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Comment by kaonwarb | Hacker News Reader

I'm happy to support farmers who want to turn to regenerative methods, but I can't see them as a solution for feeding today's world. As the article itself notes:

> U.S. agriculture production tripled in the latter half of the 20th century, due in part to chemical inputs.

And, yes:

> But that came with an environmental cost — soil degradation, water quality issues and a loss of biodiversity.

I'm not downplaying those costs, and am happy to see a range of approaches. But this is not a serious proposal for feeding folks at scale.

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Doing regenerative farming does not mean abandoning half a century of knowledge and technological progress. Rather, it is using all we now know and know how to do to heal the land and maximizing output. In a lot of cases yes, the output may be smaller of some crops, but the net total calories extracted might not be that different.

Not to mention, if your land is all but barren and it requires fertilizers to grow, when prices spike or supply disappears and the farmer can’t afford to plant…the output is zero.

It is also ignoring what conventional ag has figured out. Most of the soil loss was pre WWII and conventional ag has figured out how to grow more soil (about 1mm per year in the best case and typically slower)

The soil loss during the great depression was not due so much to bad farming practices (though tilling is harmful) but to massive farming bankruptcies following the last harvest, so much land was left unseeded -- that is, with no cover crops of any kind. The wind did the rest.

That's a very simplistic view. Isn't that exactly the same as saying "guns don't kill people, bullets do"?

It's the bad farming practices that created the situation where the soil was vulnerable.

We're not talking about blame, but rather about determining the direct causes.

It's not simplistic because something could have been done (plant cover crops) but nothing was done. The textbooks I had claimed it was about monocultures and such, but the real issue was tilling, and we still till the soil today. So no, it's not a simplistic view.

The type of plow used then is almost never used today. they used to turn the soil over butting top soil (aerobic stuff) under lower layers (anerobit stuff). Now they break up compaction but don't turn the soil over.

Inter-seeding different crops is better still.

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