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Comment by lootsauce | Hacker News Reader

I have recently discovered Greg Judy on YT and have become fascinated with the possibilities of regenerative agriculture with grazing. He is producing organically with almost no inputs, no heavy equipment and it is growing better soil. Pretty impressive when you compare how many inputs are required with other methods. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPmYlRMuXo8

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The thing about food production is that intensive fertilizer use allows double-cropping (two+ harvests per year in one field, like corn-soy). Brazil uses this a lot. So if you switch to lower input 'regenerative' processes, you'll only get one harvest per year most likely. This means Brazil might stop exporting food, and a lot of countries rely heavily on those exports.

https://www.card.iastate.edu/ag_policy_review/article/?a=94

Becoming reliant on such intensive farming practices was a mistake, but here we are.

A lot of that grain is fed to cattle, what is interesting is that here is a way to raise cattle with almost no inputs and certainly no feeding of grains.

Making a mistake and becoming reliant on it doesn't mean you can't ever stop, but it does mean you need to change.

It also means that in order to stop, everyone involved needs to be convinced that a mistake was made in the first place.

I don't agree, because with that kind of thinking nobody has to ever stop. After all, convincing "everyone" is hard. Better to just start and do it over time, after folks see your solution works.

There is a stat going around which states that !if everyone went vegetarian we could free up 80% of the farm land", yet with comments like double cropping per year which we see in the UK that 80% figure should actually be a lot lower especially if fallow time was factored in.

So if fallow time was factored in, in reality we have probably already run out of farm land to grow livestock and are at or just exceeding the available farmland to grow nutritional crops!

It makes the MIT population collapse model prediction for a global collapse in society by 2040 seem more believable when looking at the lack of farmland this planet has to grow decent nutritional crops.

Wow! Awesome video! Thanks for the link!

This is the way. We need to go back to the way our ancestors did things. Factory farming will kill us eventually.

Our agrarian ancestors were highly food insecure, and often died in droves if a few harvests failed in a row they also achieved this feat with more land per person under cultivation. Factory farming ins't ideal, but it feeds far more people on far less land. We should improve our methods, take soil health into account, and conserve water and other resources but there's a baby in that bath water.

Land under cultivation in 1970 in the US was 464 million acres and is now about 384 million acres and production has nearly doubled. A lot of that 80 million acres has been re-wilded. We now have more tree cover than we have had for more than a century.

"there's a baby in that bath water"

I love this turn of phrase. I might steal it.

factory farming will kill us eventually. Not factory farming will kill us in 90 days, on average, since that's how much food storage we have as a species.

Yeah, speak for yourself. Foraging for berries and trying not to get mauled by a moose or bear? In case you weren’t aware, that’s how our ancestors did things.

Factory farming is the only reason your great grand parents survived childhood. It’s what allowed your parents to be born and live long enough to raise you.

An argument can be made that the internet and this website only exist because some really smart people weren’t worried about their next next meal every day and devoted their talents to making innovative technologies instead of foraging for food.

The most charitable word I can use to describe this comment is ignorant.

> Foraging for berries and trying not to get mauled by a moose or bear?

A Møøse once bit my sister... No realli! She was Karving her initials on the møøse with the sharpened end of an interspace tøøthbrush given her by Svenge - her brother-in-law - an Oslo dentist and star of many Norwegian møvies: "The Høt Hands of an Oslo Dentist", "Fillings of Passion", "The Huge Mølars of Horst Nordfink"...

—edit—

Much apologies I just can’t resist whenever someone mentions moose.

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