Building on soil in Big Sandy: Regenerative organic farming in rural Montana

When something's brand new like no-till was in the eighties and precision ag in the nineties farmers often get out ahead of the ag schools. No-till isn't exactly new but perhaps some of the Montana variations happen to be?

Petrochemical agriculture is not very sophisticated. It can solve simple problems with few moving parts. Genetic engineering has started to ask more complex questions but at the end of the day we are still just getting past surface concerns.

Where science and technology might help is with telemetry, but only if everyone prints out Goodhart’s Law and puts it over the door, on the fridge, the microwave, the coffee machine, etc.

Data filtration is another thing. We think if invasiveness as a sort of score for a plant, but that’s an average of overall behavior. They are both harder and easier to deal with than we make it sound. Each plant is vulnerable during some part of its lifecycle, and or in certain biomes. It’s much easier to “take them out” during this window. But they’re patient. If you miss the window then you have a bigger problem next year. As a human my ability to juggle all of these concerns is somewhat limited, and a little detection and scheduling would go a long way toward helping me keep these problems small.

Transgenic watermelons aren’t a thing and the markets for these like organic.

Basically a bunch of progressive kinds of people are moving to Montana to grow fancy food and like to get pieces written to show off their virtue. They’re not entirely wrong but also… eh it’s all a little overdone.

American farmers aren't very productive because they don't have to be. They get $85 billion a year in all manner of federal programs, and that doesn't even start to cover protectionist trade policies.

We pay farmers to not grow anything to artificially inflate the cost of produce. We did that because the old system generated outrage - namely, the federal government buying produce that it would ship to a warehouse (which of course the government didn't own or operate itself, so we paid for that as well) and then just let it rot. Bad optics, you see.

So now we just pay them to not do anything at all, because that's more efficient. Except we still have the federal govnerment buying up billions in food and letting it spoil.

Meanwhile, we have millions of kids who go to school hungry. And whenever anyone suggests more federal spending to fix that, guess who stands up and shouts about it the loudest? That's right, the congressional reps from midwestern states where they believe in capitalism and none of that commie handout shit.