I'm not the one oversimplifying, it's 'modern' agronomists that are oversimplifying.

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.

Or from crop rotations of legumes with nitrogen fixing microbes. But that too would require a move away from intensive industrialized agricultural practices.

Toby Hemenway forwarded a notion that water cycles are sufficient to transport nitrogen from nitrogen-rich plants to their neighbors as a continuous basis instead of on an annual one. The model he builds from research he had read goes something like this:

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.

"Fifty-six percent of all land used for corn, soybeans, wheat, and cotton was on farms that used no-till/strip-till on at least part of their cropland in 2010-11: 23 percent of land was on farms that used no-till/strip-till on all land in these crops while 33 percent was on farms that used a mix of no-till, strip-till, and other tillage practices." (From the report summary.)

https://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/pub-details/?pubid=440...

Industrialized farming practices are capable of changing.

Yes. Nitrogen fixing bacteria (i.e. R. leguminasarum, s. meliloti) love the sugar exchange legumes offer. Cover cropping and inter cropping have potential to rethink the 113-year old haber-bosch solution.

I don't know if this is my theory or just heavily implied but rarely stated in the literature: chemical fertilizers are giving plants something for 'free' that they used to pay for, and the reason the crops get bigger is not strictly because of the fertilizers, but because they get to spend those calories on more fruit.

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.

> 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.

Gabe Brown seems to be pulling it off, but then again he’s not growing fruit. I’d be curious to see how much Shepard is spending on harvesting his fruit and nuts.

The claim that people and companies are leaving a 2x yield on the floor (well, field) just because they're stupid does not seem plausible to me, so I suspect you missed some aspect of it.

(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.)

> 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.

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?

"Cover crops were in use on less than 2 percent of total cropland (for all crops) during 2010-11 (6.8 million acres), with adoption rates higher in some regions (e.g., the Southern Seaboard and the Mississippi Portal). Although the benefits of cover crops and no-till/strip-till are enhanced when these practices are used on the same fields, the low cover crop adoption rate suggests that these benefits are realized on few acres." (From the report summary.)

https://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/pub-details/?pubid=440...

Cover crops have come into style though since then. They are a lot more common. Not nearly as common as they should be, but they still a lot more than 10 years ago.