Comment by micah63 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by micah63 | Hacker News Reader

No till drilling is the ultimate solution because you get ultra productive land without disrupting the soil. It's an incredible advancement in industrial tractor PTO accessories.

Another huge win that a lot of people are not aware of is using mobile electric fences to quickly move cows through fields. They eat, poop, stomp and move on. That adds an incredible amount of fertility into the ground without needing fertilizer.

For those interested in industrial production of healthy food with healthy soil (+18 inches of rich organic porous soil with trillions of cool characters, diversity and nutrient sharing super highways), check out "Kiss the Ground" on netflix (great intro to soil), then the "The littlest big farm" on netflix (see a 7 year transformation from barren monoculture hydrophobic dirt to rich soil farming in California), then check out youtube for Gabe Brown (soil expert), Joel Salatin (regenerative mobile cheap farming nut), Richard Perkins (regenerative farming expert), and Allan Savory (holistic management, how animals help soil).

> No till drilling is the ultimate solution

What you state isnt far off, as tractors have got bigger so the plough cuts deeper and the soil erosion increases.

When horses pulled ploughs, they didnt cut too deep into the soil so that white root mass you find in soil which hasnt been dug over in years is not far from the surface, but now you have to dig several inches deep before you hit any root mass of sorts, when todays tractors have been over it. Its the root mass which helps reduce the soil erosion, but also have plenty of small ponds and lakes also keep the water table up.

Whats also interesting, there is only one agricultural machinery manufacturer that I know of who is R&D'ing smaller equipment to make into robots, and they are German, in order to tackle the soil erosion, and make their equipment more usable in smaller fields.

Because Japanese food is so expensive partly because of the lack of land, you can be sure its of the highest quality, similar efforts are being seen in the UK to make the food quality higher whilst increasing biodiversity with smaller fields.

The days of stack it high sell cheap are coming to an end, partly because the pollutions levels are so high, and the poor quality food is shortening people's lifespans which is now only just showing up in data, despite retirement ages being raised.

>They eat, poop, stomp and move on. That adds an incredible amount of fertility into the ground without needing fertilizer.

The bacteria levels need to rot the poop down, so you are better off muck spreading with from old piles of poop, just like any compost, than you are from fresh. One of the other things I've seen farmers doing here in the UK, is spreading seaweed on fields to increase certain minerals.

> as tractors have got bigger so the plough cuts deeper and the soil erosion increases.

The size of your equipment does not dictate the depth you have your drill or planter set to.

> When horses pulled ploughs,they didnt cut too deep into the soil

Yes they did. Plowing completely turns over the top soil.

There are other things at play too like row spacing. We used to plant at 36", eventually we went down to 30", some of our neighbors even went down to 20" or so.

> The size of your equipment does not dictate the depth you have your drill or planter set to.

You cant deep plough (>50cm) with horses they dont have the strength as this YT vid shows https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7F4X3idewA

>Yes they did. Plowing completely turns over the top soil.

Once metal ploughs were introduced they could start to cut deeper into the soil, but the earliest horse drawn ploughs could not cut deep because they were wood as seen in some parts of the world today with oxen pulling wooden ploughs.

https://howardsuer.wordpress.com/2009/11/01/how-the-chinese-... The "mold" of moldboard is old German for soil but it was the Chinese who introduced the modern day moldboard plough most people are familiar with.

However is ploughing even needed today? This practice was started after Brexit, and its reduced fuel costs on the farm because now there is no need for ploughing and the dustbowl situations are extremely unlikely to occur.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2V7XQUtGfU

    The bacteria levels need to rot the poop down, so you are better off muck spreading with from old piles of poop, just like any compost, than you are from fresh

If I understand you correctly then you are advocating for not letting them poop on the fields?

That would mean not letting them graze on the fields either. So you're back to a barn. With associated problems.

That can also be labor intensive. Now you have to actually muck the barn and compost it all, then spread the compost on the fields.

Or you just let the cows graze, poop and stomp and you do nothing (except move them around from field to field).

I know what I'd do if I had to do all that work.

No they can poop on the field, but what you are lacking in many fields today is any form of shelter beit from trees or some other type of building for adverse weather conditions. Once the pasture got wet, with too many animals on it got destroyed, turned into mud and then you got your mini dustbowls.

Animals will seek shelter if its available, but fields are a man made thing, much of the planet used to be covered in trees but the agrarian society started off this planets deforestation, which is being repeated in parts of the world today like the Amazon.

Not only that but that shed poop besides being compostable also served as a source of fire fuel which is still used today in parts of Africa.

Ideally we would have plenty of pasture for animals to graze on, because even dairy herds will go and get milked when they want and not when the farmer schedules. This is a behaviour that's been seen in some dairy factory farms with automated milkers, the elephant in the room is we dont have enough planet earths in which to feed todays human and pet population unless we go all vegetarian or ramp up the production of lab grown meat.

In 2008 a US lifestyle needed 4 or 5 planet earths, today some suggestions put that as high as 8 planet earths, where as UK and Europe have remained mainly the same, ie a UK lifestyle needs 2.5 planet Earths and a European lifestyle needs 2 planet Earths.

That's the elephant in the room!

I think we're mixing a lot of different things there and moving from one thing to the next.

I like decomposing things. Not in the poop rotting sense but in the divide and conquer sense.

    1. Wet pasture with too many animals can destroy the pasture.

Sure. Put less animals. Also, make better pasture, i.e. pasture that is not grazed down to 1/4" with almost no protective function of the grass/roots. Move the animals well before it reaches that level and you prevents dustbowls in different ways. One of them being that the sun can't actually reach the soil. You basically never want sun touching bare soil on your pasture.

    2. Shelter

Now this is very true. And it's bad for the animals if they have no shelter. They heat up beyond levels that are healthy for them and they will use more water, which both increases your water needs as well as your labour needs to get water to them. Or resource inputs to lay pipe to get the water to them, which requires maintenance etc. I guess you get the point / know already. So yes, divide the huge fields into smaller fields that are lined with trees that the animals can naturally gravitate towards when needed.

    3. Poop as fuel

The poop as fuel is collected wherever it happens to turn up. Which in said parts of Africa can be on a large dustbowl.

    4. Not enough earths

I think this is overstated sometimes. Yes, if we use the US farming practices it's probably true. There are alternatives. Unfortunately I don't know the name. I saw this documentary on a flight quite a while ago.

Basically many of these parts of Africa that can't feed themselves were able to do so just fine before the westeners arrived and removed all the trees and made fields out of everything. Now it's barren earth. There was that one guy who - over lots of years and twists and turns I don't remember exactly any more - who figured out that the trees they bulldozed are not actually gone. The root system is still there. Below the surface and if you protect the tiny branches that appear from time to time from animals these grow back into beautiful trees that create shade for people, animals and further growth. He basically went around the villages, talking to elders that still remember the old times, making them his allies to teach children and younger adults to care for the tiny trees and to nurture them back to full growth / life. That was quite a while ago and it works. Many many villages can now feed themselves again.

All that to say: they basically went from a situation where even 10 "earths" worth of the situation they had would not have sufficed, a single earth worth of properly managed trees and ecosystem is perfectly capable of feeding them.

> Sure. Put less animals. So how do feed the Human population? Either force everyone to become vegetarian to free up the land or start reducing the population through stealth means, reducing lifestpans or invest in new technologies which can regreen the deserts as seen in places like Ethiopia or the deserts in the middle east?

Fish stocks are already not as abundant and the temperate shifts seen in the oceans is affecting fish stock in territorial waters. During the mini ice age which ended in 1857(^), the colder water saw cod stock which is highly temperature sensitive (likes 7DegC water) move down towards the UK. (^)This is why the media show global warming starting from this point in time.

Stealth means, GM crops like soy beans which have reduced omega3 content to reduce the soy beans going rancid as quickly, mean the neutrophil immune system in humans and lifestock feeding on this will be rendered less effective due to less omega3 intake. Ergo more drugs needed, great for chemical companies, and makes me wonder why govt's even bother!?!

>Yes, if we use the US farming practices it's probably true.

Global Warming. Despite the fact that CO2 levels mean more for vegetation and less need for fertilisers, because the co2 level on this planet have been way way higher, I think over double what they are today, the difference with the past, is humans need more space so that homeostasis with co2 levels and vegetation is broken.

Personally, I dont know why more isnt spent pumping desalinated water into the deserts especially considering the solar cells that could provide shelter for deserts, around the Sahara or the middle east. Would the reflection of solar cells affect the upper atmosphere much? I dont know, but cant be any more disruptive than ionosphere heaters pushing the ionosphere out into space causing leo satellites to crash to earth when they encounter atmosphere in their path.

>a single earth worth of properly managed trees and ecosystem is perfectly capable of feeding them.

Provided the human population is managed. Its only exploded in line with the discovery of oil, before then the human population was either under a billion or arond a billion or two.

    So how do feed the Human population?

If you mismanage the resource you have, you will not be able to feed said human population. A dustbowl feeds 0 people. This is what happens in said parts of Africa. The well managed pasture or well managed tree'd Africa feeds whatever number > 0 it feeds. Bulldozing it all may feed some more people initially, especially w/ petroleum based fertilizer, causing population growth. Until it turns into said dustbowl and now you have an African country that is dependent on imports to survive and people are still suffering and dying of hunger. That's also what I meant with the single earth being capable of feeding these people. With the dustbowl American bulldozers created in Africa, they are dependent on imports of corn and rice and wheat. With trees growing again they can graze livestock and plant traditional millet that is well adapted to their parts of the world and feed themselves again.

    Stealth means ... great for chemical companies

I'd first go with Occam's Razor here. The simplest answer is probably that it's not a conspiracy but pure and simple greed. That's also where people like Gabe Brown might be able to get to people. While it creates healthy soil and is "good for the environment", in the talks I've seen he specifically touts the profits he's making with his methods. This might be the one 'trick' that works in the end.

    I dont know why more isnt spent pumping desalinated water into the deserts

I've like to come back to the previous exhibit of Occam's Razor and money and greed. None of that seems like it's particularly cheap, effective - what would 'flooding the desert' actually do? - or making any money.

> What you state isnt far off, as tractors have got bigger so the plough cuts deeper and the soil erosion increases.

Old style moldboard plows drawn by horses or oxen cut about 4-6 inches deep. A modern cultivator is usually set to a depth of about 0.5 - 2 inches.

I expect you're right about the depth of the till, but it has more to do with than just the roots. Healthy soil is a living ecosystem, and tearing it up wreaks havoc on that ecosystem. To deal with that, we apply synthetic nutrients, which do feed the plants in the short term, but the soil continues to degrade over time, requiring ever increasing quantities of chemical inputs. It's not a good situation over the long term, and it doesn't take a super computer to figure that out.

Fallow fields https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallow

I am confused by how this would avert some of the issues described in the article. It describes dustbowl conditions as evaporating water out of the ground. Does no-till drilling solve this?

Healthy soil accepts water and retains it. Soil does not like to be naked, it always tries to cover itself so that it can grow a jungle of underground creatures and nutrients superhighways. Every time you till (cut up the jungle to get rid of weeds and give crops a chance to grow), you complete destroy all organic life! That soil turns to dirt that can’t accept water (drought) and can’t retain it (floods and top soil erotion). No till drills surgically insert seeds so that you can grow diverse crops simultaneously without destroying the underground jungle! Check out Gabe Brown to learn more about no till drill crops.

Thanks for some info to catch up on.

I've seen another step described where you bring in a mobile chicken coop a few days after the cows have departed to eat the insects that arrived to eat the poop.

Also keeping the cows a little while means they eat up all the "weed" plants and not just the tastier stuff —"eat your vegetables" type of thing—while if they free graze they only take the best tasting grasses and move on.

How to green the world's deserts and reverse climate change | Allan Savory (TED talk) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpTHi7O66pI

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