of similar discussion in the marijuana community. When I used to grow (legal, medicinal) marijuana, we had a reading group about soil ecology where we discussed how fungi and roots interacted, the fungi-bacteria-animal systems, etc.

A lot of crop management can be done via cultivating “healthy” soil ecosystems.

We were able to cut down on nutrient supplements, eliminate things like growth treatments, and get rid of some infestations by adopting a perspective we were raising soil full of healthy fungi, bacteria, and animals. We also started moving spiders into the plants if we found them elsewhere in the garden.

I think “symbiotic ecology” is a topic we’re just scratching the surface of.

Don't we still need to move phosphorous and other elements back into these soil? We don't have a closed loop for recycling of these elements, and instead losing them to the ocean or some place very difficult to recover.

Yes, these methods are wonderful for the home gardener, but you can't feed the world this way. You absolutely need to regularly amend the soil if you're growing crops intensively for sale.

Farming is mining in slow motion. Eventually you have to put those elements back into the system, and you can't get all of them in sufficient quantity from compost.

I disagree. The farmer mentioned above is Gabe Brown and he operates over 5000 acres and operates a closed loop. He grazes the fields which he plants crops in which he feeds to grain based animals such as pigs and chickens.

Hardly a home gardner.

Closed loop means complete recycling. Crops that go to feed humans are then lost as the phosphorous and other elements are dispersed elsewhere instead of being returned to the soil.

And how many people does he feed with his 5000 acres?

Can he provide enough for 100% of the daily caloric needs of 5000 people? 10,000? 100,000?

Crops and livestock require potassium. He harvests the crops and removes them (and the potassium in them) from his farm. Where does he get potassium after it's all been mined out of his soil?

I thought some of the fungi break down minerals from rocks?

There are no rocks in fields that have been cultivated for generations. Well, deep in the soil there are, but you won't find fungi down there.

Chicken manure is high in nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium. By moving his birds behind his cattle, he is adding nutrients back into the soil that are being used by the crops that are grown afterwards. On top of that, the birds are scratching and spreading the cow manure which are full of other nutrients that are being removed by crops.

Again. The chicken and cows and the crops get eaten by humans. Phosphorous and potassium goes somewhere else, certainly not back into the farm where it originated.

It doesn't matter if the cows and the chicken do all these things, because humans aren't returning their fair share to the soil.

I saw some another video where the claim was that there’s already enough elements in the soil to last thousands of years, but they require the right mixture of microorganisms to become available to the plants. It’s only the lack of microorganisms that forces us to add those nutrients.

[0] https://youtu.be/x2H60ritjag

Yes, right, that claim is that made in a video by Dr. Elaine Ingham, called The Roots of Your Profits, which I mentioned in this same thread, here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26718277

and which links to a comment by me (in a previous HN thread on no-till) about her work and revolutionary conclusions. And her company, Soil Food Web, is set up to consult on implementing the findings of her work.

And some major reasons both the number and diversity of microorganisms such as bacteria and fungi (and also other organisms such as archea, nematodes, arthropods) are low, is because tilling fields, not keeping the soil covered at all times as happens in nature (see Gabe Brown [1] videos where he keeps stressing how key this is and why), use of tractors, synthetic fertilizers, pesticides and fungicides depletes the soil of parameters needed for survival by those creatures, such as right moisture and temperature ranges, and organic matter levels. Not to mention the soil erosion and water body eutrophication ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eutrophication ) and desertification that occurs over the years due to all these wrong practices.

All in all, it's a deadly cocktail, and the exact opposite of how nature works.

[1] Google Gabe Brown videos. He has videos, charts, stats, etc. for almost all claims he makes, claims about his neighbors' poor results compared to his, and about his performance vs. state and US averages. He has a standing invitation for any one to visit his ranch and roam around and verify his claims.

I saw the lecture by Gabe Brown (linked above) and at the end he claims to produce significantly more calories pr hectare compared to conventional farming practices, not only because he practices Holistic Management methods that builds soil, but because he utilizes his land for many different purposes simultaneously – mutually beneficial parallel processes.

I know a guy who utilize similar methods here in Norway, admittedly on a smaller farm, but he mentions the same benefits. The farm is profitable without receiving government subsidies linked to the usual crops (grains), which seems like solid proof of their claims.

My gut feeling (based on having had half an eye on this topic for more than a decade) is that the potential for bountiful, diverse and healthy crops are much greater than most people realize. The main challenge is to disrupt the inertia that the industrialized methods have and gaining recognition in a rapidly aging population of farmers (and government officials / regulators). Maybe real change will come only with a new generation of farmers?

Yeah, it’s not magic.

That’s why it’s cut down nutrient supplements and totally remove processed hormones — not totally remove both.

The soil ecology is good at:

- turning raw ingredients into slightly more complex ones

- accessing things in the soil

- having the fungi exchange hormones for sugars

So you need to deal with adding back trace elements as part of their plant food, especially if you use the same growth medium repeatedly (eg, indoor growing).

But you can usually get away with less of those supplements because the soil ecology boosts uptake.

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