The phrase "It builds forests" is so powerfully, simply descriptive.

I think that framing agriculture's transition (hopefully) away from mono-culture into a more ecosystem focused idea seems like a tractable optimization problem. If we look at the reasons for mono-culture, I would argue part of the reason is that traditionally bigger yield is linked to bigger tools -- tractors are much larger than horses, spraying a chemical is easier when only one thing needs to survive. Monoculture makes it easy to apply big things, harvesting one row of corn is easy to scale to ten rows of corn just by making the combine harvester wider -- the harvester's problem statement is generic and scaleable in this way.

The hard problem, that you raised at the end, is how do we scale harvesting non-mono-cultures. The constraining variables are quite different when we need to perform a set of ten actions with no locality guarantees (Monoculture just guarantees locality of similar actions). I think one natural perspective is to look at how we do things non-locally at scale, which effectively reduces down to a distributed systems problem.

edit: few small changes

It’s pretty amazing what the land can do if you’re clever. I have a friend from college who makes a decent living as a flower farmer who also does horse boarding, etc.

When he slows down for retirement, he has a few million bucks worth of hardwoods that he planted right out of college on land that wasn’t good for other purposes. Mostly black walnut and maple, which he also produces syrup with and may start making booze with!

I grew up in a scenario more similar to this, though my parents didn't have the foresight to plant hardwoods for harvest (Though we did chop firewood to keep the house warm in the winter from our woods). My father still sends a supply of maple syrup each year, which is important because the syrups sold in stores are pretty questionable (The texture is too thick and the sweetness is one-dimensional).

Definitely a tension I've found in life between working in an urban software world and a more bucolic, fostering atmosphere of a farm. I hope more people find a balance in life like your friend, seems they have found the best of a couple worlds.

It is still hard, though, to scale this approach in the way that modern factory farms (Or even small family farms, to be honest - harvesting 400 acres is still non-trivial compared to the average of 150 acres in the 30s [1]) have done with the monoculture.

I would probably assume your friend has a small family style farm, which is what 90% of the farms in the US are [2]. Total farm output has tripled [3], a top of the line tractor costs nearly half a million, it really makes the equation of making an integrated farm a much more complex scenario. If I start doing a more bespoke culture, these tools are probably much less effective - that's the core challenge I think that needs to be solved, how do we increase output of heterogenous cultures.

If I had to bet (And I don't go to Vegas often for a reason), there's likely an inflection point where micro-technologies come to farming in a more direct way, possibly supplanting the way we do a lot of things today. I hate the appeal to nature, but it does seem prescient, in that a bunch of small organisms (Bees, butterflies, and birds) contribute so much to the overall health and harvest of an ecosystem. Maybe there is some, excuse me, cross-pollination to be found between that world and the one we've constructed.

Postnote:

Interesting history of farming I found https://www.thoughtco.com/history-of-american-agriculture-fa....

[1] http://usda.mannlib.cornell.edu/usda/AgCensusImages/1969/02/...

[2] https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2017/march/large-family...

[3] https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/chart-gallery/gallery...

Keeping the soil productive with more fertilizer costs a lot in some ways- fertilizer production is a big energy consumer. Basically attempting to accelerate using fossil or nuclear what the sun or things that eat organic matter do more slowly.

Hey man no way, you have been living my dream!

First I wanted to just grow berries, then I realized, pesticides and so on, so add another plant to fight that attacker instead of pesticide, then add another plant to protect that plant by being attractive for those other bugs which kill the bad bugs. Then I realized, this would eventually be a forrest with just more berries and edible fruits than normal. Thats where the problem appeared, reaping it would be hard to scale, indeed even planting such a forest would be hard to scale with current mechanical means.

I have a few designs for robot-like planting and pickery, yet all I currently have in realization is 2sqm dirt with potatos, carrots, strawberries and another pot of blueberries. :-/

Then another depressing realization, even if I made this on 100ha of land and produced a lot of nice fruits, berries, roots, the pay-off in money would probably not be worth it.

The good and the bad news is that eventually, when the rest of the land goes infertile from overuse, your method will be worth the money :)

I'm actually harvesting water through condensation machines and storing them in a man-made underwater resevoir now.

Soon I'll be pumping it into the house for plumbing, etc.

My reasoning is, in 20 years I'll have a cool project to talk about, or I'll be sitting on a fortune in freshwater.

You don't do sustainable farming for the money. It can certainly pay the bills and some. Plus subsidies and incentives can help.

If you want to make money you start a vertical farming AgTech, which will not be profitable, but will attract the trendy funding. Pay yourself well while it last.

Smart Farming is the way! You need to concentrate in flavor and quality. Yield is a race to the bottom.

Why wouldn't the pay-off in money not be worth it? You can charge a "responsibility premium" to local hipster stores.

Hipsters and eco-paying-premium people dont have money, not even close to the money provided to vertical ag tech farms.

Capital intensive to develop the automatic reaping bots, which will also cost more to operate compared to current "pour diesel into tractor and pull the earth up and shake it to extract so many potatoes". Destruction just costs less.

Hello, also a developer who's interested in agroecology. I actually also left development (as a job, not as something I do) in order to pursue a more human-centric approach to agriculture. With automation, it seems obvious we'll be seeing way more unemployment than what's happening right now, which is already alarming; small farms with synergistic crops & forestation seems like a no-brainer to achieve food sustainability. Plus, chemical pesticides are usually not used in syntropic systems, which makes it good for your health too.

I dropped out of Agroecology course in 2018 but I actively work with it or did before the pandemic at least.

I am skeptical that "more farm workers" is a trend that anyone really wants. Maybe at small scale you can sell produce at vastly higher prices to make up for the higher costs, but I don't think that what you're suggesting would be good for agriculture if adopted broadly.

Like others said, from a pov of global economics and current geopolitics, it might not make sense. But when you factor in sustainability, independence from the system and health, things begin to make more sense. Mono-cultures degrade the soil, up to a point when it'll no longer be able to sprout that culture anymore, so what do these millionaire farmers do? They just log more and more of our forests in order to plant. That's where all this logging in the amazon rainforest comes from.

All of this happens due to the green revolution & mass automation. We have papers plus empirical evidence you can turn any used up soil into good farming soil, if only we mimic the way nature does it, creating micro-climates with different cultures next to each other. One of the good outcomes of this method is that you don't even need chemical pesticides, because policultures are inherently more resistant to plagues. That and with this method, we attempt to use natural predators to cope with them too. It's basically a method of rebuilding forests, which is why it's called an agroforestry system

How much of this not "good for agriculture" is a result of a mispricing that doesn't factor in the unsustainability of the current mainstream approach? Like many areas this may involve more human workers before later transitioning to smarter machines in the long run.

Sure, that's fine. I was too unclear, I don't think jobs should be a reason to intentionally make farming less automated and that if fully manual or mostly manual farming somehow became the dominant approach it would simply not scale.

I am aware that family farms are more productive per acre and more sustainable usually, but there just aren't that many farmers or people who want to be farmers as a percentage of the population... it's hard work and exactly the kind of labor I'd expect to see automated right back away again ASAP.

Helping farmers with new automation tools that enable sustainable farming seems like a far better option than trying to disrupt farming in a way that intentionally increases the labor required to feed people. If the goal is to help people get back in touch with nature that's a great goal. It's just not a goal I think could be widely adopted.

Farmers are very smart, as the article mentions. If you give them the tools they need, they will use them if they make sense. Heck, farmers are pushing hard for the right to repair and modify their equipment (i.e. http://repair.org/agriculture/)

Edit: In case this is still unclear (it's hard to phrase right), I'm trying to make the point that you're better off trying to create a win-win with existing farmers rather than trying to start from scratch. If they are given better tools they will generally prefer to make their farms and soil healthier because it improves their bottom line. I don't think it makes sense to flip it around and completely change the agriculture system twice.

Might not be good for agriculture economy, but more farmers means more people with the means to feed themselves. Sounds like something I want.

Trade is fairly efficient at that too.

> With automation, it seems obvious we'll be seeing way more unemployment than what's happening right now

I fully support the underlying message, but automation has been happening at large scale for 70+ years now, unemployment rate doesn't follow automation, jobs are just shifted to other industries/sectors.

In other words, "Automation hasn't increased unemployment in the past, even though some pesky scientists and economists said that it would eventually be a problem. Some of those people were wrong in the past, therefore automation will never increase unemployment, ever."

This topic is boring me to death already. I'll keep it short. Automation+competition mean cheaper potatoes (or anything really). Cheaper potatoes means you save $10 per month. Now you can spend $10 on something else. Maybe on a movie or you save the money and go to a theme park with your kid. This represents a new employment opportunity (less farming more entertainment). Therefore automation isn't causing structural long term unemployment.

However there is a darker side to automation. What if automation is used without any competition? e.g. your company has a first mover advantage and it takes 4 years for the competition to catch up. What happens is that the potatoes stay at the same price but the company is increasing its profit margin which benefits the owners/shareholders of the company at the expense of workers. This isn't about unemployment. This is about wealth inequality. When a company replaces a worker with a machine it becomes more profitable but the worker gets nothing.

Society needs to change in a way that the laid off workers benefit from automation to the point that people are hoping their job gets automated or they decide to automate their own job. If someone gets laid off by automation for the third time that person should be happy, not sad.

Contrast this with J.S. Mill.

"Hitherto it is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day's toil of any human being. They have enabled a greater population to live the same life of drudgery and imprisonment, and an increased number of manufacturers and others to make fortunes. They have increased the comforts of the middle classes. But they have not yet begun to effect those great changes in human destiny, which it is in their nature and in their futurity to accomplish. Only when, in addition to just institutions, the increase of mankind shall be under the deliberate guidance of judicious foresight, can the conquests made from the powers of nature by the intellect and energy of scientific discoverers, become the common property of the species, and the means of improving and elevating the universal lot. "

Yes; if people claim that X will cause Y, and over decades of doing X it continues to not cause Y, I'd like some very compelling reasons to suddenly believe that X is going to start causing Y.

How did you support yourself economically when setting this up and ongoing? Was it economically viable and sustainable?

I had a small reserve, and I cut my living costs a lot. I wasn't trying to make money from agriculture in the beginning, was all about learning, I volunteered a lot and did a few courses later. This year we started actually selling produces and I get lots of calls to pruning jobs which I do decline because 2 years down this line I started working with development again because I got out of money. We would be able to live from the land today for sure, but also having economic security and being able to invest in better tools and such is also very good.

I'm now looking to merge this two worlds and work as a developer on solutions for agriculture/forests. I have a product in mind which I'm currently working on, lets see :)

I think you've just explained why farmers become coders and just buy their food from someone else. The idea of the Gentleman Farmer has been around a long time, but it's hard work and the pay is terrible.

Wow, that's so cool. I have long been interested in permaculture, which this seems quite similar to — how would you describe the difference? Answering my own question I'd say that immediately the focus on automated harvest of non-monocrop is very important, ad the main arguments against permaculture that I've come across (here and on e.g. Reddit) are that it's not scalable with automation. Thanks so much for sharing

They are very similar actually, but permaculture is about more than just agriculture, agriculture is one of the sides of permaculture. For me syntropic agriculture is that side, some people also call it agroforestry but this term is used for other kinds of agriculture, which builds forests but differently. On syntropic the main difference is very high density of plants and extensively pruning. The video I posted in the first comment you see a few people doing research on automating this processes, there's also some people Swiss investing into this, sure with less biodiverse but its being working great for them, so yes, can be automated, also lots of machines used on fruits crops can be used on this system, specially to speed up pruning bigger trees. And usually on syntropic its not common to find "key" shapes beds and stuff that we see from permaculture, its usually straight rows, which helps a lot with automation I guess.

Introducing an idea, in case you haven't encountered it elsewhere already. There are some estate-farms in England that are arriving on the same conclusion of permaculture/syntropic ag, albeit from a different angle.

They were spending a lot of money to extract marginal agricultural products from soil that wasn't well suited to monoculture, and some eccentric estate managers decided to stop spending the money, and allow the estates to "re-wild": no more shrub pruning, earth-moving, etc.

One of the "big ideas" they had, which might be useful to you, is to reintroduce "mega-fauna" to their ecosystems (in their case, ponies, "wild-ish" bovines, pigs, goats, and deer. They found that these fauna did an excellent job of pruning the wilds, but they had a new, second-order problem in pruning the fauna; they'd like to reintroduce wolves, to do the culling for them, but can't for somewhat obvious NIMBY reasons. :)

They're at the point where the estates more or less run themselves; they mostly make income from selling flowers, culled remains, and ecotourism. Anyways, all this to say that you might consider leveraging some organic automatons to do some of the "extensive pruning" for you. Herds of goats in particular are very efficient pruners, and they can pay for themselves.

Sources (great reading/listening): https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/02/17/can-farming-ma... and https://www.econtalk.org/isabella-tree-on-wilding/

That's very interesting and useful, thank you for sharing

I am thinking of a similar route, as a data scientist i am eager to know what graduate level courses would you recommend ? Especially for agriculture in cold climate (Canada )

Hi - coming from a PhD in agriculture (focus on sustainable ag), graduate level courses are going to be tough to jump into unless you have a strong background in ecology. Most of my grad-level courses assumed years of training in e.g. genetics, soil science and chemistry, plant physiology, ecology, weed science, entomology, etc. Agriculture is a very broad life science field.

That said, if you want a quick primer, "Crop ecology: productivity and management in agricultural systems" is a good primer on most of the basic ecological systems in agriculture. I've read it cover to cover many times.

However, you don't need a grad-level education to farm (believe me, I have been reminded this endlessly) - this is more for people doing research. For applied/actionable specifics for cold climates, your best friend is going to be local crop-extension services (in the US, most land-grants run an extension service). They will have tested techniques for your area and will be able to point you to good resources for farmers, not people researching agriculture.

One last thing - to be a successful farmer has very little to do with growing crops. Take business classes - the rest is relatively easy to figure out.

I don't know what to recommend you. I know a few people doing syntropic agriculture in Portugal which is as close as a close climate that I know. There is a guy in Florida, he have a company called GreenDreamsFL, hes the only one I know in the US doing this. But sadly this is not very much taught in academic courses down here in Brazil, but anything related to agroecology is very close, also understanding deeply plants biology helps A LOT when working with this systems, so we see a lot of people from Biology with a focus on Botany and Plant's physiology, and "florest engineering" I couldn't find a good translation to it, but its an academic course found here in Brazil which also helps a lot on understanding forests processes.

It's not a graduate course in the traditional sense, but Paul Wheaton runs a number of hands-on permaculture classes and courses on his land in Montana. Maybe not Canada-cold, but there's a large focus on shaping land and designing buildings to use energy more efficiently.

https://wheaton-labs.com/

If you want to learn about agriculture, find a farm you can support close to you, and enroll in a summer program. You will learn more if you get your hands dirty.

Ok, this is very cool, but it looks like as of now it requires orders of magnitude more manual labor than existing agriculture. This means increase of produce price to about the same extent. Unless a huge paradigm shift will happen (which takes decades without a major disaster), I don't see this as feasible any time soon.

I have so many questions. Do the rows run north-south or east-west? Is there a formula for how widely spaced the rows need to be? Is the pruned wood buried or left on the surface?

Looking forward to the product you mentioned in another post too! :)

what advice would you offer to another developer that longs to get into agriculture?

If you are wanting to do it as a commercial venture, then livestock (particularly beef if you are in the US) is about the only way to go unless you can purchase vast tracts of land and the equipment to run it.

If you are considering vegetable farming commercially, don't unless it is an extremely boutique product like truffles or exotic mushrooms, the economies of scales are crushing. The other option that is still viable is small plot that produces and end product. e.g you own a vineyard but you are not selling grapes you are selling wine. You own a pepper farm but your end product is hot sauce. Those are still viable for small plot.

The best thing you can do with a decent tract of land is to plant it full of expensive hardwoods such as black walnut and occasionally prune the trees to promote straight growth for lumber.

I have 7 acres and I planted 4 of it with African Ebony, one of the most expensive woods in the world. They are not native to my area so there is no issue with harvesting them and they require little in the way of care. They will provide a nice cushion for my children when they mature given that a single tree is worth between $300,000 to $1,000,000 (at current market) depending on size and quality of lumber. I planted about 50 trees per acre. The math is pretty self evident and it is the best use of land agriculturally if you are looking to maximize profit via small plot agriculture.

My wife uses some of the other land for personal farming but that is her gig, I grew up on a farm (citrus) and after NAFTA swore I would never scratch a living out of dirt again. I told her she was on her own with the vegetable farming other than helping her with where to plot certain vegetables and when to plant them.

Aren't there stories where 30 years ago lots of people had the same idea and planted similar species, resulting in a price crash when the trees matured? I'm not a tree expert so don't know the species, but I feel like I heard something like that happening in the southeast.

How did you decide on your species and how do you know other people don't have the same thing in the ground right now?

Yes there where but that was mainly from timber stock which matures faster than true hardwood stock, if you are very young say in your 20's you could plant hardwood stock for retirement but generally hardwood stock foresting is a generational investment.

Some of the limitations on everyone planting is that most of these species are protected, so you have to be able to plant them in a similar environment where they are not native or you run the risk of having to pay impacts for every tree harvested. Others are land availability and the other is many people don't want to encumber their land for a return they personally will never see. Most of the stuff you hear about from 30 years ago where faster growing trees in the pine and oak families which you could see harvestable maturity in 10 (pine) to 20 (oak) years and while it did cause a price crash, those people did make money. Just not FU money.

Contrast this with any African blackwood and you are looking at 50 years minimum till maturity and possible as long as 100 year. I don't need the money (not that I am rolling in it) but it is generational insurance for my children and their grandchildren. For a little back story I own a house that sits on 7 acres on the ocean, I plan to will the house to my descendants and keep it in the family as a place to come back to and congregate, for all generations to use. The trees are the hedge that their will be money to support that vision, as well as provide for the family if need be.

That being said the whole thing could flop, but at least I planted some trees that are in serious danger of going extinct in their native habitat and my descendants will be in possession of some really resilient hardwood.

What changed after NAFTA, if you don't mind my asking?

I mentioned this in another post on another topic but there was immigration reform in the 70's and 80's that opened up migrant work to the conglomerate farms. Which drove down prices most family farms where able to survive this onslaught but it kicked the legs out of any cushion they had. They then lobbied for NAFTA which allowed them to buy up tracks of farmland in Mexico that could not survive due to the new Mexican labor shortage created by the US workforce immigration reform, they then moved production to Mexico, drove prices down to an unsustainable level for small plot farmers, those farmers bankrupted, the conglomerates came in and bought up the small tracts that where now available, they then parceled those tracts together. Then they lobbied for more immigration reform and brought in workforce for their new US farms and that is why you do not see an American field worker nowadays. It's not because they do the jobs that we don't want. It's because they systematically destroyed the opportunity to do so and hold the cards to keep wages suppressed. If wages go up for farm hand work in the US, they shift scale to Mexico, if Mexico is unstable they shift scale to the US.

Most of the politicians on both sides of the isle where and are complicit in it because they view food pricing as a national security issue. The government has a vested interest in keeping the price of food and necessities low as people tend to become pretty violent when they are starving. That being said, it was a huge transfer of middle class wealth to large conglomerations.

I assume the little "Product of Mexico" sticker on all my supermarket bell peppers and that they don't have a $14 minimum wage down there.

Buy a copy of Farming Simulator.

Agriculture is a brutal, pitiless world of perfect competition, commoditisation, and winner-takes-all consolidation. There’s an old farming joke: “What would you do if you won the lottery? I’d farm until it was all gone”.

farm sim is the most broken game ever.

Even with the more realistic mods, which brings the most basic things like seasons(!!!), it is a futile fight against the bugs and bad UI.

farm sim is nothing but an advert for tractor brands.

Watch a couple youtube videos but NEVER pay it. you've been warned :)

Start by getting your hands dirty. Grow some herbs in a window box or something simple. Once you reap the rewards, you may get the green-thumb itch and keep going. Getting started is easy: seed, dirt, water, sunshine

> Start by getting your hands dirty.

Same advice I'd give someone in agriculture looking to get into code.

decide what kind of agriculture you want to do and check what is time and money requirements and seasonality is. Next step could be doing internship to see what it it feels like. There are many options from wwoofing to more job like situations.

Well and then you are ready to decide. Being small farmer is tough: not a lot of money and a lot of work, but it is rewarding by many means.

I personally decided to be in more play farm: few acres of vineyards, small wine production. It is still professional operation but I don't expect to be making full living off it.

Just do it, start getting your hands dirty as other said. I personally started with composting and now I have a system where my food waste becomes forests, I eat lots of vegetable/fruits and I just throw the bucket on a specific place, cover with mulch and food grows. Avocado, papayas, limes, cucumber, tomatos, lots of them grow easily here just by doing this.

If you look for "agroforest academy" in youtube you may find a video course in english on this syntropic agriculture topic too.

I think that's the first time I've actually seen farmers have an interest in improving their soil. Conventional practices are basically strip mining fertile land as if it was some finite resource.

I would like to transition to this in the next 5-10 years. Starting off with a garden on a plot of land I just purchased.

That syntropic agriculture video was powerful.

Any way to contact you to understand how you've made the transition?

For sure, will be a pleasure, you can find me at alissonpatricio at gmail

Thanks! I sent you an email. It's from my personal domain, so might have gone to your spam.

Nice to hear it can be done .... after 20 years in technology I am on the same path to get into the agriculture sector.

I can see that being critical in Brazil, near the rainforests, but does this strategy work in the great plains?

Might not count as the great plains, but Mark Sheppard's New Forest Farm in Wisconsin is a good demonstration of a similar approach in a different context.

https://newforestfarm.us/about/

Not to belittle the difficulty, but as someone who just drove from WY to WI over the last couple days... east of the Mississippi is drastically wetter than western MN+.

Yeh, there's a chicken and egg situation…

Having trees increases rainfall but need to grow the trees with little rainfall first!

Yes, the method applies anywhere in the planet. But for that you need to deeply understand the plants available for you, I mean those that are able to grow there in the beginning, native or not, here we use lots of african grasses and eucalyptus to start. There are a few people replicating this all over the world in very different environments.

your description reminds me of Jane Jacobs in Death & Life of Great American Cities

After watching that video, it seems like you could just mulch large areas of "dry land" and it would have a similar effect more quickly. The pruning (and rotting of the wood) is what is fixing the soil right?

Yes exactly! Its what happens naturally, trees dies, falls, takes others with them with the fall, make space for newer trees and wood decompose... Natural succession.

If you don't have woody material, just leafs works too, the key is organic matter build up and photosynthesis. So we tend to cut weeds (when they start to mature/flower usually) very cleanly for them to grow bigger and better, not killing them, focus is to build soil for more demanding plants.