You cannot farm soil for longer than 8-10 years without major nitrogen, and phosphorus replenishment. Actually lived in the sticks, and did farm labour in my childhood.
Controllable soils which are good at intaking, and retaining fertilizers are sustainable.
Bad soils with unusual soil chemistries can get depleted no matter how much fertiliser is dumped. That's true.
https://gimletmedia.com/shows/howtosaveaplanet/76hmbge/soil-...
They focus on two farmers, one a small-scale farmer in NY who started with the vision of a sustainable farm, and a commodity farmer in Minnesota who was looking for ways to improve yield. The Minnesota couple are, like your example, not at all "tree-huggers;" they're just people who want to survive. And what they found is that they can get more crops, for less money, while also limiting their exposure to potentially harmful fertilizers and pesticides.
They see a lot of resistance from their neighbors, because conventional farm knowledge is so ingrained in their culture. Running a farm is tricky, and experimenting can be the difference between profit and losing your shirt. There's just not much will to risk losing the land that's been in a family for generations on a quest to find a better way.
Feel like I'm missing something. State universities all over the nation have agricultural programs. Are they teaching stuff like cover crops? In other words, does this guy align with the conventional experts, or is he fringe, or does the industry have a schism?
Ag extensions mostly recommend the high input farming methods. What Gabe Brown practices is more than just cover crops.
Source: grew up in the sticks and worked on the family farm as a kid.
Natural nitrogen replenishment rate is microscopic. And it will do absolutely nothing about phosphate depletion.
Phosphate replenishment can be done by spreading manure or using fertilizers. It's a harder problem, but you have to work the problem.
Yes, and and the rate of replenishment, even if you dump many times more soy straw on the fields than you will harvest, will still be microscopic.
It plainly doesn't work for anybody, but people who only farm for themselves. It's a grandly inefficient use of a scarce resource — land.
Even if the soil will be squirming with nitrogen fixing organisms, and nothing else for many years, it's nitrogen intake will be like a single nitrate application, or less.
> Phosphate replenishment can be done by spreading manure
And catch god knows how much food borne diseases in the process. That's disgusting, and absurd in the 21st century.
Wouldn't a competing farm be more profitable to add fertilizers to the soil to replenish the loss nutrients, which means they can price out the crop rotation farm?
This is why regulations (and to combat their evasion by other countries, anti-dumping tariffs) are needed.
Can you buy good soil or is it part of the land and just too deep/not worth buying?
Good soil needs lots of dead plant stuff. Bad soil is clay or rocks.
https://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/what-are-s...
What I don't get is why the focus on fertilizers? There may be some wisdom on not spraying random poisons on the stuff you are going to eat¹, but the worst you can get with fertilizers is soil salinization, and this is perfectly avoidable on any place that isn't a desert already, and there are ways to avoid it on deserts too, just a bit more expensive.
1 - So there's a reason for a poison by poison discussion, the overall label of "organic" just poisons the discussion.
How do the crops you mention “gather phosphorous”? From where?
If you learn about the soil food web you will learn that most things we dump on farmland are made available to plants by bacteria and fungi. Unfortunately, those are the things that we kill by farming the way we do.