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Comment by photochemsyn | Hacker News Reader

A remarkable amount of the fertilizer applied via modern industrial farming practices is just wasted:

> "According to an average of 13 global databases from 10 data sources, in 2010, 161 teragrams of nitrogen were applied to agricultural crops, but only 73 teragrams of nitrogen made it to the harvested crop. A total of 86 teragrams of nitrogen was wasted, perhaps ending up in the water, air, or soil. The new research was published in the journal Nature Food in July."

https://eos.org/articles/index-suggests-that-half-of-nitroge...

Large-area applications by mechanized systems seem to be part of the problem, but that's also necessary to escape the subsitence agriculture trap, i.e. with such systems, it's not necessary for half or more of the human population to be working in the fields to grow food, it's more like 1 in 50 or 1 in 100.

The most promising solution might be AI + robots. If a robot could crawl up and down fields inspecting individual plants for nutrient status and applying small amounts of fertilizer as needed (also weeding and checking for pest infestations), it could cut fertilizer use in half while maintaining the same level of production - and perhaps eliminate the need for most herbicides and pesticides.

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There is so little organic matter in the topsoil due to modern farming practices and it gets worse every year. The result is soil that doesn't retain water, it just runs off. This means that irrigation has to be more and more frequent, and it means that fertilizer runs off (causing algal blooms etc) more than it percolates into the soil

Lots of places to read more about this issue and here's a start: https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/soil-degradation.html

I'm not sure why the general tone of HN seems to be that modern farming isn't changing at all.

Erosion has been on everyone's radar for decades. We went from plow -> till -> low till -> no till. Believe me, the folks who do this talk about plowing practices and cover crops. They also discuss GMO crops and the crazy legal restrictions around seed that come with it.

> Brown earth has a deep top layer where most of the nutrients are and biological activities take place. At around 20 centimetres deep

Fun fact, where I grew up there is over 10 feet of black dirt before you hit bedrock. A lot of the Midwestern US is like that. Even with all that runway those guys _still_ discuss erosion.

> I'm not sure why the general tone of HN seems to be that modern farming isn't changing at all.

Indeed. Perhaps somewhere out there is a parallel forum filled with farmers opining about computer programming, with equally inane remarks like "Have those programmers ever thought about making languages that translate into machine code instead of writing everything out as ones and zeros?"

> Sutor, ne ultra crepidam

If you are a shoemaker, be careful not to pass judgement beyond the making of shoes.

You can pass all the judgement you want. You should just be more ready for it to be inaccurate the further you get from things you practice.

Most of those forums (which I have visited) are in person; they’re almost always complaining about the proprietary locked down code. Frankly, farmers are a more libertarian bunch than programmers.

I think people see a sea of corn and don’t appreciate nuance.

The bigger issue that farmers are ignoring is water.

Farmers are well aware of water and the sustainablity of its sources. It just so happens that the equilibrium point they aim for is sustainability for them, not them & everybody else that happens to live downstream

The rate of depletion of large aquifers suggests that farmers don't care very much about sustainability of their water source. I think price is pretty much the only signal that farmers can afford to care about.

Depends where you live, but farmers around me are always monitoring everything — rainfall, water retention in the soil, aquifer levels, river and creek levels, etc.

That said, you’re right, they’re running a business. What they tend to do is use the smallest amount of water to produce good yields.

The only real thing a farmer can control are what they plant, when they water, when they fertilize and what they harvest (plus some maintenance, like weeding, but water isn’t impacted).

What farmers tend to do is water when necessary (between rain periods). They’ll also select different plants to grow based on price and watering schedule. That said; I’ve also seen farmers try to improve water retention (through tilling in cover crops and / or adding organic material). They’ve also built dams, etc to capture rain water and reduce erosion.

As far as I can tell, farmers do indeed try to conserve and utilize what they can. At the same time, water is being subsided by government and / or regulated. So places like California have a weird things like building farms in the desert. If the water prices were more free and people still build farms, I don’t see an issue frankly. They’re just using every drop before it gets to the sea. As the water depletes (ie too many farms) I imagine farmers will go elsewhere or change crops to become more efficient.

To be honest, I don’t see water management being too much of an issue at the moment. Plants have become increasingly drought resistant and we have the ability to breed and genetically modify them more so.

Water in western states is often a "use it or lose it" system, driving overuse even if the farmer knows better.

[1]https://www.propublica.org/article/killing-colorado-wasting-...

Water in the plains comes from a aquifer that will be depleted in my lifetime.

> The bigger issue that farmers are ignoring is water.

Ironically a statement without nuance. Western US farmers are ignoring water. This is not an issue in the East.

> The bigger issue that farmers are ignoring is water.

Of course, whether that's an issue depends on where you are in the world.

It's gonna be different in California vs Germany.

What they don't seem to be talking about is learning from indigenous farming communities who use things like diversity in crops and rotation to keep soil quality high. These problems were solved decades ago, just not by the industrial farming community

It's like everyone who's ever watched a YouTube video about planting a 3 sisters garden has an opinion for the people actually staking their livelihood on this now.

It is more about that fact that people talking about sustainable food production do not share many goals with commodity farmers exchanging corn and soybeans for as much cash as possible.

At least farmers have the humility to not go on the internet and smear you based on their opinion of your use of a document database over a relational database.

No kidding, and furthermore it's as if they don't take a second to consider scalability, yield, commodity-market efficiency, and labor-force.

"I've never farmed in my life, but I'm pretty sure I know more than the guy who has been doing it for decades and whose entire livelihood is based on it."

Or they've read up on anthropology, this is common knowledge in the field

Pretending indigenous communities “solved” this is a farce. If we switched to their methods 90% of the population would need to die because they don’t scale.

Not a good look to strawman things like this when you have sibling comments elsewhere in this thread saying the discussion needs more nuance.

I actually did napkin math awhile back comparing a particular 16th century indigenous agricultural yields with 20th century American agriculture [0]. The indigenous system came out favorably until the second half of the 20th century despite the limitations of hand tools and natural fertilizer. There's still a gap between that and current yields, but I think it's fair to point out that most advocates of these systems are actually arguing for a synthesis with modern technologies that allow them to scale rather than a complete rejection of modernity.

[0] https://reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/l4do8a/aztec_cor...

It’s not a strawman and there isn’t much nuance to what you yourself said. It’s not even close to being adequate.

Claiming that people are arguing for “synthesis” is just a weasel word escape route. Indigenous farming is completely inadequate and the parts that are useful have already been incorporated into modern farming.

What is it you think is still on the table for this “synthesis”?

Are you familiar with how traditional agricultural systems tend to work? They're vastly different than modern industrial agriculture in my personal experience. You won't find average farms in Central Valley or the midwest doing intercropping (especially anything besides strip intercropping), hyperlocal heirloom varieties, terracing, and complex crop rotations.

Tractors don't like intercropping or terraces, complex rotations are logistically difficult and expensive without a meaningful market to back them. Distributors also don't want your optimized hyperlocal varietals nor do farmers want to manage seed production, so most people buy commercial varieties.

You don't need to explain why these things are true because I already get it. It's beside the point here.

> Are you familiar with how traditional agricultural systems tend to work?

Yes, they produced terrible yields that would starve the current population.

There is a reason farmers’ markets are for the upper middle class. Anything that isn’t done at scale can’t feed 8 billion people. If it can’t be done with combines/tractors/etc, it’s fucking useless.

What percentage of indigenous people were involved in farming? 100%? It's less than 3% today.

So your solution is to give up your job and return to subsistence farming? Let us know how that works out.

No, my point is everyone would to do it that way.

Without experience, land, and modern industrial farming techniques? No, "everybody" would not start subsistence farming. There would be massive famines, billions would starve and die.

I think everyone’s on the same page.

But if you ignore the labour demands per mouth fed, the education needed, the amount of land to feed current western population to sustainable replacement level, the requirement to maintain advanced defence systems to prevent land being taken or otherwise destroyed, the issues with the global climate affecting whatever you do in this agrarian society, could it be done?

Interesting, coming just now from the thread talking about AGI, AI eliminating most jobs and thus necessitating UBI as a result.

Currently 1.3% of American jobs are farming.

Like the rest of industrial age development, farm automation has historically been built around treating everything uniformly (even distribution of seeds bred for easy harvest in evenly spaced rows evenly fertilizied with no rocks etc etc). Moving away from that introduces all kinds of complexity, mechanical problems, data problems, etc, which are not easy to solve even when you have historical existence proofs of potentially better ways to do things. It's happening though.

It introduces trying to sell your crops for 5x what your competitor is and no buyer is going to pay 5x for “sustainable” produce.

What I'm getting at is things like applying fertilizer based on estimated need from imaging data, using robots with lasers to kill weeds, mechanized intercropping, etc. Not something consumers will necessarily see any direct impact from but that improve the quality and economics of production.

> which are not easy to solve even when you have historical existence proofs of potentially better ways to do things. It's happening though.

What I am getting at is if these “proofs” existed, they would already be proven by lower priced goods at the market.

A historical existence proof of a system or technology working has essentially nothing to do with whether it's being practiced in industry today, and whether it's being practiced today has very little to do with the product or pricing you see when you for example stop by KFC to eat a piece of chicken that's largely created out of corn, soy, and methane. That's the beauty of capitalism and commodity markets, John Deere can roll out technology for say computer-controlled planting that improves efficiency and the dividends get spread across the value chain without everyone having to know about it or change what they're doing.

We do. Perhaps you may not recognize our lingo. For example, around here we humorously refer to wheat as 'poverty grass' because there is no money in growing it but recognize it as a necessity to keep in the rotation for the ecological health benefits it provides.

There’s money in growing it, but usually where nothing else profitably grows, which is a lot of places.

Hugely mechanized though which makes it work when you have enough crop land. But yeah, $/hectare yield is going to be low.

Crop rotation is a standard practice. Sugar beats cannot be grown year after year on the same plot.

Crop rotation seems to be pretty widespread. I remember as a kid learning about it and knowing I’d see different crops each year to help the soil for future harvests.

Crop diversity is great. And you also need lots of organic matter to go on top of the soil: to build life in the soil. that's much better than trying to duct tape the matter with fertilizer.

> Crop diversity is great.

Crop rotation has been standard practice my entire life. One of the many kickers though is soybeans are the fallback crop for really wet springs. Many crops need to be planted by a certain date or the growing season will be too short. Soybeans can "make up for lost time", so to speak. If your first planting gets flooded, or if it's too wet to get any crop in, you can wait until it's dry and toss in some soy to recoup some of the cost. Thing is soybeans use a lot of nitrogen.

> And you also need lots of organic matter

Manure spreaders are still a thing.

Many years ago one of my neighbours tried not rotating is crops. It worked out okay the first couple of years, but it wasn't long before his yields nosedived and within the five years he was bankrupt.

Why did your neighbour try?

Soy on soy (on soy, on soy...). Disease soon sets in if not regularly rotated.

My family's been farming corn on corn for 20+ years. Started strip-tilling in the 80's High residue fields help trap as much moisture as we can with limited irrigation capacity. Farmers have no choice but to take care of their soils to remain viable. And more than viable, be profitable as there are many people who depend on them both for their livelihoods as well as an ever demanding population with mouths to feed.

But why did they try it

Why did they try continuous corn? Seed technologies became available that allow it.

Trying to increase short-term profitability, no doubt. But I don't know for certain.

It’s strange that the article you linked doesn’t mention no-till farming. Farmers replace the plows on their tractors (which turn over the soil) with knives that have fertilizer injectors on the tips. Rather than plow, then spray fertilizer on to the surface, they inject fertilizer into the ground. After a few years, earthworms reestablish themselves and naturally aerate the soil.

This can be combined with other (well established, commercially available) precision agriculture techniques to minimize irrigation and fertilizer waste.

The big problem is the up front cost of replacing tractor implements, and training labor.

Anyway, this is much easier than agroforestry, building glass hydroponics towers, etc.

Thanks I was looking for a youtube video that I couldn't find so I grabbed the first article I saw that explained that problem well. As for solutions, you are right no-till is a big one (the main one?) and is worth reading about elsewhere

Yup, most gardening books start off talking about humus, “dark, organic material that forms in soil when plant and animal matter decays.”

Industrial farms are very far away from the foundations of healthy soil, and they need copious amounts of fertilizer and water to compensate.

The food produced is less nutritious and less sustainable as a result.

Consider investing in a local CSA if you have the opportunity. It’s a fantastic way to support locally sustainable agriculture.

CSAs where I live are a luxury good for a few people to feel better about themselves. You pay in much more than you get back (compared to a grocery store), and what you get is geared towards variety to make it more appealing. As such, you get enough of any particular veg for one or two meals, at a cost that is wildly expensive for most people. I tried one summer, and it was cute but replaced approximately 0% of our grocery bill.

Just to throw out some numbers, I pay $27/box for my fruit n' veg mix, which I could mostly replicate for maybe $15-20 at the grocery store. But the freshness can't be beat, and I think it's fun to see what I can do with whatever shows up. It's definitely not replacing my entire grocery bill, of course, but I do think it is worth it.

That' not bad. Where I am for $45, you get a big bad of lettuce, a couple of potatoes and an onion. Last years was so disappointed that we didn't renew. Ten years ago the same CSA was $600 for the season, 4 months, and it was a good sized bag with a pretty nice selection of produce. Granted I think every bag included some beets but by the middle of the season I really liked beets so it was a plus. Now it jut seems to be a better deal to go to the farmers market and get whatever looks good.

I guess it depends on your goals. It will never be as affordable as the grocery store as the economies of scale aren't there. The idea is to provide reliable revenue to a local farm in exchange for high quality produce produced in a sustainable way. It doesn't make me feel particularly "better about myself" to connect with the family that provides us this service, but I do like their mission, and I want them to be successful, so in my case it's worth it. Also, I would imagine pricing varies wildly from one region to the next, so we may be comparing apples to oranges (or swiss chard for that matter).

Farmers mix superabsorbent polymers in the soil to improve water retention.

https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Factory-Price-Wholesa...

This sounds like it's begging for an article in 20 years about "Why we never should have used superabsorbent polymers in agriculture".

Won't these things get broken apart after years of working the ground? Won't they potentially contaminate other areas by traveling downstream or being blown by the wind?

> 161 teragrams of nitrogen were applied to agricultural crops, but only 73 teragrams of nitrogen made it to the harvested crop

Getting ~half of the nitrogen from the fertilizer into the harvest seems awfully impressive to me. There are so many ways for nitrogen to escape - into runoff, broken down back into the atmosphere, used to grow weeds and non-productive parts of the plant, etc.

This kind of robot are already being developed and tested.

See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sV0cR_Nhac0 Sniper robot treats 500k plants per hour with 95% less chemicals | Challengers

> A remarkable amount of the fertilizer applied via modern industrial farming practices is just wasted:

Hmm, the fact that there is waste totally unsurprising given some of nitrogen deliverey methods (like anhydrous ammonia). But those numbers are really high.

> water, air, or soil

Ah, but if it's still in the soil that could probably account for a big chunk of it that would eventually get used

While it's cool and all to want to work on AI+Robots, because obviously that's where this thought is coming from because who wants to actually work in the fields am I right?\s I think it's more important to think about market fit and margins of farming, in what world is introducing a complex, expensive machine to an already thin margin industry a practical solution? The reason it's inefficient and wasteful isn't because "they're some hicks who need the righteous engineer to come and save them with their brilliance" its because its fast and cheap

> in what world is introducing a complex, expensive machine to an already thin margin industry a practical solution

In the world where it is cheaper than the rising price of fertilizer.

The robots (including maintenance) would also have to be cheaper than sensors and existing automated tractors.

I’m not willing to say it is impossible, but it would be extremely difficult to achieve.

Agree. Not sure if the OP checked the price of modern farm equipment lately. I’m pretty sure $500K for certain things is not uncommon.

Modern industrial-scale farming equipment is already highly engineered. Adding features that allowed for more precise care of individual plants would be an extension of existing technology, not something radically new. Take a look at modern combine harvesters, for example:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2LnkKgwpOE

This is also a sector that would benefit from electrification, incidentally.

Of course, the fossil fuel and petrochemical sector won't like being cut out of the agriculture business to any extent, so there's that kind of resistance to such changes.

What type of energy density is needed to run a combine at harvest time 24/7 from battery or (green) hydrogen?

Yes, but fast and cheap is temporary (and the end result is a lot of pain).

This is a problem that requires structural investment from government (the populace) but once done, the return on investment seems very high.

How do you think the Netherlands are the second leading agricultural exporter in the world right now? Short answer - very efficient greenhouses.

To get an idea of just how efficient - they use ~4 to 9 liters of water per pound of tomatoes produced. The world average is 60 liters per pound of tomatoes. Not the high end - the AVERAGE.

In places where you have enough water, that doesn't sound like a problem.

It's not like the water is lost forever. (In those places where you have enough water, and don't take it out of an ancient non-replenishing aquifer or so.)

Sure, but water is hardly the only input they're optimizing for.

They're reducing the need for pesticides and fungicides by controlling the ambient environment around the plants.

Reducing the need for fertilizers by optimizing growing conditions and limiting runoff and waste.

Basically - the attitude there has been: "Build the right environment for the plant" followed by a focus on efficient (and therefor cost effective) inputs.

We aren't building the right environment, we're just dumping inputs (pesticides, fungicides, fertilizers, water, etc) on the growing area and calling it a day.

Which is cheap on the up front capital costs, but much more expensive over the long term, as you end up needing consistently more inputs over a long period of time.

---

Basically - I'm arguing that the up front capital costs likely are worth the returns to you get in efficiency, but farmers in the US are not incentivized to make those investments. Or perhaps more realistically - can't afford those investments on their current operating margins. Which is why we likely will want government programs focused on this.

> They're reducing the need for pesticides and fungicides by controlling the ambient environment around the plants.

Not just the ambient environment. When you go soilless through hydroponics, you eliminate a lot of soil borne disease issues. Even soil control through pots instead of direct ground contact prevents a lot of problems wiggling around.

Wow that is astounding.

AI robots that do companion planting with robots. There's a free idea for you. Harvesting would not work with combine harvesters. You'd have to harvest corn planted with beans like you were picking strawberries, but with robots, maybe it's doable.

Maybe, but that's a lot of degrees of freedom of movement and machine vision to use "3 sisters" farming techniques, interplanting works because of the system of moisture, structure, and nitrogen fixation that each unit provides. Not saying it's not a good system/cool project idea.

Well, that explains why our water is so high in nitrates. I've been looking into our local water supply. Out of the over 200 contaminants, the one that exceeds the EWG's limit by the most margin is nitrates which is said to come from fertilizer run off.

A lot of that can be from intensive animal farming.

Really bad in New Zealand with all the dairy production.

> A remarkable amount of the fertilizer applied via modern industrial farming practices is just wasted

You can also cut out most of the nitrogen just by using Plant Growth Promoting Bacteria (e.g. azospirillum), but most US farmers don't do that. Without PGPBs, most of the plant's energy is wasted just trying to uptake the nitrogen from the soil. Whereas the with the bacteria, not only do the bacteria produce the nitrogen themselves, but they also do all the work of feeding it to your plants so they can spend their energy growing and producing food instead.

> but most US farmers don't do that

Why?

Is it not cost-effective?

> Is it not cost-effective?

A quick Googling of the literature (more general terms seems to be bioinoculant and biofertilizer) suggests exactly that. There are industrial products out there for large-scale inoculation, but manufacture, packaging, shipping, and application of bioinoculants can require rather sophisticated carriers, whether in solid, liquid, or polymer form; or engineering more easily accommodated bacteria or fungus. It seems it's still very early days for industrial-scale products, notwithstanding that the research and perhaps even some products go back decades.

I'd say the majority of that ends up in the sea, causing algae blooms and killing life for miles around. So worse than wasted.

Surely there is more farm land away from the sea than adjacent to it. How does for example fertilizer from here[1] or here[2] end up at sea?

[1] https://goo.gl/maps/Pm4JGesJZ9xELrBB8 [2] https://goo.gl/maps/rzGttw1gMchSWXREA

For the US, there's a nice app where you can follow the watershed path: https://river-runner.samlearner.com/

Edit, direct link to the pinpoint: https://river-runner.samlearner.com/?lng=-98.92662834458773&...

[1] - down the Arkansas river to the Mississippi, and right out to sea.

[2] - down the Danube, and right out to sea.

That still dozens, if not hundreds of kilometers the fertilizer somehow needs to walk.

It doesn't walk, it flows - sometimes above ground, sometimes under - to the nearest tiny gully, creek, stream, spring, etc., with very few exceptions.

The network for the USA: https://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2016/10/21/16/3995911F000005...

It's 14km (8.8mi) from your pinpoint to the Arkansas, from there it's about as straight of a shot toward the gulf of mexico as you can get (via the Mississippi).

It's water soluble.

Sure, but why is it pulled sideways and not down, and why does it move toward the river of all directions it could move?

For exactly the same reason the river exists in the first place. Why does the water flow to the ocean and not just sink into the ground?

A lot of it does sink into the ground though. Thats how aquifiers replenish.

I think the percentage of fertilizer in the groundwater would reach an equilibrium where just as much is going out as is coming in.

Water from shallow aquifers also flows into nearby rivers.

Some water is pulled down (along with the half of the fertilizer that's actually used), the rest is literally washed away because the soil can't absorb the amount of water being dropped on it. All the water that's flowing over the ground ends up in rivers (it's the reason they exist in the first place).

Some of it does I am sure, where some will be consumed by soil bacteria. Lots of fertilizers are salts as well and even if it goes into the soil, rain will redissolve it where it will eventually make its way to rivers.

There's very few places where water does not eventually end up in the sea.

Though if it seeps into the groundwater it may take a geological amount of time.

The Mississippi and Rhine Rivers

Might be the Danube and not the Rhine in the second example. (Not that it matters.)

Probably right, good call

A lot also ends up in the groundwater. It just takes a couple of decades to reach it.

45% conversion to crop is actually amazing and way higher than I thought it would be.

You'd never be able to get it to 100% just based on thermodynamics alone. It takes a lot of energy to move nutrients from an area of low concentration (the soil) to an area of high concentration (the plant).

Just making up number here, but if a plant needed 10 grams of nitrogen, but the soil contained only 50 mg at any given time (but was constantly replenished), plant growth and yield would suffer considerably - despite the fact that a sufficient supply is available over time. You need to have an excess supply of nutrients available to maximize growth.

It's similar to water - many plants will die in soil that has a low level of moisture. The water is there, the plant just doesn't have the capacity to actually pull in enough to sustain life.

Idea: Take some clay, form and burn a repository for nitrogen rich water, that can be reached by roots, but not by rainwater, bury them beneath the field, resupply it via a feed line.

Now watch roots and heavy tractors ruin that brilliant plan.

Is this a problem exclusive to outdoor farms, or would vertical/indoor farming help this?

Hydroponics usually measure the nutrients in the water and only add when needed. Indoor farming with soil beds can adopt water recycling too but there's no requirement to.

If you do greenhouse farming, the problem is more explicit.

(Though in theory you could still just let your wastewater drain into the ground, and have the same problem.)

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