Yeah, but a natural ecosystem isn't agriculture, and the concept of a "pest" doesn't even make sense in one. Agriculture is engineering an unnatural surplus for human consumption, and keeping everything else from eating that surplus. "Pests" are non-human organisms that want to take that unnatural surplus for themselves.
> There are very well established agricultural systems that use that principle and employ it to enable commercial farming without pesticides and herbicides while retaining high productivity. Search for syntropic agriculture and New Forest Farm (Mark Shepard).
That's kind of off topic, but I'm skeptical those have compatible productivity to typical commercial farming techniques. Either the "high productivity" is quite a bit less that the productivity for traditional farming, or it requires far more labor input than is practical for modern society.
If that is the case (and there were no other alternatives) the dominant form of agriculture (industrialized monoculture) is more or less tailor made to be attractive to pests and an enormous amount of energy and labour has to be employed to keep them out, much more than in the regenerative systems I've highlighted.
> I'm skeptical those have compatible productivity to typical commercial farming techniques
Way to be skeptical without even bothering to do a Google search. Mark Shepard claims (and has 20 years of data to back it up) that his system is of a comparable productivity in terms of human-usable calories to an industrialized corn operation. Syntropic agriculture was developed on a plot of land that was degraded by conventional agricultural methods to the point that it was given up and it now provides the basis for a commercially successful farm. Plenty of other examples around as well.
> […] or it requires far more labor input than is practical for modern society.
"Modern" societies employ between 0.5 and 3% of their workforce in agriculture [1]. If we'd tripple the share of agricultural workforce but in return drastically reduce the energy use and make farming a net carbon sink instead of a substantial contributor to global warming, I think it would be very much "practical". As things stand, we could pull the required labour simply from people doing tele-marketing and nothing of value would be lost ;-)
[1] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.AGR.EMPL.ZS?location...
agreed
> Mark Shepard claims (and has 20 years of data to back it up) that his system is of a comparable productivity in terms of human-usable calories to an industrialized corn operation. Syntropic agriculture was developed on a plot of land that was degraded by conventional agricultural methods to the point that it was given up and it now provides the basis for a commercially successful farm.
Yes, I've read about Mark Shepard with a lot of interest. However that's just one farm. It's yet to be seen if his methods will work elsewhere, if his claims for productivity can be substantiated, if his productivity can be duplicated, and so on. In short his work is, currently, at best a prototype.
If you're going to claim that regenerative can be as productive as conventional then you need to point to systems that are widely used and whose productivity figures are reliably gathered.
> "Modern" societies employ between 0.5 and 3% of their workforce in agriculture [1]. If we'd tripple the share of agricultural workforce but in return drastically reduce the energy use and make farming a net carbon sink instead of a substantial contributor to global warming, I think it would be very much "practical". As things stand, we could pull the required labour simply from people doing tele-marketing and nothing of value would be lost ;-)
You miss the point. It's not about the availability of labour. It's about the price of labour. It's more economically efficient to reduce labour as much as possible. I'm not claiming this is a good thing. It's the reality of farming in a free-market society.
> It's the reality of farming in a free-market society.
But farming is not a free-market enterprise in "modern" societies. It is the most subsidized and among the most regulated among all enterprises in industrialized economies. German farmers derive half their income and all their profits from government (mostly EU) subsidies. I don't know the figures for the US, but I'd bet that they are similar. Farming, by who and how farming is practiced is basically entirely defined by political priorities, which at this time are mostly still based on the technological and scientific developments of the 1930s-1970s, which have created some very well established commercial interest groups (chem-ag concerns, farmers unions, etc.).
Because if it was that good, I'd expect to have been seeing all kind of articles about the massive revolution in agriculture. If there wasn't some kind of catch, why isn't it seeing wider adoption?
As far as what counts as "commercial success." It'd really have to be something that can compete with commodity agriculture to be a solution. If it's a "commercial success" because it's some boutique thing that can charge 10x commodity prices to make up for 5x costs by selling to self-consciously "ethical consumers" and elites by marketing its good local green permaculture vibes, then I don't think it will be anything but niche producers.
The systems I have highlighted have demonstrated commercial-grade calorie surpluses over decades. Kindly da a tiny bit of research before simply claiming the opposite.
Regenerative agriculture has also demonstrated that it can bring degraded and marginal land back into production and it uses less irrigation etc. by design, so it would be possible to expand arable land.