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Comment by dmos62 | Hacker News Reader

Side question: any sign of at least borderline-viable farming techniques without pesticides or herbicides? By viable I mean, as a complete replacement for current agriculture.

I know next to nothing about this, but have had some shower thoughts that a different agriculture system could be viable if we increased our expectations for farming's labour intensity. I probably got the idea from permaculture videos, because they seem to get impressive results, but it also requires some skill and a lot of work.

I'm half-expecting a hail of downvotes, but maybe I'll find other people that have been wondering the same.

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If we're willing to accept higher labor intensiveness, there's plenty of very realistic farming techniques that could be reintroduced. For example:

- Off-season cover crops like legumes, etc both can fix nitrogen and out-compete weeds.

- Intercropping, where different crops are planted in proximity (like alternating rows). This is less susceptible to pests and disease than monocultures, and the plants can be chosen to mutually enhance each other's fitness.

In general, a lot of these techniques also give a healthier ecosystem, with more pollinators and predators of pests. The yields can be excellent and sustainable, but it is more labor. However, there's plenty of bullshit jobs[0] out there, and many people in them might find this kind of work more meaningful. I think a future society would do well to allocate labor with these goals in mind.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs

>If we're willing to accept higher labor intensiveness

In general will translate to

>If we're willing to accept higher costs

We may be willing to accept the first one, but I am absolutely not convinced of the second.

Florida farm workers got McDonald's to agree to paying a penny per pound extra for tomatoes where the penny was to go directly to the farm workers' wages. This resulted in a 71% increase in farm worker pay.

It appears that labor costs are not a significant portion of the price of produce. Of course, this would not apply if automated harvesting had to be replaced by manual labor.

https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSN0933192520070409

Current industrial agriculture isn't physically sustainable in the long run for many reasons (soil loss, depleted aquifers, salinity), so the status-quo isn't a long-term option. Either we figure out how to feed billions of people sustainably, or things will get rather unpleasant in the future.

I don't disagree with you though.

The problem with the word “costs” is that it’s too easy to conflate this with money, and just think it means spending more of an abstract and essentially unlimited resource (money).

The reality is that it means we will HAVE LESS STUFF, food or otherwise, because we are increasing the effort required to generate a unit of food.

I think this is the $10B question!

It would seem that altermatives which are much more friendly to the planet involve lower yields but of arguably higher quality.

This would mean food would be more expensive, although most western nations eat too much anyway and should appreciate that something as simple as food isn't cheap by definition, especially when we are effectively paying someone else to do all the work.

The other big question is about eating meat (or at least as much meat as we do) since if we could reduce wasted land for animals, we would have more space to grow crops which could make up the shortfall of the lower yields.

There is soooo much land that cows graze on that can't really produce crops.

Space isn't an issue caused by meat consumption. Further cows often eat the parts of crops we won't like corn stalks.

Cows and other ruminants are kind of miracles and absolutely need to be part of our food supply.

Literally all of societal progress is built on the back of "that thing we used to spend a bunch of time/money on, well we made it cheap and can now redirect that productivity and resources elsewhere" for every conceivable value of "thing", food, clothes, written communication, transportation, energy, consumer junk.

What you are arguing for is a non-starter. Society will not accept higher costs for any duration of time. Some route around the problem that is driving up prices will be found.

There are several companies that are using machines with computer vision to identify weeds and then either squirt a tiny amount of herbicide (Blue River/John Deere) onto them, or burn them with a laser (Carbon Robotics, others).

Or flamethrower https://hackaday.com/2021/09/11/dont-sleep-on-the-lawn-there...

Farming is a competition between pests, weather, consumer demands for perfect looking fruit, prices undercut by places with less regulation (or more subsidies), and your actual skill in caring for the farm. It’s a real gamble every year for farmers. This at baseline would raise the costs of food as you’d get less crops per acre or end up seeing retailers go for vendors abroad who still use the chemical and made a larger crop.

Yes: https://www.gothamgreens.com/.

They grow foods in hydroponic warehouses with no soil and no pesticides. You can find them in Whole Foods.

I'm a huge fan of urban farming like this.

I wonder what the energy budget look like for an operation like that. The argument against urban farming is that it is energy intesive and not really space efficient if you include the space needed for the extra energy production.

It would be interesting to see a comparison with conventional farming where the energy to produce fertilizer was included.

They aren't growing significant calories and hydroponics do not currently have the ability to do so in a way that competes with soil cropping

Thats cool but you probably need ~2000 calories a day which would require chewing through 28 pounds of lettuce(70 kcal/lb) which ain't easy.

More than borderline, there are many many examples these days of people practicing forms of ecologically-informed agriculture that match or exceed the yields of destructive systems and methods.

When I first heard about Permaculture in the late 80's it was still pretty obscure, and regenerative agriculture in general was "hippie-dippy". Nowadays there are thousand of projects with videos on the youtube, and people are practicing ecologically harmonious farming all over the world. See especially Gabe Brown's talk linked below, he's not replacing current agriculture, just updating it with scientifically-grounded techniques that improve the volume and vitality of his topsoil while being more profitable.

Quoting from some notes I've been keeping:

There's the "Grow Biointensive" method which is designed to provide a complete diet in a small space while also building soil and fertility. They have been dialing it in for forty years and now have a turn-key system that is implemented and functioning all over the world.

=> http://growbiointensive.org/ Grow Biointensive

(These folks are also selling their system, but they also have e.g. manuals you can download for free. I find their site curiously hard to use.)

## Permaculture

Permaculture could be called "applied ecology" (with a kind of hippie spin.) and a similar school (or parallel evolution) called "Syntropic" Agriculture. Both of these systems aim to mimic natural ecosystems to create "food forests" that produce crops year-round without inputs (no fertilizer, no irrigation.) The process takes 5-15 years or so but then is self-sustaining and regenerative.

For Permaculture I find Toby Hemenway's (RIP) videos very good:

=> https://tobyhemenway.com/videos/how-permaculture-can-save-hu...

=> https://tobyhemenway.com/videos/redesigning-civilization-wit...

There's a very lively and civil forum at

=> https://permies.com/forums

## Syntropic agriculture

=> https://agendagotsch.com/en/what-is-syntropic-farming/ Syntropic agriculture

(FWIW, I find Gotsch's writing (in English) to be impenetrable, even though I pretty much know what he's doing. Anyway, his results are incontrovertable.)

I'm afraid I don't have a good link in re: Food Forests and eco-mimetic agriculture yet. This "Plant Abundance" fellow's youtube channel might be a good place to start, in any event it's a great example:

=> https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEFpzAuyFlLzshQR4_dkCsQ "Plant Abundance" (youtube)

## Growing Power

If you really wanted to maximize food production and aren't afraid of building insfrastucture (like greenhouses and fish tanks) there's the (sadly now defunct) *Growing Power* model:

=> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growing_Power

=> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vs7BG4lH3m4

=> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jV9CCxdkOng

They used an integrated greenhouse/aquaculture/compost system to produce massive amounts of food right through Milwaukee winters.

## Regenerative Agriculture

Then there is the whole field (no pun intended) of *Regenerative agriculture*, e.g.:

=> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUmIdq0D6-A "Treating the Farm as an Ecosystem with Gabe Brown Part 1, The 5 Tenets of Soil Health" (youtube)

=> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXRNF_1X2fU "Symphony Of The Soil" Official Trailer (youtube)

This is very much non-hippie, very much grounded in (often cutting-edge) science (ecology, microbiology, etc.) and ecologically and economically superior to artificial methods (e.g. Brown makes money. It's actually weird that more people aren't adopting these methods faster. You make more money, have fewer expenses, and your topsoil builds up year-on-year rather than washing away in erosion.)

## Miyawaki method

For regenerating native forests, not agriculture per se.

=> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akira_Miyawaki

That's exactly what I was interested in. Thanks for the hand-picked recommendations!

Cheers! I'm working up a kind of catalog or directory of "ecological living". It really seems like we have all the solutions, we just need to "get 'er done!"

Aquaculture

You can't run the corporate governance system on permaculture! People managing a small plot of land and getting an abundant amount of clean, good food won't fly.

What we need are more massive farms, with just one crop, roundup ready seeds, imported fertiliser, etc - all owned by charitable (tax-free!) billionaire foundations for the betterment of us all! Get with the program!

PS I'm being downvoted - but what's the problem? Bill Gates "owns less than 1 percent of the nation’s total farmland" (from https://nypost.com/2022/06/30/bill-gates-purchase-of-north-d...).

I believe you are on target. Small plots of land are on average far more productive per acre than large mono cropping plantations.

"Dacha gardening accounts for about 3% of the arable land used in agriculture, but grows an astounding 50% by value of the food eaten by Russians." (from https://smallfarmersjournal.com/russian-dacha-gardens)

> Small plots of land are on average far more productive per acre than large mono cropping plantations.

the bottleneck is not exactly land, but cost, manpower, etc. that's why industrial farming dominates the food and feedstock sectors.

You are right on target however I am not seeing people here understanding that the tight spot is not land but manpower.

It seems to me that people think that if the first farm is more efficient in converting labor, dollars and cheap fuel into food than the second farm, then the first is the most efficient farm across all categories including land use. When one of the pieces changes (for instance fuel costs) then the formula needs to be revisited.

Realizing that personal, scientific and careful management of land yields more food per acre without agri chemical products is an important first step to thinking about the picture even if the low cost of fuel is a current reality.

Yeah, people are just completely inoculated against all forms of nuance :D

What I think is important to add to that equation is some dynamism of those prices/costs. Because even though fuel (fertilizer) costs are rising now, it's unlikely that they'll stay high, and changing from one form of industrial scale agriculture to some other is likely even more costly (than bearing years of high fuel costs).

One quite possible scenario is that if fossil fuel use falls so much that production becomes so uneconomic that prices still rise (or remain relatively high).

Of course, eventually as with everything that is eaten by technological progress it's likely that we'll start using a lot more energy (just not from burning fossil fuel) to have better controlled production. (Call it 'vertical farming', but it might look completely different, maybe big domes or ... who knows.)

that isn't a fair comparison though. Small farms grow high value crops that need a lot of labor, large farms that grow the same crops are even more productive (not by much though), except that there isn't enough demand to support a large farm growing those crops. There is a large demand for corn, so a lot of large farms grow it.

"You can't run the corporate governance system on permaculture! People managing a small plot of land and getting an abundant amount of clean, good food won't fly."

I have seen quite some permaculture farms, but abundance of food I have never wittnessed, compared to conventional (organic) farming. Rather big talks and low yield.

Don't get me wrong, I believe we could feed the world without the need of mass scale poison, but not while blinded by dogma.

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