https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhizosphere
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1906655116
https://regenerationinternational.org/why-regenerative-agric...
Some proponents of regenerative agriculture to learn from are:
Joel Salatin - https://www.polyfacefarms.com/
Ray Archuleta - https://soilhealthacademy.org/team/ray-archuleta/
Gabe Brown - http://brownsranch.us/
That is the primary contribution of synthetic fertilizer, and there aren't scalable natural processes to match it. Countries used to go to war over nitrogen stores (such as islands covered in bat guano).
Food to feed your troops (and workers in armament factories) is a strategic military resource.
You have to either grow it yourself or import it. Artificial fertilizer allows you stop importing nitrogen (which could be blocked by embargoes) and make it locally, which would allow you to potentially grow food locally and not import it either (again, embargoes).
The one that fascinates me the most is the way the Mayans did it - Chinampas. That and aquaculture growing lots of smaller fish seems like a create combo if we could get small backyard pond/farms going
I hear that water quality and, to a lesser extent, water chemistry has a huge impact on taste. I've sort of noticed that in certain lakes compared to others.
I challenge you to a duel, thems fightin' words. Fried catfish is one of the greatest things on the planet (mind you not terribly healthy).
How are we going to feed another 2 billion people let alone those that we have without fossil fuel inputs? Maybe biotech will save us, but I am skeptical.
Stop employing people in bullshit jobs. Immediately you've got 75% workforce on basic income, and I think some of them would like to work on small scale local farms. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regenerative_agriculture] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_basic_income]
We already grow food for 10 milliard (thousand millions for our obscurant us friends) people. Problem is poverty and inequality, not scarcity. [https://www.huffpost.com/entry/world-hunger_b_1463429]
There's another thing that comes to my mind, when people suggest the adoption of a plant-based diet.
Protein quality [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protein_quality#Protein_source...]
Why?
In our modern society where many people require less calories than our ancestors, because most don't do as much physically intensive labour, it's somewhat tricky to get enough protein from food _without_ taking in too many calories.
Yes, plants do contain protein. But sort the above linked table for "complete protein" and you'll see of the 9 "complete protein" foods, only 5 are plant foods. And of those 5, only Quinoa appears to have no limiting amino acid.
It seems that animals have had an important role in recent times of concentrating plant protein to levels such that humans can get enough protein without taking in more calories than they require per their lifestyles.
Let people who are used to meat/dairy diets adopt plant-based diets and I wouldn't be surprised if this leads to more of them becoming overweight.
Imo it's a good thing when people try to eat less meat/dairy but they shouldn't think it's an easy thing to do that comes without caveats.
David Raubenheimer is said to have conducted an experiment where people's behaviour showed that protein content is what disproportionately determines how much people eat until they feel saturated.
Some references: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01956... https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/obr.12131
I think that the exact opposite is true. Most new vegans lose weight quickly.
There are no overweight fruitarians (imho - not my cup of tea). And not many vegans. But there are many ways how to do things - if you're eating a lot of fats, processed foods, junk food ... you'll be overweight, vegan or not.
Also, you can't replace meat/dairy with single protein source (e.g. tofu) and think that you're ok. That's not the way it works with the plants.
For me vegan diet means whole foods, minimum fats, as diverse diet as possible, almost no junk/processed food, 30-50% raw vegetables. It's not easy to gain weight this way.
> Imo it's a good thing when people try to eat less meat/dairy but they shouldn't think it's an easy thing to do that comes without caveats.
You're making it sound scary :) It is easy, certainly not hard, but you're right, new vegans have some things to learn.
The only supplement you'll certainly need is vitamin B12.
In the end what you'll want is fruits, vegetables and lentils of various kind. If you have a diverse diet, you'll have no problems.
Yes, it means trying (a lot of) new things and recipes and some learning (how to substitute meat/dairy with plant-based alternatives), but it's not hard and in the end it's very satisfying process. I'm always hunting for new recipes.
> David Raubenheimer is said to have conducted an experiment where people's behaviour showed that protein content is what disproportionately determines how much people eat until they feel saturated.
Yes, lentils & beans. Satiety guaranteed :)
> https://www.finegardening.com/project-guides/gardening-basic...
We even have 8 milliards of humans producing manure, which we currently (mostly) flush to the sea [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_soil].
And if we do use it, we do it wrongly [https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/mar/22/i-dont-k...].
We have to learn how to use what we have (atmosphere, rhizosphere, pigs, poultry, humans), that what does not destroy forests and wildlife (cows), and avoid that that kills and poisons the nature (pesticides & herbicides). Then we have a chance.
There's lots of FUD about China maliciously overconsuming fish, but they actually (sustainably) farm >50% of their seafood IIRC.
Nitrogen is 70% of our atmosphere. When you remove all other plant life in order to get the last 20% of theoretical yield from your land, you end up having to manually provide all of the services that were provided by the plants you killed. The Green Revolution is a petrochemical revolution. Cooking allows us to use lignin calories to recover more calories from our existing food supply. Livestock do the same, either by converting grasses (ungulates) or recycling unpalatable foods (pigs).
When the petrochemicals become expensive we will have to go forward and/or backward to some other solution (most likely old solutions with new twists). The sibling comment with the huge bibliography points to some of the more coherent voices in the world of polyculture agriculture, although Gabe Brown exists in a sort of grey area between aggressive crop rotation and polyculture.
After a rain, as the soil goes from waterlogged to dry, there are phases that are hostile to root hairs and ones that are conducive. So the plant roots pulse with these cycles, advancing and retreating, sometimes arriving at places vacated by other plants. By this mechanism, any plant can scavenge some of the nitrogen left in the decaying root hairs of their neighbors.
I would also warn that thinking nitrogen=legume is a potentially limiting strategic error. While something like 7% of all plants fall into the Fabaceae (legume) family, some other pockets of the Fabales order also have root nodules, in particular, alder, and up into the Rosids clade (buckthorn, ceanothus), and then a few odd stragglers like borage, which makes me wonder if it's a taxonomic problem, parallel evolution, or what.
And then there's mondo grass (asparagaceae), which nobody expects to have root nodules. I knew about that plant for about two decades before someone pointed out it's nitrogen fixing, and that's not even in the wikipedia article. And in fact I'm having a dickens of a time finding a citation for that.
https://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/pub-details/?pubid=440...
Industrialized farming practices are capable of changing.
There have even been a few studies that warn that some strains of conventional crops are losing the ability to make this exchange. When we hit peak phosphorous and start taxing anhydrous ammonia production, these strains are at risk of going extinct (hopefully not enough of any crop to take us with them).
The wrong question is, "how many calories of <X> can I get out of this field in a year?" The right question is "how many calories can I get total out of this field in a year" and there are a number of people out there demonstrating that they can get about 50% of the conventional yield from an acre, but for 4 different crops, and a few other things thrown in to get over 2x the total yield.
The "problem", in scare quotes, is that these solutions take more thinking and knowing than scourging your fields every year. But since running a farm practically takes a bachelor's degree these days, that's not really a problem of lack of resource in that area. It's more a problem of perspective and focus.
I agree on this point. Every successful farmer I've met has been of notably above average intelligence. However at the family farm scale it's a very fragile business. A small increase in input costs can greatly reduce or eliminate profitability. While I think permaculture, no-till, and other such techniques are great, we have to acknowledge that they require considerably more labor than running a combine harvester over corn or soy fields. The labor shortage is bad enough that even generally immigration skeptical rural areas welcome H-2A migrant workers. And while the best American farm workers are every bit as hard-working as the best Mexican seasonal workers, the average Mexican that comes to the USA in the program is considerably more reliable than the average American these days.
(The most obvious could be that nobody want to buy some of the other crops, so while you could get the calories out, you can't get the dollars out, and the calories would go to waste if everyone did that.)
A lot of US agriculture is done on by contract operators. Bill Gates seems to work mostly in that model.
I mention Gates because what he says suggests that he'd love to see that claim pan out on a large scale. Also, he's known for insisting on high dollar yields.
And yet, we're talking about demonstrations and not actual significant experience.
Maybe Gates is lying about his social goals AND also isn't profit-maximizing.
But, if he isn't, why aren't the demonstrators doing good and doing well (2X production is a big bucks) by doing this stuff at scale somewhere in Gates-land?
https://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/pub-details/?pubid=440...
I assure it is not BS. without fertilizer you do not the explosive yields that we get all over th world including the United States.
And it is in fact well documented in a huge collection of science journals.
India is, by many accounts, likely to switch to a new-new form of agriculture sooner than some of the rest of us. The combination of bigger problems and a shallower 'tradition' of western farming practices makes that easier.
There was a post here about California covering its irrigation canals with solar panels. A couple of us politely pointed out that a couple of provinces in India have already been doing this for a while.
Nevertheless, structural issues remain. Farmer suicides are not even remotely new and it's disingenous to suggest otherwise. And it has to be pointed out that the suicide rate amongst Indian farmers is lower than the national average.
You'll have to pry Western farming methods from the cold dead hands of Indian farmers. Even the urban intelligencia has shut up about organic/traditional farming after seeing what's happening across the Palk Strait.
The indian itelligencia? I'd like to hear more about the commonalities here between equivalent folks in the uhmmm "west"
My only real point was that anything could look rational after what they went through before hand.
On paper Mark Shepard seems to have about 106 acres around his house, which I think is a gross branding mistake, because he farms a lot more land than just his homestead. I have to find this interview again because it was kind of shocking and I'm afraid I may be misquoting it. One interviewer got him talking about all of the land he owns elsewhere, leases, or consults on and he makes some comment about he may actually be managing more farmland than anyone east of the Mississippi.
Most of us are on the internet all day regardless. We downplay the incremental cost of both doing things, bragging about it online, and getting it on people's radars, like it's simple but we mostly think about the people who are good at it and not all of the ones who quietly disappeared without most of us ever learning about it.
Farming is exhausting. Farming is remote. Farming is slow, and experiments take years to prove to be more than dumb luck. The gap between killing it and selling your audience on the notion that you are killing it is much, much wider. Talk enough, and you have to stop doing, which means you're now selling ideas that you can't back up.
Understand that it is my wish and hope that these sort of low/no fertilizer organic techniques can work better than "traditional" heavy-fertilizer/irrigation farming the west now mainly employs. It's just that vaguely recall hearing about this sort of thing 30 years ago. And 20 years ago. And 10 years ago.
I have created fully automated systems for indoor that control everything except harvest. It is impossible to convince people due to the cost I am pretty sure.
Thusly? Money printer really does not go brr for this.
Some of his crops are targets of opportunity. They're a cover crop and if the weather is just right and he gets it planted in time, he might be able to harvest it, or at least graze some livestock on it, but if not, then that's fine too, because the dividends still made it worth doing.
He is a very frugal farmer, both in resources and energy. Mark Shepard, in contrast, seems to be more interested in the energy side of frugality, and is so open in his disdain for people throwing good money/time after bad that it's practically his personality. In particular he likes to rant about how utterly mathematically unsound the idea of rain barrels is, and the kind of cognitive dissonance it takes to keep telling yourself otherwise.
Rain barrels make a tiny bit of sense in a small urban lot with a large roof. They make no goddamned sense at all in most agricultural contexts.
pH and temperature are pretty easy and common ways for soil to keep essential minerals away from the plant life which could utilize them.
I bought some property that was practically concrete at the beginning of the dry season. I hurt my hand and damaged a tool trying to take a soil sample to send to the lab. A couple years later you'd never know, except that past me was apparently smart enough to take a video that I found when trying to free up some disk space.
Plants, bacteria and fungi all manipulate soil PH for better or for worse, and you can steer that. And keeping soil covered, especially with tall plants, can drop the temperature tens of degrees Celsius. A forest floor is much closer to ground temperature, for a host of reasons.
Nearly every symbiotic relationship fungi make is based on buying sugars from plants by selling them minerals from biological weathering of rock (particles). What happens in conventional agriculture is that we murder all of the fungi.
There are a few places with strange soil compositions that are actually lacking in particular minerals. We could either elect to do something else with that land, or transition everyone but them to a post-green-revolution strategy.