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.