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Comment by mathgladiator | Hacker News Reader

The key criticism is that it yields less, so it doesn't scale. Furthermore, it generally lacks uniformity, so you can't automate either.

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Crops can be integrated and still planted and harvested mechanically. Planting differing height crops or same height crops with different seed sizes you can still use machines and harvest multiple crops from the same time/land.

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.

Better quality only helps if customers are willing to pay more. A lot of crops are sold through middlemen as undifferentiated commodities.

If there were a way to differentiate higher quality food in the store it doesn't need to cost more. People will prefer the higher quality produce and the low quality producers will need to adapt or die.

Higher quality food should cost more - it costs more to produce.

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.

Produce grown regeneratively doesnt cost more to produce mostly because of the lessened or eliminated chemical inputs. That doesnt mean that regenerative farmers arent getting a premium for their product. But, that is more the demand warrants a premium than a higher cost to produce.

Customers do pay more for organic food and non-GMO food that's certified.

American farms can be truely vast, so any statement on averages is swayed by this. The article says they are planting 4,500 acres this year. When you look up average US farm sizes it is hard to know what to compare it to as monocropping or single breed farming seem to be the standard. However you do it, the farm planting is a lot smaller than 4500 acres.

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...

Would disagree with the automated comment. Most thing in regenerative ag are just as automated as conventional ag, unless you're thinking of something specific?

I'm probably thinking along the lines of perma-culture and bio-mimicry where things are all mixed up in a more natural way. Essentially, you don't have giant machines since there are too many edge cases.

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