"Dirt to Soil" by Gabe Brown might start getting more popular. He started investigating no-till, etc. after several successive years of crop failures and thus not being able to afford the normal inputs for industrial farming.
But if you use cover crops and especially rotate out of alfalfa you can safely reduce nitrogen use because of the carryover of nitrogen in the soil.
This is the most relevant quote I could find on his website. I can guess that some may quibble over the "chemical" modifier in front of fertilizer, but I remember his book going more into discussing the reduction in fertilizer use, so I'd start there if you are curious.
> The misuse of chemical inputs (pesticides, chemical fertilizer and herbicides) is also detrimental to soil life. For this reason we do not use synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, fungicides, GMOs, and glyphosate. We are working hard to eliminate the use of herbicide. http://brownsranch.us/soil-health/
And I love RED Gardens in Ireland!
Composting and this kind of organic farming is a nice boutique niche, but realistically it would be unable to sustain the food requirements of the world without being prohibitively expensive. Fertilizers based on petroleum and other mined minerals is the only options for that.
There are other ways to solve the problems currently solved by chemical inputs. And there are many examples of functional biodynamic organic farming systems all over the world that suggest we can scale it if we want to. We’ve just been addicted to cheap fertilizer.
It’s interesting to think about where the money goes in our society. Let’s say we never broke up unions in the USA, and wages rose along with productivity instead of stagnating after 1980. Then we could be using more expensive farming methods, which make healthier communities, and yet people would be able to afford it. This is perhaps more similar to how things are done in France, for example.
There’s a lot that goes in to making any commodity relatively cheap or expensive. I think probably healthy soils and healthy foods are worth paying more, but we should make sure our economy functions in a way that everyone can afford food, of course.
What is one way?
> And there are many examples of functional biodynamic organic farming systems all over the world that suggest we can scale it if we want to. We’ve just been addicted to cheap fertilizer.
People need food to live and lots of people don't have much money. It's very easy to say we're addicted to cheap fertilizer when you can afford to pay premiums for your biodynamic organic food. Billions of people do not have that privilege.
As far as people’s ability to pay, you seem to have glossed over my section where I point out that it is policy decisions, not some natural occurrence, that leaves so many unable to pay more. This is true both for within the United States where I live, and for the world at large. Whether or not people can afford higher food prices is something we have control over. We could ease restrictions on collective bargaining and unions could petition for their wages to increase. You may think that is a bad idea, but nonetheless you’d have to agree that is a policy decision that could result in higher wages. And so, whether or not “we” can afford to buy more expensive food is not out of our control.
But I think the nutrient input will still be required in the form of petroleum and mineral based fertilizers though because alternatives to that I think are not only very costly, probably much more than total machinery and fuel costs now (which are roughly on-par with fertilizer inputs of the cheap stuff today), so I don't know if you could make up for the entire cost difference. If you did with your machines, I guess you would still get people wanting the cost savings of cheap fertlizers. I also don't know if they would scale enough to provide enough food.
So ideally you would replace chemical intensive farming with regenerative organic. Regenerative organic does require more hand labor. What I am saying is that robots could reduce the labor requirement, making it easier to scale regenerative organic. There are a whole host of benefits to this process, cost is not the only concern. In fact people are willing to pay more for their products.
See this 5 part lecture if you want to understand the process I am talking about end to end. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0hBUOdv2vn8
I'm not sure what neutral means here, but if it means adding or removing something from the system then sure. Growing and harvest is not neutral either, which is why you need other not-neutral processes to replenish what was depleted. This is not negotiable whether it's compost or nitrogen fixing bacteria or whatever.
> Adding fertilizer destroys the biodiversity of the soil leading to sicker plants and the need for even more additives in the form of pesticides and fungicides to stave off problems caused by unhealthy soils.
Modern farming techniques absolutely cause a holocaust of life, wiping out as much animal, plant, fungus, and other life as possible while leaving the crop. It's also the most cost effective way to mass produce food crops.
> So ideally you would replace chemical intensive farming with regenerative organic. Regenerative organic does require more hand labor. What I am saying is that robots could reduce the labor requirement, making it easier to scale regenerative organic. There are a whole host of benefits to this process, cost is not the only concern. In fact people are willing to pay more for their products.
Regenerative organic does not avoid the need for the nutrient inputs. That's the thing. It replaces fertilizers with compost and nitrogen fixing, but that's not free and if you scale it up to meet global food production it would probably be much more expensive. Nitrogen for example takes a lot longer to fix than you can apply fertilizer so you would need more land to achieve the same rate of nitrogen use by crops. Compost itself has nowhere near the nutrient density of fertilizers and would become scarce. Before the days of intensive agriculture and before most pesticide and herbicide chemicals and machinery, back when people had to use compost and legumes and things to get nitrogen into soil, guano become one of the biggest industries in the world because of how much more productive it was than those prior techniques. It resulted in such big efficiency gains, that the huge costs of running guano mining operations on remote islands and sending fleets of wooden sailing ships across vast oceans to ship the product were more than covered by the cost advantages at the farm.
If I was president I'd ask Gabe Brown to run USDA.
Despite going around making presentations for years, it is still a hard sell to farmers.
Examples (and I am paraphrasing not quoting):
"What if my crop goes bad? Or hail? How do I deal with pests?" "Polycropping means that you'll have some kind of crop even if some of them don't do well, or the market crashes on one of them"
"I can't run my farm and make a profit without the subsidies" "I was able to get off of subsidies and my farm is more profitable and resilient than it had been before."
"I'd still have to get manure from somewhere and prices will go up" "I run a livestock operation on the fallow fields. They help fertilize the fields until I put crops back on them. I sell both crops and livestock."
And so on.
No till is standard farming practice these days. You can't get government subsides in many cases if you do traditional tilling. (there are other types of tilling allowed - they are much better for the soil)
https://www.atnesa.org/contil/contil-shetto-indigenous.pdf
If folks thought notill is so revolutionary, wait 'til they see perennial food forests and agroforestry. Those also have indigenous roots.
Okay, what were their yields per acre? Or is the plan to go back to population levels of indigenous people?
“What are the yield numbers for practice X?”
“How can we maximize yields?”
“How can we supply population size Y?”
“How do we grow food to standards that are sellable in grocery markets?”
“How can we keep grown produce fresh enough to transport them thousands of miles away?”
In contrast to things like:
“What makes for a healthy ecosystem (which includes plants, animals, fungi, and humans)?” (A farm as an ecosystem rather than a machine that produces food)
“How do we incorporate waste as an input to another living system within the ecosystem?”
“What can we grow locally that would support the community and reduce dependency on long-haul transported food?”
“What are the feedback cycles in our ecosystem and how can I design in a way to add more of such processes?”
“What small changes I can make to those feedback cycles that would create larger effects in the ecosystem?”
“What yields are we not incorporating into the design of our ecosystem?”
“How can I turn the margins into productive land?”
I don't know what kind of crowd that "Sustainable Agriculture's annual symposium" pulls but I found the number of people in the audience quite small unfortunately.
Edit: He's also farming on 16" of rain a year. If he can do it, so can you.
Most of the "family farms" have been driven out of business or have had to scale up to industrial levels (thus becoming part of the problem).
How does "Regenerative Agriculture" address the scaling problem?
I just wanted to mention (based on the book only, I don't know that much about him otherwise but would like to tour his operation this summer) that his approach is so much more than no-till, which itself I would say is fairly well known. An insane variety of cover crops, livestock grazing, and business strategy (his son and direct to consumer aspects) are the most interesting parts of what he does.