https://www.biggestlittlefarmmovie.com/
Your dad might love it, even if just for the nostalgia.
That said, I think some of the lessons in there are awesome. Both the ones about biodiversity but also perseverance in the light of 'disaster' striking and staying strong and going on with the biodiversity path instead of just resigning and saying "yep, alright, Big Farmer is right, this doesn't work".
Others use tractors, buy fertilizers and other crop treatments like anyone else.
No matter how bad they screw up, in the very long run, Earth has a tendency to figure out how to recycle the raw materials. After all, Earth's ecosystems are the result of surviving cataclysm after cataclysm, from volcanism to asteroid strikes to climate change, to invasive species after invasive species. It's got a lot of experience dealing with giant debris piles left over from one shitstorm after another, be that a biological plague or the ash of an impact event.
Whether humanity will suffer a catastrophe of our own making is another question.
It is interesting that by incrementally converting the life-support system of our planet into dollar store trash, we could have similar impact on the biosphere as an ELE meteor impact! The tragedy is that, at least theoretically, this particular cause is avoidable. Or was. (Maybe science really is to blame? Wouldn't that be sad.)
To me, it implies that planet earth is as implacable as the rest of the universe. It doesn't have feelings. It doesn't care. And it will still be here for millennia yet.
This changes the conversation from:
"We're hurting mother earth."
to
"We're thinking animals and yet we're making a poor future for ourselves."
You're right that we are "thinking animals", but we've got a global animus now that is obsessed money and growth. We're infected with a greed virus that I think is fatal to its host.
And the problem, as I see it, and alluded to in my OP, is that local incentives are all wrong now. Nearly every decision that is rewarded by the markets at a local level is bad in the long term. You can teach a small fraction of people so that they may become enlightened, but greed spreads faster, and is better rewarded. In a game-theoretic view of this, it will always pay to defect from those conserving and living sustainably, as you externalize the losses onto an unseen and uncared-for future, and spread that loss among everyone else. Moral hazard, everywhere. But now, with global civilization and industrialization, and instant communication, we've become more than a diseased troop of chimps headed for a brawl in the forest; we're an insanely overpowerful superorganism driven by unquenchable lust for exponential growth and armed with millions of years of energy reserves--even nuclear weapons! There's literally nowhere on Earth that we can't or won't go in search of resources or vacation potential.
As much of an atheist as I am, I can't help but feel a pang of spirituality about this, and that pang is, unfortunately, despair for the inhabitants of this green jewel that is being ravaged. And by inhabitants, I'm broad in including all living things, regardless if they are cute or have fangs and spit venom. All those funny animals, frogs, plants, fungi. They got fucked because money.
The culprit is the scientific method, and in particular it's ability to give people repeatable, inhuman action-at-a-distance that amplified moral hazard 10000-fold.
The longer the distance between extraction and consumption the more fucked your civilization is.
As horrible as that sounds, there is a beautiful symmetry: science gives hope to spread life beyond Earth, and yet it is also provides a real path to the destruction of Earth, our only home.
Clearly Nature thinks the gamble is worth it.
Science is a good tool for getting things done. The how.
Money is the motivation for getting them done. The why.
You've both got good points.
Scientific capability enables fucked because money.
I used the word "machine" before, and also the word "superorganism". I get this creepy feeling we're part of a cybernetic superorganism more akin to a slime mold, digesting the world not with funky stomach acids, but the humming sounds of a million bulldozers, pile-drivers, hammers breaking down and building up again. And now, in the 21st century, some kind of Star Trek computer sounds as the digitized stock market whirs away at a speed incomprehensible to these little pink-gray bundles of nerves prone to chemical stimulation.
All of those learning and optimization processes are harnessed, in bulk, towards the economy--harnessing the energy and mineral resources of this planet to create "wealth" for the value system of that machine. Even as just a software person, being light-years away from a bulldozer or a harvester, everything I have done inevitably feeds into making that machine more "efficient". I am rewarded, so my little life is improved. (I guess I shouldn't complain, the machine has made me relatively wealthy so far!?)
One element of the world which is clearly already a "cybernetic organism" is the everyday "Corporation" - it is an actual fusion of humans and machines to achieve a goal. Corps have many emergent properties, none of which have their root in any individual person or machine. And note that this was true pre-information revolution! (And note: corps ALSO have a center of mass! Although this usually isn't the most useful characterization, its accurate.)
When it comes to evolution, individual organisms are needed by the thousands.
If we have one superorganism subsuming the whole planet, then what if it turns out this isn't the ideal evolutionary path?
Fermi Paradox Great filter comes to mind. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter
But given how hard it is to predict the future, the details are : how much will it hurt?
How much of humanity will survive? How much biological diversity will we lose?
Aside, I don't think atheism/religion enables or precludes empathy for the living things in the world. 'Tis a sad future in many ways.
I guess the dead rock ball will still be fine.
The two groups have almost no philosophy and practices in common. Different worlds.
As soon as they paid off the loans for the land, they rented the farms out to someone else to work and moved to town to get easier jobs.
I love the smell of capitalism in the morning. Smells like...better than pig shit.
[0]: Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari (2011)
this is it right here. we're extracting all nutrients from a concentrated area and sending the yields far away. There's no replenishment.
Even the water shortages in California is not as simple as "farmers are using all the water". It's the demand for food far, far away.
It's hysterical that Bitcoin is the punching bag, because when economies that are prone to hyper inflation give way, its BTC that is used in many of those same countries. Who also, resort back to subsistence or local Ag. And guess what, destroying your land is kind of antithetical to the whole farming thing...
Anyhow, regenerative Ag can now be a massive boon if the infrastructure bill gets properly allotted; I'm skeptical but this could really come to define late millennials and gen Z to ensure that the problems they inheritance from the most wasteful generation (boomers) has some chance of being remediated prior to it being depleted and ensuring famine.
I am open to wondering if CO2 emissions are also too easy a punching bag. Crops can go way nonlinear when lacking mined water, lacking fertilizer, and lacking soil/biomes etc. I was not aware that the infrastructure bill favors regenerative Ag.
It's pretty vague, to be honest; but from what I've gathered many of its proponents are using it as a phase-in from the core of the New Green Deal, and is essentially a massive works project.
As a former farmer (Biodynamic) myself and a person that did Supply Chain I think that critical infrastructure doesn't just apply to the roads upon which freight travels on, also having a horrible factory farmed centralized food system is what created shortages during COVID and were revealed for all to see. There is no denying it that this model cannot function with just the slight amount of variance, 3PL continued to work and even improved during COVID in some industries, but none of that mattered in the end.
This incidentally led to crop losses due to a lack of labour, and many unnecessary deaths of workers like at meat packing plants had a shocking enough effect that made CSA memberships (shares in the Farm that grant you boxes of vegetables) the more viable option and revealed something that I knew from experience in the aforementioned industries (also culinary): the less food travels, the more savings can be passed on to the consumer, but also the higher a premium it has to it's targeted demographic.
The reason I highlight this is because critical infrastructure, as in the stuff that is of national security, after COVID has to include manufacturing of things like PPE and medical equipment as well as farming in a far more distributed manner--ventilators were just one of the examples of how far the US had fallen.
And the truth is the Department of Ag already has a lot of sound programs to help young, first time farmers: but a concerted effort to incentivize them with low to no interest loans for farming equipment and livestock for 10+ years would be a boon for so many wanting to get into farming and revitalize so many disenfranchised communities that were displaced in the 80s when mega pharmacorps forced their way that led to this big Ag system.
Simply removing a lot of subsidies to corn, soy farmers and using that to float the low interest loans would pay for itself in added revenue, moreover many farmers markets are now obligated to accept things like WIC and foodstamp programs to be accepted so we can readily pivot a low income community's diet in a decade, as seen in Detroit.
I'd include water/desalination as well, but to be honest I'm not sure that will be explored this go around, but may at a later time.
The transformation of farming is a direct result of corporatization and globalization, like almost every other sector of the economy. It's just more of the machine eating the world. Small, family farms, the kind that my ancestors toiled on, since unrecorded history, literally centuries, back to central Europe, were chewed up and spit out by the machine. The forests, the land, the local wildlife, now, too, the soil, all chewed up and digested in the pursuit of the one thing that the machine really craves: money.
It's the legacy of our entire economic focus on profit, growth, scale. No big conspiracy, no evil bad actors you can hate forever, just the summation of our value system expressed in the invisible hand of the market, jostled or cajoled here and there by policy, or retarded briefly by it, but always pointing in the same direction, eventually to consume all the natural resources, dipping over the threshold of sustainability to the reservoir of resources behind it, extracting and emptying it, until eventually there is nothing left.