Gabe Brown manages about 5000 acres, with a skeleton crew.

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.

Not to sound contrary... but if their techniques are better, why haven't they been replicated widely? If they can output just 20% better financial return, they will double the profits for most farmers.

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.

There is a tremendous market of corporate interests that have a very vested interest in farming staying the way it is. From custom GMO seeds to input(fertilizer, fungicides, pesticides) producers to implement manufacturers they all want farming to stay the same. A regenerative approach removes a massive amount of those needs and profits.

The farm industrial complex is built around creating problems and selling you solutions.

Entrenched interests would be a driver as well as conventional wisdom here to date imo. That said there are indeed millions of acres in the mid-west (US) and beyond operated by commercial growers whom leverage the benefits of inoculating their acres with beneficial microbes. Ultimately mother nature dictates yield mainly thru moisture availability (acres under a pivot excluded) so growers focus on risk mitigation and nutrient efficiencies to achieve profitability. The paradigm is shifting away from heavy synthetics due to costs, generational transitions in operation management and our understanding of the rhizosphere. Beneficial microbes are not the only answer but leveraging their inherent capabilities is an effective tool and currently available.

What is harder? Go ahead and try to convince people.

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.

The comment farther up the thread (at this point anyhow)[1] references Gabe Brown. He is using very little to no commercial fertilizer on his farm and has been for years. I am guessing his audience among cash strapped young desperate farmers has increased a lot in the last 3 months.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31237965

There are a couple of particularly noteworthy things about Gabe. His philosophy was a baptism by fire. He ran out of money via a combination of bad decisions and getting hit by a statistical cluster of bad years where the world seemed to be saying Fuck You in Particular (there were 4 years with catastrophic hail storms, and none of his neighbors got hit by more than 3 of them).

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.

The 55 gallon rain barrels are near useless for small plot irrigation. Larger containers can hold a meaningful amount of water to be useful during sporadic dry spells.

No, the problem is that to get half an inch of water to cover your fields takes a giant storage tank and a giant collection area. Install a hard scape big enough to provide any notable amount of water storage and lack of arable becomes your primary issue.

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.