Organic and regenerative agriculture are revitalizing rural Montana economies
montanafreepress.org
montanafreepress.org
-isn’t this a tech/VC blog? How is it that so many of you are so interested in and knowledgeable about agriculture?
-what about this story made you want to discuss it here?
Looking forward to learning more!
And we the users are nerds, and while most of us work in software engineering, we're interested in everything and anything deep and tech/science related.
It's a moderated forum of scientists, engineers, and intellectuals. ycombinator was one of the original VC funders of reddit and decided to use the same idea for its VC community.
There sure are a lot of stereotypes about tech enthusiasts. Hackers are interested in hacking nature too! ;-)
What to Submit
On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
Agriculture and its future are like candy.
I work with technology but I'm skeptical that we understand some of the complex systems we claim to understand (or just as likely, something about the bottom line for a big corporation means it's hard to get the full story). 20th century agriculture was focused on short term gains, often resulting in profits for a few big businesses, that eventually resulted in big "unforeseen" problems. Like soil depletion, cancers among farm workers, runoff and polluted waterways. Technology caused those problems, so I guess sometimes it's good to be reminded that sometimes older methods can be better than new.
As many of us neo2k hackers are getting to ages where we think about future generations and even legacy, the stranglehold of corporatism on agriculture R&D and production is very worrying - and your blog is quite informative.
A 2015 USDA study shows organic corn fetching 3X conventional. But, higher variable costs. What if lowering costs with new techniques changes the roughly equal profit margins to a 2X? That's the sort of questions I and folks like me like to ask.
Aside from that, my housemate sold a cattle ranch in Montana and his family is one of the largest wild rice growers in California before the drought. Now, converting some of that parched land to Solar. Seems like a terrible waste. What if you could do both?
What new markets in this space are interesting to you?
This sucks and echoes the repairability problems with modern laptops and phones. Apple and the other major consumer tech companies make more money by selling stuff that can’t be fixed, or that only they can fix. That gets consumers slightly thinner, less expensive stuff, but it’s terrible for e waste and weakens the secondary market for tech, making tech more expensive overall while boosting corporate profits.
So, to answer your question, you could probably get traction by talking about people who are building tools that aren’t encumbered by repairablility and IP problems. Let’s see some open/source crop cycles. Let’s see bootleg tractor repair. Let’s see weird local regulations that force people to play fair.
And now I'm off down the "Blendle" rabbit hole...
[edit] Arggh. Homepage blendle.com, subhead "To our Beta users": "Today Blendle starts its beta in the United States..." -- undated, and "... Continue reading on medium.com"
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14020950 Social media's effect on journalism is greater than shift from print to digital
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22146086 Jim Lehrer’s Rules of Journalism
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12611377 Best practice examples of data journalism and visualization projects
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11343822 Blendle: Pay-per-article journalism platform that refunds you for clickbait
[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9453821 Blendle: A radical experiment with micropayments in journalism, 365 days later
Has any progress been made since? Is this an area where technology could help (eg robotic precision weeding machines)?
Disclaimer that I have yet to read your article so it may already be covered.
I believe ycombinator even invested in a few ag tech startups.
Personally, I have an interest in biology and nature - everything is so complex and interconnected!
I would say that many people here have an interest in learning "how things work" that isn't limited to just computers.
A lot of people in tech have diversified jobs and the community has a lot of valuable insights on a wide range of subjects.
An couple of examples:
- SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy successfully launches ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16319505 )
- Is that ship still stuck? ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26585282 )
And many more...
In this case, I'd say that soil depletion is a known problem here and the article discussed that.
Some of us have also founded or worked at AgTech companies.
I watched a few hours of the videos linked to here in the comments, and I will never look at those photos of "drought" the same way again.
They always feature dry parched bare earth, and now I understand that of course that land is dry, there's no cover crop on it!
I hope that regenerative agriculture takes off soon enough to keep our food supply stable during the next few decades of climate shift.
I think part of what is exciting and intriguing in your article is that it paints a picture of what agriculture could look like. Instead of just feeling a sense of dread about how our society is ruining everything, many of us are technological optimists with a core belief that science and engineering can help light a way to a better future. Who doesn't like reading articles that reinforce their existing beliefs? ;-)
I've scoured YouTube and other sources for regenerative ag content over the last few years, and what I crave are more specifics and details of business models, scientific analysis, etc. It would be fascinating to actually see the books for a couple of different farms, conventional vs organic vs regenerative. How much money is spent on chemicals vs labor vs seed, etc.? What does insurance cost, and how much risk is there? Does regenerative ag with higher soil carbon lower this risk? (Maybe there is a smart regenerative only insurance play here?) Many of us would probably love to work on autonomous tractors, computer vision to spot problems, etc., etc., so learning about the key levers and problems underlying this industry would be incredibly thought provoking. While reading your article my head went to: why can't those electric fences both monitor the cattle and move themselves around? Could you attach water or compost to the cows themselves to have them help distribute useful inputs? There is an incredible amount of food waste, yard trimming waste, and other carbon rich waste streams generated by society. Why aren't we spreading that on these farms? Instead of tilling the top inch or two, couldn't we be planting the seeds in a new layer of added material? I guess this would require moving a lot of mass, but maybe if it's an autonomous supply chain it could be constantly bringing beneficial waste streams to farmers? It seems like each crop is likely to take some nutrients and provide others. Could you not auto-sample a farm and then automically determine the optimal crop mix which will most benefit the soil? If you have market data you could also connect this with current market prices. Last, if all you did was grow optimal cover crops for a few years could you dramatically improve a farm? Should we pay farmers to give the land a break and only grow beneficial crops so they can come back in N years as an organic, regenerative operation?
My wife and I have started trying to order all of our meats (fish, pork, beef, chicken) from sustainable operations, and it's actually quite hard to know who to go to. When we do finally find one that seems compelling, they are often sold out. Is anyone creating a centralized marketplace for the output from regenerative farms? I have a feeling we aren't the only ones who want to support these operations.
Thanks for a thought provoking article!
This is true. One of the regenerative crop types are pulses (lentils, chick peas), and MT produces a lot.
https://www.ndsu.edu/pubweb/pulse-info/resources-pdf/Growing...
The state often appears in stories about agriculture in precarious environments (See Jared Diamond's "Collapse" for one example.)
Montana is largely a semi-arid desert, especially over the 2/3's of the state that are northern Great Plains. East of the continental divide, it gets about 10" of rain per year, which is about a quarter of the US average.
And with climate change, it is more precarious. Temperatures have been unusually high this summer, and it's fire season now. Weather has become more volatile. (Cherry crops on the Flathead have been destroyed two of the last three years.)
https://dailyinterlake.com/news/2021/jul/03/growers-expect-e...
> Lentils in the United States are primarily grown for export.
Growing lentils is a great idea, but the developed and developing worlds' palates also need to also change course toward consuming less climate-damaging foods like meat and more lentils, chickpeas, and other pulses.
Already today, pea protein is a major constituent of the newer more realistic meat-substitutes, which is a good trend, but if most lentils just end up being exported and used as some sort of livestock feed, it will make little differences to the climate and environmental issues we are experiencing.
> They also lease land to neighboring ranchers, whose grazing cattle aerate the soil with their hooves and add organic matter and nutrients via manure.
Meat can and should be a part of regenerative ag.
I recently visited a family friend's place/farm. A year ago, the soil was the typical cracked dry light tan clay ground that I have in my yard. It's quite typical in Oregon.
This time, the soil was a dark color with tons of organic material and great water retention. This was entirely due to the grazing. They have goats and an alpaca. Ruminants are excellent for soil health, and the meat they produce is also great for human health.
Reducing to 4-30kg of meat per capita per year seems impossible.
No one can even accomplish that with ruminants. That's why there's so much chicken everywhere, because accomplishing that with ruminants is near impossible, so chicken is advertised massively instead.
A nitpick, there's no single food that is great for human health or bad for human health. Diet can contain various things and be healthy and it can also lack meat and be healthy.
I used to think similarly, but now I’m not so sure. Gabe Brown, the author of Dirt to Soil, changed my outlook on animals place in a healthy ecosystem.
On his farmland he puts about 700k lbs of cattle on 1acre of land at a time, rotating those cattle frequently across 40 acres. He claims this practice has been an integral part of his regenerative ag method.
> A large-framed cow is one that requires a higher intake level for maintenance alone
https://brownsranch.us/livestock/
My math came out similarly to yours but I don’t think it’s unreasonable for there to be 150lbs of waste high cover crop biomass in a 6 square meter area.
Again he is rotating these cattle daily and never depleting the crops of any one area, giving them a chance to grow back by the time the cattle are rotated back through.
Another term you can search for to find visuals of what this sort of density looks like is mobgrazing.
[1] https://www.thebeefsite.com/articles/3154/how-much-forage-do...
If you're going to grow ruminants just on grass, it takes a lot of time and land to eventually sell the meat compared to what's happening now.
We could argue that a reduction from 100+ kg to 4-30kg of meat per capita per year could be supported this way but I have no idea.
However as a vegan my hope is that we eventually let animals graze and simply do not kill and consume them. One could argue “the meat is there” but that meat is beings with a heart and a mind. When I see the grazing animals with their babies in toe, I think about how they will be separated and the pain the mothers will go through.
We can take great care of our soil with regenerative grazing but that is quite apart from whether or not we need to treat those animals as mere property and eat them.
FWIW I am now in year three of veganism and it feels like I have made it past all the "teething" stages to the point where I am absolutely loving my vegan meals. It is rare for me these days to eat a meat or cheese substitute - more like the occasional junk food throwback than a normal meal. Lentils, tofu, potatoes, carrots, broccoli, brown rice, peanut sauce, lettuce, zucchini, and just some of the foods that bring me joy to eat.
Hopefully you're already learning to make vegan meals but if anyone out there is on the fence I highly encourage you to learn how to make delicious vegan food. It's so tasty and you won't feel the guilt of eating meat.
Vegan modifications along the lines of 'substitute the meat in your burger for mushroom' seem depressing, like they're unengaged with the balance of flavours in the dish.
Remember the vast majority of China was extremely poor until just recently. No ones affording meat. The most traditional cuisines can function entirely without meat.
In San Francisco there is an absolutely amazing vegan japanese restaurant. https://www.yelp.com/biz/cha-ya-san-francisco-san-francisco-...
I googled for "french vegan food" and found this: https://veggievagabonds.com/best-traditional-french-vegan-re...
For chinese food I would imagine there is a lot of traditional vegan food. Tofu for example originated in China. For lots of chinese dishes with meat, something like Tempeh or Seitan make great traditional foods that can substitute meat.
I googled "chinese vegan food" and found this: https://thewoksoflife.com/traditional-chinese-vegan-dishes/
The thing to keep in mind is that veganism is very common in parts of the world where the right crops grow well. So indian food is full of vegan and vegetarian options like dal (lentils).
One of the things you can do is just get to know the traditional plant proteins like lentils, tempeh, seitan, and tofu. Go find some tempeh at the store, unmarinated. Slice it in to long thin fries, and pan fry them in some olive oil. Brown them on all sides, then add salt. Some super tasty fries that will make you want more. Now next time you cook tempeh do the same thing but cut it in to small cubes. You can add that on top of anything in place of meat and it will be very satisfying.
Then learn to cook tofu and seitan. Eventually you will become familiar enough with them to plan dishes with them.
And for me I found that adding peanut sauce is an easy way to make things tastier. So experiment with that!
From your experience is it possible (in a farm context of a fixed amount of land) to just let the larger animals graze in such a way that they can live their natural lifespan? or are there concerns of species overpopulation (and ecosystem degradation) akin to deer on poorly managed land?
Many of my dairy animals live through their long natural lifespans; it hurts to see my 14 year old best friend (usually the matriarch of the herd) get torn apart by a pack of coyotes though, or suffer other disease or mechanical injury as a result of old age and bad luck. However, on a large plot of land (say 60-100 acres+) that is not managed, they will surely run out of nutritionally dense foods to eat, as they will freely pick and choose certain stands of certain forbs or grasses, and let others lie dormant (these ultimately going to forest). The result is the highly nutritious choice foods get eaten to death, forest slowly sprouts everywhere else, and animal health suffers as a result. Now, if you had a large mixed herd, it becomes a possibility (think cows, goats, sheep, pigs, chickens, other fowl all living together). Now, if you can take that same large plot of land, and that same mixed herd of various animals and preferably plants, insects, and fungus, and rotationaly graze in much smaller paddocks, you can make magic happen, assuming your soil was dense enough in minerals to keep the animals happy and healthy on pasture alone (unlikely in many parts of the world without mineralizing the soil first).
Big props to any cow that eats a bird though.
There have long been chickpea based "chikn" patties available at grocery stores.
Also try IKEA's plant balls, which are made primarily of chickpea flour.
Forget about the developing world. This is all about the developed world. You are to blame. Most of the pollution is by the US and Europe, regardless of whether it happens at home or as pollution outsourced to China.
If you like lentis, you too can experience the joys of the US Humanitarian Daily Ration, NSN 8970-01-375-0516 [1]. It's vegetarian. It's kosher. It's halal. It's cheap to manufacture. It can survive being air-dropped without a parachute. It's heavy on lentils.The US military gives it out to starving people.
[1] https://www.dla.mil/TroopSupport/Subsistence/Operational-rat...
Very sad. I grew up in Bozeman, and I loved Flathead cherry season.
Interesting! I always sorta thought those were warm-weather crops.
Documentary on the Loess plateau in China: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjLV_aVRUmQ
Talk on the Caledonian Forest: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nAGHUkby2Is
Talk on using the "herd effect" in Africa: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7pI7IYaJLI
A talk presenting a realistic view on soil reconstruction, what IMO is the best argument to convince farmers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUmIdq0D6-A
That said it is not necessarily better to produce all crops in low density, high volatility, season dependent environments. Some material % of crops can move to more intelligent indoor settings where yields are higher, weather isn't a factor, and production yields can be scheduled without risk of weather impact. I'm actually a partner in one of these high volume operations in Montana (randomly). Uses less water, has zero soil impact, requires little to no chemical agents and is predictable.
What I hope will continue is crops that are capable of producing profitable and predictable yields in indoor environments will move more and more in that direction. This could serve to reduce soil stress and leave soil for crops that need more space (e.g. tubers) and livestock to aid in improving soil longevity.
Note this is not a plug for vertical farming. That's an entirely different mirage of financial engineering.
When you say "indoor" are you describing large greenhouses? Or growing crops using artificial light?
So that when you hit the float pond for a 12-16 grow cycle, there's marginal loss.
Sun == free, rain == free
How does indoor ag plan on scaling up for anything other than super high margin vegetables and spices when their competitor (outdoor ag) has no cost associated with sun or rain? Not even to mention soil.
edit: I like indoor/vertical ag a lot (when applied correctly) When people try to propose producing things that have no chance of succeeding in our current Kardashev scale, it makes me think they are arguing in bad faith or with a fundamental lack of understanding of the problems faced in food production.
And that's not even taking into consideration the higher density you can get indoors vs outdoors - the amount of land that is cleared for ag around the globe is staggering. Getting an order of magnitude more output from the same amount of land, but having to pay for water and light, is likely to make business sense and be better overall for the environment.
Do the actual economics work out right this second? Maybe not. Will they in the not so distant future? I'd bet on it.
California's central valley is a primer candidate not so much because of geographic concerns, but economic ones. Almost everything grown in the Valley is high margin. Those indoor ag systems need to get their water from somewhere so if if aquifiers and fresh waters supplies are dwindling, that will affect indoor ag too.
Growing stuff indoors, at any scale has proven harder than people thought. My experiences have mostly revolved around pests being more present in indoor setups (thrips, white flies) and you end up spraying more pesticides indoors than you would outdoors. Indoor systems are susceptible to the same climate variability as outdoor systems. A storm knocks out power for an extended period will kill an indoor crop too, or the storm itself may destroy the building.
I'm pro indoor ag. It needs more investment, but it needs the right investment, not this pie-in-the-sky mindset that we shouldn't grow anything outdoors and indoor ag will save us all.
Vertical as it is today is an excellent nursery solution to feed growable plants into float ponds with little to no loss. As an independent production method, vertical isn't mathematically sustainable.
40% of fresh food is lost before it makes it to the end user (USDA data). The loss comes from a combo of unpredictable weather, timing issues where market prices dip below production costs at harvest time, and supply chain issues.
So it's a complicated math problem but it's important to consider in the suite of food security tools we look to.
Absent regen, we're likely to decimate soils over generations. If we flip totally to regen, we won't have enough land.
So a host of solutions is required.
I'm mulling whether we have enough land (at 100% regen practices). I almost think we do.
From a system-level, we're over saturated because of ethanol and other things that realistically could disappear and society would be better off. Just need to recalibrate our acres a bit
Those are all napkin numbers, or poorly sourced, and worst case, but I would love to see some good numbers on what it means to the climate to have a lot more ruminants in the farming process. (If much of current beef cattle production was moved to be dispersed along these lands, that seems like it might be a good idea for all involved though).
At least one practitioner of regenerative agriculture, Gabe Brown, uses super dense grazing and frequent movement of the cattle to actually restore his soil health.
http://brownsranch.us/grazing/
If this sort of stuff interest you, I highly suggest his book, Dirt To Soil. It’s a light read with a lot of great information on regen ag.
Indoor farming sure does require an input of energy and a high up-front cost, but you can get extremely high yields reliably, and you can dramatically reduce transportation and chemical costs, plus reduced water costs often.
As far as transporting crops to markets? That's actually a success story. Rail hauls most of the crops from Montana to the PNW (if exporting to China). Rail is dirt cheap and efficient, as any true HN reader will know. :)
1 - https://www.nass.usda.gov/Publications/Todays_Reports/report...
https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2017/june/understanding...
I visited with some friends a couple of years ago who had leased a paddock to a pair of humans who used it to build a hydroponic green house.
They produced leafy greens for the local restaurant market and in the first part year had more cash flow than the whole farm around them.
They were working very hard but were poised to make a lot of money.
They were using the sun for energy input - I fail to see how indoor agriculture under lights can be profitable except for the most valuable of crops
Imagine all the kick in the mid 2000s for "vertical living walls" as all the rage in large scale office complexes.
Imagine that if instead they put vertical gardens in every high-rise and the farming of the veggies was a part of the HOA and the veggies were just included in the cost of the living in the home - and you could opt-out and give the veggies to the homeless/shelters/churches/etc...
Now imagine if the US was like Singapore, where the setbacks in dense urban environs is massive enough to manage handling a ton of eatable growth between all buildings.
There are three things that should be required for every single building going up (aside from structural sound-ness)
1. Parking underground for 3 levels
2. Vertical EATABLE gardens
3. A network of 'non=potable' water supplies (water you can get from a grey-water system run through the entire building to feed the plants in the vertical gardens.)
Good new farming: put solar panels in sun, connect lightbulbs to solar panels, put plants under lights.
(Although it's not totally as daft as I make it sound, because it's theoretically possible to do frequency conversion in a way that makes all the energy of sunlight available to plants instead of everything but green.)
Massive amounts of government regulation that inflates the price.
I.e. just weed so far.
Generally tomatoes and maybe peppers have enough margin and volume to be justify indoor settings.
Things like nuts are a no-go or any sort of wheat/cotton/maize/soybean operation (even specialty applications like edamame have severe uphill battles to profitability)
WTF - I hope ZERO of this happens... Don't attempt to think that youre smarter than ~5BILLION years of earths bio/eco balance until we were weaponized by fungi...
We dont need "higher yields" -- we need more efficient consumption and distribution...
I found it an interesting listen. Of course it's a fairly shallow entry into the topic, but that's what they are about after all; get you interested, give you pointers for more if you feel like it.
Just too bad they'll go spotify-only and thus seize to be a podcast... I'll have to stop recommending (and listening...)
Yes, that bums me out too. It must make economic sense (for both parties; presumably the data in the app and exclusive content is a win for Spotify), but it's a real bummer that they are moving from a format that lets me, the listener, control how I want to listen, to a format that requires me to download an app. Not gonna happen, but companies will always try to build walled gardens.
The worst part of it is that Spotify's android app is buggy. Actually, that's an understatement: it's garbage. I shouldn't have it hang waiting for network connection just to navigate the offline portions of the app (e.g. downloaded podcasts). Anyone who writes a simple "music player" android app in a weekend or two could handle that case far better.
More here if you want to learn about the reasons why: https://www.vox.com/2019/2/7/18214941/alex-blumberg-matt-lie...
Thank you all for such a great conversation here and asking such thought-provoking questions!
Regenerative ag will not make you very rich either, so you have not much money to invest in lobbying activities, to go against the flow.
How do you figure? Regenerative ag is still relatively new, and it’s practices are being honed. Idk what you define as rich but I’d venture to guess that Joel Salatin and Gabe Brown are extremely wealthy.
My biggest concern about it is that half its advocates say crazy things. For instance, down-thread we got the line:
"[Paul Wheaton] believes that in a decade the soil will be so rich in organic matter with healthy microbial activity (with no chemical history) could produce food that cures cancer. I believe that in an environment where human body is not weakened by the constant bombardment of chemical compounds, it could heal itself from cancer."
I do my best to keep an open mind because, hey, a lot of bits and pieces sound plausible, but whenever I get to lines about cancer-curing food, I begin to doubt the truth, validity or factual nature of anything else that was said on the topic.
Aside from that, the biggest question is always going to be "Does it scale to growing sufficient food for 10 billion people?" Maybe it does, maybe it doesn't, but whenever food comes up keep in mind that end game. If a particular agricultural system could produce food at lower energy costs, more sustainably, "better", but could only feed a billion people applied globally, it's only an acceptable solution in very particular moral frameworks.
I think going deep into crazy is natural, and the hard question is trying to balance that out with a deeper truth. At core, I think there is a deeper value in being the control group outside of the modern world.
So, can food cure cancer? I don't know, but it may be worth looking into. Amish, for instance, have 40% less cancer. Is it the food? the air? the bacteria? the hard work? No Idea!
Myself, I'm getting firmly on the fasting train. I eat every other day, and I feel great.
Life expectancy should really only be talked about in terms of expected lifespan of someone who's already made it to say 3 years old.
Otherwise, we get a very distorted view of modern medicine's ability to stave off death. Modern medicine has really done well at reducing infant mortality though.
Also - who diagnoses Amish people for cancer? Can there be a higher "dark number" of undetected cancers among them than among the general population?
There’s no mystery.
People can say things that are patently absurd about one field while being an expert in another, but I also can't just be completely credulous in treating any assertion about any subject I do not understand as true. I don't really have much else to do but build out from a network of trust rooted in people who seem competent and clear-minded by whatever criteria I can judge.
It's even possible to combine these things, although that's a dangerous game to play. Biodynamic agriculture is a great example of this, Rudolph Steiner's model of how agriculture (and scientific matters in general) is... heterodox... but biodynamic farms regularly produce good crops of quality food, and the practices cultivate healthy soil by any objective measure you would care for.
I wouldn't go casually trying this with medicine, where practitioners are more likely to do the wrong thing for the wrong reasons, rather than the right thing for the wrong reasons.
He bans anyone from the permaculture subreddit who disagrees with him, which is why there are multiple off-shoot subreddits, including one specifically dedicated to his malfeasance which broaches into criminality.
Does anybody know why movements rooted in holism keep getting taken over by people like this? It seems like every movement that starts out by wanting to incorporate high-level perspectives ends up getting burdened with the crystal-spinners and magic-cancer-curers of the world.
Yield for some crops is actually more after the ~3 year transition period. However, for all crops quality is greatly improved. Better quality means you need to eat less to be satiated.
I'm envious of Japan's 'designer produce' tied to their gift culture. America doesn't really have much "This fruit is so much better, people are willing to pay 10x+ for it". I think our food system would be much better if we had $20 versions of all produce to get people to stop treating produce as fungible commodities.
They might not be farming at a scale big ag run at, but it’s no small operation.
The below link says “The midpoint acreage for U.S. cropland nearly doubled between 1982 and 2007, from 589 acres to 1,105.”
https://www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/publications/45108/39359_er...
It's not a blocker, but financing the capital equipment takes some investment and risk. Farms are fairly dialed into their operations already, and getting people to change (especially when they need to pay money to do it) is a slow process.
That way the cost of food would rise, but the cost of regenerative practices presumably wouldn’t rise as much and would earn more.
It is crazy that everyone hasn't switched. It is more profitable but it is a leap of faith to switch and most ag extensions are still recommending high chem use. There are some hang ups with crop subsidies making it difficult to change also.
But, the tide has changed as evidenced by this article. General Mills is pushing for 1 million regenerative farmed acres by 2030. The transition is happening but as with any paradigm shift it takes time to convince everybody that there is a better way.
https://www.generalmills.com/en/Responsibility/Sustainabilit...
People don't like to admit it, but yields under current intense monoculture, fertilizer happy are best-case scenario. This is obvious and intended, we're squeezing as much yield as possible without care for long-term consequences. Those yields might not be achievable under regenerative practices (but they might be in certain farms). For some reason, we have this mindset where we can't give up any yield, but in reality, if the economic models and government subsidies were redesigned, we absolutely could.
The most important thing is to change how you think about yield. Yield/acre needs to take into account how much outside inputs are involved (trucked in fertilizers, mechanical inputs, etc).
It's absolutely correct to measure how we're doing. It's tricky when the units of measurement are not the same. It's harder still where there are so many types of soil/climate conditions and so many types of output to measure. But we can't just ignore output if we want to improve or give prospective adopters some idea of risk (they are literally betting their farms on it afterall).
As i've said in other threads we have many misaligned incentives in agriculture that we're seeing play out. if you click my bio, I post blogs about these topics and more
https://www.csuchico.edu/regenerativeagriculture/demos/gabe-...
There's a number of open positions, most with the option to be remote!
I ask because I've been researching regen ag for smallholder farms -- a few programs exist, primarily through microfinance, but I've yet to see any quality + accessible programs to accomplish this proactive approach tightly knit with carbon credit markets.
An obvious difficulty with this approach is verifying the transition actually occurs and more carbon is sequestered, but it does seem to be an essential component if we want to move more farms to regenerative ag. Curious if you have any further thoughts on this space, I'd love to speak more about this.
FWIW, I've been following Indigo and the regenerative ag space for a while and IA is doing some great work, so I don't mean to undermine the impact these programs already have.
Right now, farmers (corn/soy/wheat/cotton) are reward on quantity, so they need to increase production and keep costs down. Rightly or wrongly, the prevailing thought is to increase yields rather than cuts costs.
There are news systems thinking approaches slowly gaining steam (as the original article is about), but the reality is these things are economically risky. This is why the government needs to divert agricultural subsidy money from its existing criteria to one that requires practices like cover cropping. Importantly the money is already there, we just need to shift how its disbursed and start incentivizing more sustainable practices
What does that mean? Everything is made of chemicals.
Edit: you will probably find that many words have multiple meanings, and it is not hard to find words that have one specific technical meaning and a different one in colloquial usage. Organic is another common one.
I had zero difficulty understanding the post you're replying to— and neither did you. It doesn't even annoy me any more, probably because, as a chemist, I got it out of my system years ago.
The time one of my second cousins responded to my telling her my major by making a face and saying "I don't like chemicals" does kind of stand out...
We're tackling this exact problem at Yard Stick (https://www.useyardstick.com/) - developing a new way to measure soil carbon that is fast, accurate and affordable, with backing by ARPA-E and in collaboration with the Soil Health Institute.
Later this week, I'm going to post a contract-to-hire position. In the meantime, email me at evan@useyardstick.com
What kind of involvement are you looking for design-wise?
I try and blog a little bit about sustainable ag on thinkingagriculture.io as I work in ag research and am interested in how this meta evolves.
Source: https://www.nrcs.usda.gov/Internet/FSE_DOCUMENTS/stelprdb116...
http://instagram.com/cleryfarm/
The previous owner had a soil test done, and through that we were able to assess how eroded it was (very). We switched the hay fields over to organic practices, but the biggest projects so far have been roughly 20 acres that we've put into conservation, including an oak woodland and an 'upland prairie' - both vanishing ecosystems in the state of Oregon.
Long term we're moving towards agroforestry practices, and thinking through the lens of carbon sequestration. In the short term, we've been heavily focused on brush removal, tree limbing, etc, for wildfire prevention and suppression.
How do you go about determining this? I just built a 400 sq. ft. greenhouse this year, and aside from watching the plants get bigger each day, I'm not really sure how to tell if I'm "doing it right".
The more life you see in the soil the healthier it is. Predatory arthropods are a really good indicator. If they are around that means there is food for them.
We bought a plot of land here in Arkansas a year and a half ago and have been working it, and plan to continue doing so with the aim of creating a self sustaining food forest and garden, one outcome of which will necessarily require healthy and strong soil. The ground is rocky and the rain runs off fast. We have been planting trees, bringing in leaf mulch, and leaving the cut grass when we mow.
There are a shockingly large number of techniques and things to know about this kind of work. Join some groups on Facebook or IRL, visit with farmers at your local farmers market, and search around and you will be able to get your hands on more info than you can handle.
The soil on our croft is in a good way, having been left undisturbed for decades (aside from being cut for hay). However, we still need to build fertility and are doing so through compost, ramial woodchip and biodynamic preparations. This combined with a no-till (or minimum till) approach is helping to develop build soil and enhance soil structure. One issue we need to address with this is water management, as it can get very wet here (although we are a few weeks without rain now).
For keeping track of fertility in your soil a simple test that many people do is measure organic matter. This isn't something I've done yet. You can also do worm counts. And more detailed soil tests.
There are apps out there such as SoilMentor by Vidacycle that guide you in tracking this. Here's a good overview of their tests, which can be done by farmers on site with minimal equipment https://soils.vidacycle.com/soil-tests/
You can get a sense of the baseline when starting a project by doing this. But a good indicator would be looking at what plants are growing there already (if any) - weeds etc are indicators of soil characteristics. For example, compaction and drainage.
Personally I haven't taken any soil tests yet, I'm just keeping an eye on our crops and getting the sense of things that way. I'll take some tests at some point soon. Simple approaches to this can be pretty handy, for example I've been scything our 2 acre field and it allows me to step over each part of the field noticing how the vegetation changes species-wise and in vigor.
Supporting this, I'm also developing an app for market gardens to use for crop planning and record keeping. It's great to be your own customer, plus I'm tapping into a good network of established markets gardens here who are helping to shape the product.
I recommend anyone starting a project should read Mark Shepard's new book Water For Any Farm. His master line system, built upon PA Yeoman's keyline and scale of permanence is valuable, especially at an early stage. Equally valuable in dry climates as it is in wet ones.
The nut tree farmers need some help. They are spraying water scattershot to soak the ground. What's more is that they have the ground prepared as perfectly flat bare soil--I presume to make automated harvesting possible.
It looks like a lot of resources are allocated to this rather imprecise method of irrigation and as the droughts and heat persist I could see this failing to scale. It doesn't look like it scales very well even in good times.
I was wondering, given the very organized situation of the trees and ground, why are they not using direct or site-based (drip?) irrigation? It would definitely change the watering process from one of rolling and unrolling irrigation line and towing of sprinklers (water canons?) to one where you would automate water delivery via a network of lines with computers and have workers monitor and repair lines as needed.
https://extension.colostate.edu/topic-areas/agriculture/subs...
Dust generally isn't an issue for outdoor plants, especially not in Washington or Oregon, and especially not for deciduous trees.
He did a book on it: https://www.chelseagreen.com/product/dirt-to-soil/
I also like Geoff Lawton's work on food forests:
I often hear it cited as a benefit in situations like this, and it has a certain feel-good quality to it, but instinctively it feels like it means people pay higher prices: if you're buying seed from the local seed & feed, it's almost certainly more expensive than if you buy it from XYZ megacorp.
Whether that is true or not, I don't know. It's definitely true that corporate concentration has been increasing and that many of these communities are in decline.
Following on your example, if you buy seed from the local seed & feed, you :
- build resilience, for example if a global pandemic prevents far-reaching import-export
- are less subject to geopolitics
- money invested have a higher chance to stay in the local economy : the owner of the local seed & feed may buy its vegetables from you
- create local jobs : this seed & feed owner may be able to create jobs for people
- overall avoid the lock-in that you can have being tied to XYZ megacorp, for example if they now decide to only sell you seed that will grow with their newly branded feed
- preserve local folklore : maybe there is a kind of seed that grows really well on your soil, but not so much in the others, so XYZ has decided to discontinue it because the market is too small to be profitable
A well-off local economy supports more things than a poor one. Local seed & feed shops are a start, but think of every other business that might be part of a small town: grocery stores, bookshops, art galleries, clothing, musicians, movie theaters, children's party entertainers, furniture makers, car dealerships, repair shops... how many of these things used to be made locally, and are now made by people working under dubious conditions somewhere in Asia, then shipped across the world at a huge, but completely-ignored cost to the environment? How many local shops has Wal-Mart ruined by being large enough to cut predatory deals with suppliers that let them sell stuff below any sane price point? How much money left the entire US economy for Jeff Bezos' pockets during the pandemic?
Keeping money in the local economy leads to better-off neighbors. Better-off neighbors are less likely to resort to criminal acts to feed your family; better-off neighbors are more likely to be able to help you out if something bad happens.
The metaphor that comes easily to mind is water: each local economy is a pool, with the locals the fish swimming in it. Buying stuff from a megacorp may be cheaper in the short run, but every time you do that, the corporation is pumping a bit of the water out of your pond and putting a little of it in their pond, far far away, and most of it in their giant storage tank even further away, where it sits, unused. Ultimately your pond dries up and either you leave for a larger pond that hasn't been sucked dry by corporations, or you end up baking in the sun and dying.
From co-ops to seed dealers, chemical dealers, people to apply and plant these chemicals and seed. Equipment (Deere, Case)...if these people vanished, rural america would suffer GREATLY. Locall replacements for these jobs/companies is not clear to me.
Consider a single (physical) twenty dollar bill. If it enters a small town (remote worker for FAANG withdraws it out of an ATM) and then immediately leaves (from the Walmart till onto an armored truck to the local city center), that's $20 in economic activity.
If it passes between five hands locally before it ends up on that truck, that's $100 of economic activity, five times as many opportunities for people to exchange what they have for what they want.
This is a toy model, there are a ton of things wrong with it, but it does illustrate a real point. In the six-hands scenario, more of the residents are offering goods and services to each other, in the two-hands scenario, everything is being provided to and by the larger economy. Less resilient, less locally-scaled, and it's easier to replace the small town with any other set of producer/consumers who offer lower prices or thinner wages.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Animal-Vegetable-Junk-Sustainable-Sui...
I think that is going to be the property of this sort of agriculture that makes it really popular.
Pity they cannot get carbon credits for the increase in top soil. Or can they?
He has a bootcamp and I took 2 weeks off from work to try it out in January and I learned alot just by being there. https://wheaton-labs.com/bootcamp/
After that experience I couldn't focus on work anymore so I quit my job (I have 2 years worth of savings) and now my days are spent trying to restore the soil in my backyard.
I'd wager the down-votes related to the claims around curing cancer, but there is reason to pursue this. I'm self experimenting on myself and wife since the wife has an auto-immune issue (MS). She was on the anti-gluten train way before it was fashionable since there is an immediate cause and effect for her without celiacs.
We really should question all of our practices and values.
I also think this has a lot to do with our cancer rates.
So I agree with you that, at least for me, eating less than I want to (or nothing) much of the time, and eating a lot occasionally, feels better than constantly feeding myself more calories (carbs especially!) than I need.
But most people on this site, myself included, don't think we were 'designed' at all.
Personal tangent: The property I have was a typical Roundup maintained monoculture lawn without any insect diversity, bees, etc. Now it's teeming with all types of insects and different native species that have re-established themselves and I've been able to use about half of the property for fruit and vegetable production. It's awesome to see the progress that's possible even in such a short time.
You might have heard of this already, but for anyone else who might come across this comment, there's a site called https://getchipdrop.com/ where you can sign up to get a free truckload of wood chips from arborists that just did work nearby. Just beware that you can get a TON of chips dropped off so be ready to move all that matter lol.
first and foremost, I'm covering the bare dirt from direct sunlight by covering it with a layer of cardboard (empty amazon shipment boxes).
Next is some aerated compost tea to speed up the microbial activity and loosen the dirt and start the process of turning it into soil. Add some compost along the way
I'm documenting the journey on this forum if you want to follow along: https://permies.com/t/164053/Gardening-Journey#1286751
Chemicals like roundup where so effective they changed agriculture production in unforeseen ways (like we lost institutional knowledge on how to successfully grow crops without them). The fact that mother nature is rendering all chemicals (glyposate, glufosinate, dicamba, 2,4-d) ineffective is predictable. Mother nature also had the mechanisms to combat these chemicals, but it happened quicker than most people thought.
We also didn't have 2nd and 3rd generation tools (re: not chemicals) ready to go when the chemicals failed. So we're stuck on treadmill.
There are solutions though...
And some of those changes were significant positives not only for agricultural productivity, but also for the environment. The biggest of these is the reduced or eliminated tillage... tilling the soil several times a year with heavy machinery was the biggest contributor to soil degradation and even outright soil loss.
First, after tilling, some of the soil literally blows away with the wind. Second, organic residue in freshly tilled soil decomposes rapidly to CO2 and Methane, versus healthy untilled soil where a significant portion of it would decompose to long-term stable humic and vulvic substances... so we have a double negative where we're increasing the global warming contribution and decreasing the capacity of the soil for retaining nutrients.
I've dabbled in farming, and I'm no fan of glyphosate, and certainly not of Monsanto, but I think it's important to point this out because certain knee-jerk reactions, like "ban glyphosate" by themselves are only likely to make things worse. If you ban glyphosate for example, one of two things is likely to happen... 1) it will be replaced by even worse chemicals, or 2) people go back to frequent tilling. There are no quick fixes to industrial agriculture, the only solution is to move toward highly integrated regenerative approaches, and these are by their nature much more complex and labor intensive. It's great that there are more and more people doing that, but big ag keeps them operating at the margins of our food supply.
I often say to people, I need to spend (i.e risk) $100,000 for the chance to make $20,000-$30,000 if everything goes correctly. One major event and you just lost 100K. Scale up or down depending on the size of the farm.
I would argue the pendulum has swung too far with crop insurance. There are acres that have no business being in production and rely on federally subsidized crop insurance programs. Needs to be re-thought IMO
There is a WIDE variance on the quality of co-ops. Some are great and well-run and provide the intended benefits to farmers. Others would make the mafia looks less corrupt (seriously, the CEOs of some co-ops make 500k+ salaries).
> Between cash and cover crops, Wicks and Givens are planting about 4,500 acres this year. Some of that land is leased from Wicks’ mother, who retired in 2019, and the rest they lease from neighbors. They’ve contracted most of the barley to Anheuser-Busch, though they’ll sell some to nearby Hutterite colonies for chicken feed. They’re also growing lentils, chickpeas, Kamut and Einkorn for smaller mills including Timeless Seeds and Montana Flour and Grain, both based in Montana.
> Their yields are smaller than their conventional ones were, but Wicks said it’s worth it. Previously, they were at the mercy of international commodity markets, as well as ever-increasing seed, chemical and fertilizer prices. Organic producers often have more leverage, because they usually grow a diverse range of crops and sell directly to processors. Plus, many Montana organic grain and pulse growers forward-contract their crops, meaning they lock in a per bushel price before even planting. Wicks and Givens often sell their organic crops for two to three times the price of conventionally grown ones.
A similar, likely smaller scale, tale is told in TasteMakers[1]. In this episode I think it was the beef supplier that said that he couldn't count on the commodity price of beef, but by contracting with the local artisan butcher prices were set for the year. Who knows what percent of his herd goes to that butcher.
How well can this model scale remains to be seen. Also, do not underestimate the meat cartels. They have deep pockets (and the cutthroat executives) and can go to the mattress far longer than small-time players.
Not trying to refute what you are saying because I honestly don't know, but this seems to contradict the original article. Of course sustainable/organic farming is going to struggle to compete in the normal international commodities market, but in the article it mentioned that organic grain could be sold directly for 2-3x the base commodity price. Seems like that kind of progressive price scale might make it not such a "terrible business".
This is a very underdeveloped space. The prairie ecosystem is all but extinct. Reviving it and getting tourist to come will be a real thing I believe.
Where has this happened?
The risk of land collapsing is probably greatest West of the Missouri river where historic rainfall is less and historic topsoil is less (Dakotas, Nebraska, Colorado, Kansas, etc).
But in that case the use of chemical seems to be unrelated?
>severe drought and a failure to apply dryland farming methods to prevent the aeolian processes (wind erosion) caused the [dust bowl] phenomenon
Pesticides destroy insect diversity, including predatory insects that keep pests in check. This is particularly problematic because pest populations tend to recover more quickly than predator populations, so if you stop spraying the problem comes back worse. Pesticides can also harm bird and amphibian populations, which play a role in pest control.
There are ways to prevent the desertification of the United States, and they don't involve PhDs and lobbying.
Organic ensures that the soil where your food came from had no prohibited substances (most synthetic fertilizers and pesticides) applied for three years. Chances are, if you are buying food from supermarkets without the organic label, your food probably came from a farm that uses unhealthy synthetic fertilizers that may attribute to health issues later down the road.
Unless you know your restaurant is cooking with organic food, they are probably not so it is best to eat out sparingly and learn to cook with your own delicious food with your organic ingredients.
If you want to step up your game, you could also buy organic clothes (aka clothes that came from plants / animal) that came from soil without prohibited substances. Your body is covered most of the day so it's better to be on the healthier side.
Obviously, the label "organic" doesn't mean you are getting the best because there is still alot of room for improvement. Organic still allows some form of pesticides and fertilizers and has next to nothing about the organic matter in your soil (which determine how nutritious your food would be).
The article mentions regenerative organic certification, which addresses the shortcomings for organic labels. If we, as consumers, demand for the highest quality food, it turns out to be good for the soil and the long term health of the earth too!
Hands down, if you have a space for your own garden or even pots at home, you could easily grow food that are more nutritious than any food you can find in a grocery store. Optimize for organic matter in your soil. The higher the organic matter, the more nutritious your food is. Most of the agricultural soil that grows food has about 3-6% organic matter, you can easily get it above 10% at home. So if you have time on your hands, you should try growing the food you eat most regularly at home.
[0] https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/nutrition-and-h...
Seems like minor improvement in a meal, it doesn't measure the cumulative effects of these minor differences every meal, over several years.
Organic is a scam for the natural is better crowd that occupies the human experience. A chemical is the same whether it is natural or synthetic. Plenty of natural substances are toxic. There is no difference in taste or nutrition between organic and non-organic, however GMO can be made more nutritious.
I didn't fail either. Our school focused on the theoretical and we never had practical applications of the knowledge.
> A chemical is the same whether it is natural or synthetic
For me the difference is naturally occurring and moderated via biological process of organisms vs extracted and manufactured chemicals. For example, you wouldn't find large amounts of Chlorpyrifos (used in herbicides) naturally anywhere in the world. It was mass produced for use in agriculture.
> GMO can be made more nutritious
If you are measuring specifically for say, vitamin A, you can engineer a crop to have higher concentrations of vitamin A than any other crop out there. So yes you are correct.