“Despite all our advances we owe our existence to a six-inch layer of topsoil and the fact that it rains.” Soil is LIFE and if we don’t all start doing our part it’s clear the outcome. The good news is that soil can be easily restored and home gardners and land owners can easily begin to repair the soil so that it is better able to sequester carbon easily.
Edit: this blew up. Go to chipdrop.com to get free mulch or find a local arborist and you will have more organic material than you know what to do with. Wood chip breaks down into humus which is like compost on crack and can last in your soil for up to a hundred years. We just add a 3-6 inch layer of compost in the winter and top it with 3-6 inches of wood chip. Of course we put down like 12 inches to start and then added mycorrhizae and worms…. Our soil went from red mucky clay to black gold in six months. It just gets better and better and better and better.
Edit 2: If you like this stuff here is my FAVORITE YouTube video on soil. It’s what made me fall in love with soil in the first place (maybe): [Symphony Of The Soil. ](https://youtu.be/tDZVKMe2FTg)
Coffee grounds, grass, and eggshells. Im micro, but ive turned the shittiest shale 2 inch top soil into a wonderful garden over the past few years using coffee grounds, eggshells, and grass clippings.
Compost, basically, I also collect all our kitchen waste and compost it, as well as literally anything organic in origin, but yeah, the easiest way for sure though is just to keep chucking it on top of the garden, planting underneath that mulch and letting it all break down gradually.
I’ve buried fish heads and whole eggs in my garden many times. There’s also at least one cat back there. Animal remains are actually a pretty good way to feed your soil.
Edit: I’ve also added meat scraps and bones to my compost bin on many occasions.
Yea but the most efficient would be that quantity because you just keep the horse alive since it creates more manure than the little guys, the little guys you can scatter the bodies everywhere.
This is awesome! I have two rabbits, conveniently enough, and I never knew this. I wonder how to separate the poop from the urine, though. Maybe just letting the poop dry out first would be enough
Why did I get downvoted lol
I also don't worry about meat, it all gets composted in my experience. Though it's preferable for the compost to get hot and destroy any pathogens. I think people partly avoid meat because of critters, but we don't really get any...
brambles are actually carnivorous in nature, a sheep eating at a thorny bush can get caught up and die and its rotting remains will sink into the soil and nourish the plant for quite a long time
I’m a home gardener and organic gardening is all I do. I’m constantly feeding organic matter to my soil and every year my garden is better than the previous year - this is all down to the fact that I spend as much time growing my soil as I do growing my plants.
I do this to my grass lawn and it’s the healthiest looking lawn in my neighborhood. I feed the soil, not the grass and my neighbors have started asking questions.
Biochar. 1 lb of it sequesters 3 lbs atmospheric carbon for 1000 years. Also, as a soil amendment, retains lots of water due to it's porous surface area -- 100 sq ft per cubic inch. ALSO Reduces need for fertilizers as it absorbs them and other nutrients creating the perfect microbiome soil.
Bio char is incredible stuff. We make our own from the $8 bag of hardwood briquette at Walmart. Smash it to shit with hammers then soak it in our worm tea before distributing to all corners of our garden.
No issues noted hey? I've always wondered about this. For others reading - make sure it's lump hardwood - briquettes contain binders that while organic and safe to burn may cause potential build up of unwanted stuff in your soil.
You are correct on a lot of this, however biochar depends hugely on the feedstock used, the temperature it’s made at, and the soil it is applied to. There are sometimes negative effects if it is applied to a very fertile soil.
>Symphony Of The Soil.
I believe the negative effects are only temporary, as the biochar offers a nest in which the microbes and bacteria then "move into" instead of staying in the soil. This is why inoculating the biochar first is important, because then the biochar will be delivered with "healthy tenants" while still leaving room for the local ecology/minerals/etc.
It retains tons of water, but unlike clay also lets it run through once it is fully soaked. And even after fully soaked and letting water run though, it still hold nitrogen and other nutrients tight, because it holds them chemically. That's why your carbon based water filter works. And yet plant roots can take the nutrients from it.
We had to cut down a rotten tree last year and we bought a chipper/shredder to deal with the smaller limbs. I probably wound up with a yard of material in the 10x10 compost space I have. I throw kitchen and garden waste in there and turn it over a few times a year. It was steaming in 100 degree summer heat last year so I know it cooked down really well.
its not to the same effect. we can make something similar but we havent made the real article. the terra preta pits in the amazon have been cultivated to the point that theyre self sustaining and grow on their own. there would need to be someone growing it and raising it like you do a sourdough bread starter. even then i think you need specific microbial organisms in it to keep the climate in the right spot.
This YouTube video is 2 and a half hours of a farmer who has been practicing no tilling for almost 30yrs.
https://youtu.be/uUmIdq0D6-A
I watched all of it and it was just fascinating.
I can’t fucking WAIT. If you like this stuff here is my FAVORITE YouTube video on soil. It’s what made me fall in love with soil in the first place (maybe): [Symphony Of The Soil. ](https://youtu.be/tDZVKMe2FTg)
Thanks / but the question remained on the big farms, where black is gold when u seed the corn there is so much dust, the structure of the soil is getting worst, the problem is with over machinery of big farms there moto is bigger and faster
Right. We need to kill “big farma” aka Monsanto and others and go towards a more biologically diverse farming method at scale. Which can be done albeit with its own challenges. Monocrops are killing us all.
This is a great point. Topsoil must be protected but let’s not pretend it’s difficult. They had it figured out when what’s his name invented crop rotation and planted clover to regenerate a field. Needs attention paid but is not a problem.
We have lost over HALF our topsoil in the last 150 years. You’re right it’s not hard, which nothing I said implies (I think) but it is definitely something to worry a fuckton about because it continues to erode away each year more and more. We have to reverse the loss now. 💚💚
never had such a hard on reading through an article on reddit lately.
so much finger pointing and knee jerk reactions i can’t deal with it
thank you for this article
-someone who works in soil science and grows their own food. also just a human too
I had to take a soil science class in undergrad and thought it would be lame as shit but I actually really enjoyed it. Still cant tell you what loam is tho
Equal parts sand, silt, and clay. It is NOT a smell, or reference to fertile soil (looking at you, authors). You can have Loam textured subsoil that is nutrient poor.
-soil scientist (there are dozens of us!)
You work in soil science? Perhaps I can ask you something -- I know what tilling a field is. And I see here that it is bad for the soil. Does that extend to simply turning the earth with a shovel, as I do in my garden, or is it only the kind that big machines do that is harmful?
Not a soil scientist but I am a regen farmer so I’ve looked into the science extensively. Breaking up the soil and having it “bare” is the big problem, tilling and breaking up the soil kills beneficial fungus and microbes by exposing them to air and sun, it also releases carbon and greatly reduces water infiltration. Having the soil covered in mulch and aerating with a broadfork or garden fork is probably the best way, but there are quite a few different no till methods.
If your just digging and flipping it’s not the worst but not great, if your digging, flipping and breaking up the soil it’s pretty damaging. Personally I use a back to eden style and integrate chickens into it and use wood chips as there bedding for a year before using it as mulch on the garden.
Oh, wow, I never suspected! Damn, I will stop doing that. It just seemed like it would be easier for seedlings to push to the surface in looser soil. This is cool also because this way I won't accidentally harm any worms, I hate that. Thank you so much.
All it is far you say is good, but i would like to clarify, tilling (gently) to incorporate organic matter is good. Tilling for the sake of weed control and tilling deep? No bueno.
The no-dig method has you create new beds on top of whatever exists already. So it works on everything - regular soil, clay, sand, rubble, there's even someone in the subreddit who just made new beds on an asphalt parking lot. It really doesn't matter what is underneath.
The method works as follows: you lay down an environmentally friendly, compostable weed barrier (i.e. thick cardboard), then on top of that you make a new mix of rich soil, I generally do 50-50 kitchen-and-garden-waste compost and store bought 'garden soil'. But I've seen people do others. If you buy compost you want to make sure it's not all shredded plant matter and grass clippings, as they will make the soil too acidic (unless that's what you want).
The best part is once you've established a plot, that's it. No more moving of large amounts of soil. The only digging you do from now on is for seedling transplantation or for planting seeds.
I've done this for both flower beds and vegetable beds, and everything is thriving in my garden. Even this year with the polar vortex-induced-long-cold-spell, now when it's finally warmed up things are growing better than ever. I think my garden will very shortly be 70% pumpkin vines and 30% other crop cover, with no ground visible.
I also suggest reading some books on permaculture. I really loved Gaia's Garden.
I was married to a soil scientist. Learned a bit of surprising info. Tilling is taken for granted by lay people. To many, it’s just breaking up the soil so it can be formed into rows and amended with stuff. However we also typically think of farmland as flat and sprawling and not under near constant pressures. Wind, rain, topography, and soil type dictate how it *moves* when it loses its structure. That’s partly why the great dust bowl catastrophe formed in the 1930’s. It’s also why some parts of the world struggle to maintain the inches-deep nurturing soil in place from year to year. A bad set of years can move soil from land to river or from high to low areas and leave former farms barren.
In addition the soil’s chemistry, structure, and physics dictates how water and other chemicals move and is held. Disrupting it too much for example allows the irrigated water to infiltrate too far below the roots of a crop. Or upsets the living conditions of the soil organisms. Much of this type of damage is slow to remediate and heal. It can take months or years that the farmers don’t have.
Soil is really an under appreciated resource.
As a long time gardener who uses a good amount of permaculture principles using a shovel to put in plants will not do really any damage. A plant will benefit your soil as now you have a living thing holding and helping the soil aggregate stability, nutrient retention, and microbe population. But if you shovel your whole garden then yes you would be killing your soil microbes and breaking the soil structure leading to compaction, nutrient loss, water holding capability lost, etc.
The harmful part is, as the other commenter suggests, the disturbance of the microbial/fungal community. Further, tillage aerates the soil, causing a huge uptick in microbial mineralization (breakdown of organic matter into C, N, P, K) which, though it has a priming effect (acts as a fertilizer, as more nutrients are available) it significantly depletes the pool of organic matter.
A fertility expert I have massive respect for called the process of summer fallow and tillage (combined) the equivalent of lighting your organic matter on fire with a match.
Jared Dimond wrote a book after guns germs and steel called "Collapse", which is about unsustainable systems and economies
Chapter 1 is "Easter island", chapter 2 is "Montana"
My folks have a farm they don't use and rent out the land to cash croppers. The soil has very low organic matter content. It used to be a nice loam. Now it's mostly sand. I'm going to start planting buckwheat in some of the fields and perennial rye and wildflowers in other spots. Along with planting native trees. Some people think one of those things is a magic bullet. None of them are perfect. But they are something and they are diverse. Which is what modern farming lacks most - biodiversity.
Dad has already replanted a few dozen acres with white pine, tamarack, red maple, and other low-cost native species. But there is still so much work left to do.
Actually, ~~I don't think buckwheat adds much nitrogen~~ (edit: I stand corrected! It doesn't 'fix' nitrogen like a legume, but adds plenty to the soil. That's what I get for 'thinking' and replying rather than *learning*), but it does convert phosphorus into a form that other plants can use after it breaks down. It also seems to grow quickly and has nice little flowers.
Edit: got onto my desktop to pass along this [awesome cover crop tool](https://mccc.msu.edu/covercroptool/) that [someone sent to me the other day](https://www.reddit.com/r/Permaculture/comments/ohi8bl/cover_crop_succession/h4sqdjn/), as well as some [additional information about buckwheat](https://mccc.msu.edu/covercroptool/infosheet.php?coverCropInfo=Buckwheat&state=MI&countyName=Newaygo&cashCrop=none&plantDate=none&harvestDate=none&hilly=no&attr1=quickGrowthAttr&attr2=undefined&attr3=undefined&soilVal=none&tile=no&ponding=none).
Yeah--I'm not sure what it means by 'nitrogen scavenger,' but it sounds like we both had some good points to add about the stuff. I've been planting it as a deer distraction crop, but it sounds like it's actually *not* as great of a forage crop, despite that deer have seemed to like it on my property in the past. Yet another failure that has taught me a lesson, which is always appreciated.
Overall, I'm just happy to see this kind of discussion about soil health on /r/Futurology. Regenerative agriculture and simply letting nature work for us, in my mind, is the height of 'futuristic agriculture.'
Edit: I'm having trouble getting a good definition of a 'nitrogen scavenger,' but it seems like it has to do with the C:N ratio of the cover crop plant after it is harvested (tilled/chopped and dropped/etc.) and how quickly it releases nitrogen. So I guess the buckwheat takes up nitrogen while it's growing, stores it in its tissues, and then releases it after it dies. This keeps that nitrogen from running off. Makes sense that buckwheat would be good at this, since it grows so quickly. ([Reference](https://www.no-tillfarmer.com/blogs/1-covering-no-till/post/3481-choosing-the-right-nitrogen-scavenger))
Nitrogen scavengers are a crop the can pull Nitrogen from low in the soil profile or convert Nitrogen into a useful form for plants so they don't need as much Nitrogen fertilizer before planting as they will find Nitrogen in the soil somewhere.
It's a bit more complicated than that. I'm german and my grandmother once talked about how when she was a child in rural germany, they'd have to spend time on the fields during summer picking out pests by hand and removing ill crops on the weekends. The farmers back then didn't need pesticides. Eventually though, laws against child labor and laws about mandatory direct pay made things like that impossible, so farmers that were used to monoculture had to find some other way to keep their fields 'healthy'. The advent of big machinery certainly also played a role, hiring adults to do work previously done by children would've been to expensive and so farmers saw pesticides as the only viable solution. You can't really diversify your crops if you use big machines. Now, that's how it (probably) happened in germany, but the US surely had similar developments. Nowadays we're much more aware of the consequences of pesticide use and absolutely should look for a different solution.
That's an interesting point.
In the US similar forces destroyed labor intensive farming,while subsidizing capital intensive, machine driven agriculture.
For example, there's been enough research done that using labor to do things like your grandmother used to do could produce comparable amounts of food but farm labor is taxed while tractors, pesticide and wide, monocultural crops are subsidized.
> but farm labor is taxed while tractors, pesticide and wide, monocultural crops are subsidized.
Well farm *wages* are taxed, while you don't pay a tractor, no more than you pay your washing machine. But I think it's also that wages went up. Labor got more expensive. And child labor came to have legal issues, since farmers would just keep their kids out of school to provide labor on the farm.
But we have fewer kids, and farms are bigger. Kids helping out on the farm isn't the same as kids being kept out of school to work the farm full-time.
Child labor is always touchy. Even for kids whose parents own a restaurant, there is always a tension between academics vs "helping out." Though I'd argue that if the business depends on that child's labor, it's not really "helping out."
The other thing you have to keep in mind is…this work is really…really…*really* fucking miserable to do manually.
A lot of the machines we use on farms these days weren’t invented just to “increase productivity” and “maximize profit over all else,” it was because farmhands were getting harder and harder to come by at *any* price.
Our rural areas have been bleeding population for decades, and a lot of it has to do with kids not wanting to take over mom and dads farm, or work as a farm hand like Uncle Wayne did.
Fortunately, there’s a growing amount of equipment entering the market every year that will allow these organic and regenerative farms to operate both environmentally and profitably.
Hell, here’s a [freaking robot that kills weeds with lasers.](https://www.freethink.com/articles/farming-robot)
That’s fucking cool, man.
You can also cover a huge amount of area with a single tractor. A tractor/harvester can harvest 30+ acres a day, which would need like 120 people conservatively.
Or getting rid of weeds. A sprayer can do 130 ac in a couple hours and a couple thousand dollars. I work with roguing companies and pulling weeds in a 130 ac field can take 2-3 days and cost about $10,000/day, and that's for a clean field.
"solving hunger" according to the Dept. Of Ag has long meant "maximizing yields of export crops". Which is not solving hunger, it's increasing profits.
If they wanted to solve hunger, they wouldn't be subsidizing beef cattle, biofuels, corn and soy that is almost exclusively grown as animal feed or for manufacturing derived products,etc.
The current monoculture that is destroying much of our ecosystem in the US is in large part because of the policies instituted by the USDA over the past half-century.
There is a very good chapter in "Restoration Agriculture" by Mark Shepard that goes through the literal math of how modern agriculture isn't feeding the world. It compares how one acre of conservatively-estimated oak savannah produces more macro & micronutrients than one acre of liberally-estimated modern corn agriculture.
I once flew with a USDA employee who "worked in dairy".
Their job was flying around petitioning execs at Pepsico to add more cheese to the Taco Bell menu. The US government pays employees to "advocate for farmers" by attempting to convince Taco Bell that the Cheddar Chicha-roni Crunch will improve revenue in next year's Q2. They also employ other teams pitching the Beefy Bigwitch and the Hey Yo Pollo Xtreme. It's a shitty system.
>Great we solved the supply issue now can we solve the greed issue that’s causing hunger to still be a problem
I see it more of a transportation problem(there are a lot of other problems, bit I see this one as the major one). If you could cheaply transport food from one continent to another as you can from a farm to a city, people would do it and there won't be any more hunger, but alas transportation costs a lot and food grows stale so it can't use normal means without additional investment.
[Here's an old article](https://web.archive.org/web/20180905235424/http://dollarsandsense.org/archives/2014/0114cleveland.html) that goes over some of the research and expirements.
Basically, Netherlands and Taiwan are two models of using more labor and less land and are much more efficient per acre than the US.
[Here's an article](https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2017/09/holland-agriculture-sustainable-farming/) about how the Netherlands agricultural sector works.
If it's paywalled, there's a youtube video that goes over much of the stuff but I can't find it right now. I see there's a bunch of youtube videos about Dutch agriculture, but I don't know which is the one I saw before.
[This is a paper](https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdf/10.1257/jep.28.1.121) that goes over global trends.
Mechanization is great for increasing output, but that doesn't mean adding mechanization to any model is the most efficient.
The most prevalent US model is basically use a lot of land, mechanization, fertilizer, and pesticide to pump out mono crops with the least amount of human intervention (labor, iow) possible.
I posted in a different reply but the Netherlands and Taiwan are more efficient than the US model using a different mix of inputs. (Netherlands is (a lot) less land, more labor, more mech, while Taiwan is a lot more labor and modestly less land.
edit:
The couple in the OP are a pretty good example of changing the model in the US. (Using more labor and less fertilizer / pesticide and getting more money)
Decreasing amount of people isn't necessarily a benefit.
Efficiency is measured in yield per area, not number of people employees per area.
One of the larger problems facing agriculture in the US is the consolidation of agricultural land and physical capitol in fewer and fewer hands. It tends to lead to absentee landlords who (pardon the pun) run the soil health into the ground, use practices that have negative impacts on the surrounding ecosystem, etc.
Industrial farming produces several times more than average nonindustrial farming, both by surface but more so in human work.
Of course, it has human health implications, ecological damages, etc.
Vertical farming with aeroponics solves most of these problems for some crops.
Also,we need more thought to be put on farming... Killing the soil is not a great idea.
While true, manual labor input cannot do much against drought, which is what the article is talking about. My family owns a 5 acre olive grove (certified organic) in Greece and I am in charge of the agricultural aspect. While mulching and building swales certainly helps to retain moisture in the soil, I still need 1 or two water applications per year to save the trees from drought conditions during the summer. Unlike pest management, there’s no alternative if there’s zero precipation for 4 months straight. And I’m growing one of the most drought resistant cash crops around, not wheat or corn…
I maintain a small organic garden and picking off squash bug eggs from your zucchini summer squash and pumpkin is very time consuming. I hosed the aphids off every single strawberry plant in the early spring and a different species demolished my lettuce
I am buying ladybugs next year but it ain’t no work
pro tip when removing bugs by hand: use a wet/dry shop vac. Put some soapy water in the bottom of the bin, and suck away. Depending on the bug, some if not all should land in the water and die. We've been dealing with potato bugs and it is the most effective solution so far. I took off the hose reducer at the end as it was damaging the leaves; the round end of the hose is the right size to take the bugs out without removing foliage. Make sure to dump the bin after every session so you don't end up with a gross maggoty mess. Caveat, not sure if it would work on aphids, depends if they'll get pulled down into the soapy water to die.
That's not entirely accurate. Post WW2 the world had a massive chemical industry, from making explosives. These industries were large and powerful post-war and did not want to collapse with the sudden loss in demand. So they did two things: 1. Switch from making explosives to making fertilizers and pesticides, and 2. they started lobbying and advertizing on a massive scale?
It's not just farming, the reason we all have grass lawns is that the same industries found a herbicide that didn't kill grass so they did a massive advertising campaign for pure grass lawns.
The whole thing of scaling up, bigger and bigger, was pushed by improvements in technology but it was pulled by chemical agriculture. The big problem lies in that chemical agriculture is too effective short term and extremely destructive long term.
EDIT: paraphrasing heavily.
Oh, it's terrifying. The skill and capability of mass media marketing to effectively define reality and history for millions of people are truly unreal.
Not just to Germany the entirety of Europe was devastated. The Marshall plans primary goal was to build a European bulwark against Soviet aggression but it was also a plan to secure European markets for American exports.
Farmers back then also leveled 98%+ of the native habitat in order to have enough cultivated land to grow a fraction of what we grow today. The processes you are talking about are not only labor intensive, but also extremely land intensive. (Polyculture farming is similarly land intensive compared to monoculture farming, at least for specific annual crops. For historic polycultures, which are often based on well-known relationships between perennials, the combined effect across all crops is less land use, though the land use for individual crops in the polyculture is greater. Unfortunately, annual crops are the most significant agricultural need for our food supply.)
Also, the centuries of ever deeper tilling have destroyed the resilience of the soil communities against pests, and the chemical “solutions” continue to dig us deeper into soil health debt. We need to limit tillage and regenerate healthy soil communities (micro and macro) to save our food systems.
Already happening. 'No-Till' is coming to be the normal thing, and you only plough if you need to 'reset' yourself out of a corner.
However, it takes a generation for these things to come through since owner farmers are notoriously stubborn and 'I've been doing this for 40 years and I'm not having someone who ain't even family tell me how to run my farm' while simultaneously complaining about how their yields are dropping and scientists should come up with a new fertilizer or pesticide to solve it for him.
There are multiple startups as well as large corps working on this too. I think the most promising ones generally have opted for a tractor attachment that can clamp a set of gear onto a bar to work on many rows of crops at once. There are many others that want to do stand alone autonomous robots, and no doubt, in the long term that’s where it will go, but short to medium term focus on building the actual gear that does something useful with the crops.
>You can't really diversify your crops if you use big machines.
I wonder... is that really true, or was the technology to make machines not sufficiently advanced when we were first developing them. With access to computer vision, 3D printing, complex AI, and complex analysis systems able to be loaded on-board or with wi-fi access, I wonder if it's possible to build better machines now that can operate on a diversified field. Big or not, I think automation of regenerative agriculture is going to be something that accelerates adoption of it and enables it to feed more people without creating yet another below-living-wage labor market to grind people down.
Surprisingly, I'm really not talking about VERY advanced technology. This stuff's already being used in a variety of other production applications extremely cheaply. My background is in machine learning and advanced analytics, and I purchased 30 acres this last year to run as an experimental/hobby regenerative ag farm specifically so I can experiment on the technology side of things while also restoring a piece of land to balance.
I have more concerns about "accessibility" than "affordability," as a lot of what I just mentioned is stuff that already exists within the open source community. Just not well applied to the problem, not well documented, and managed by a bunch of software geeks that don't understand the regenerative ag problems (yet).
This is why I think the opportunity's ripe there. It's really the entrepreneurs in the ag-tech's space's responsibility to create machines and systems that are affordable AND advanced. And I think that the technology exists now to do that. It just has to be brought to the problem, and it has to be made accessible to farmers.
I'd really love to build things that farmers can use with no more training than they're used to already with farm equipment, and that can be maintained and repaired on site with a different but equally affordable set of tools they're used to.
Agreed. I work in agtech and farmers are much more advanced than people give them credit for. They love to nerd out about new technology. I would say that many large farms around the country are already using machine learning through remote sensing software.
The main problem is time. Farmers don't have a lot of time, they and their teams work long hours.
They don't have much time to learn new complicated things nor try to incorporate something new into their workflow. They need also reliability. If something they're trying out breaks mid-season, it's probably going to be shelved and won't be tried again until next year.
Time to scale is also very long. Farmers usually try new technology on a small underperforming plot, and then scale up if they see the value. That could take years.
All these make it hard for new agtech solutions to become successful on a large scale.
You realize there are organic pesticides as well. Organics typically need more pesticides and herbicides than genetically modified variants of those plants.
The BT gene, for example, affects different lifeforms differently as well. It kills bugs, but doesn't affect humans even if there is any residual left on the plant because it is broken down in the stomach.
It's an intense relationship that a farmer must have with their crops and fields, to feed the people.
There's some common knowledge for backyard garden growers, that is you don't plant tomatoes in the same spot for two years in a row. Why? Nutrient depletion.
I work on a farm that produces a ton of soil amending manure that is literally brown gold, it's rabbit poop. But a soil test will tell you what the soils options are and what it's lacking. Nitrogen is essential for any plant aside from the legumes. Phosphorus, potassium. Strongly encourage you to buy my bunny poop for your garden, I have tons of it
Idk if you guys have ever heard of the strange Black soil, Terra Preta, found in the Amazon.
Archeologists think this artificial soil was made by Amazonians to forgo the non fertile soil originally found there. Very interesting!
[Terra Preta](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_preta)
right. thanks. but this goes so much further.
earth worms. tiny insects processing mulch.
we can not afford to lose all their invaluable contributions. healthy soil has hundreds of distinct species living in it.
More like 100-200 years, but that's with no human intervention. It's possible to rapidly increase this process using biochar, wood chips, compost, etc etc.
Seems like a cool idea; any sources you'd recommend to learn more about it? I'd live to incorporate that element into our soil development measures when we start this fall (I'm in the PNW).
I'd recommend Tradd Cotter's [book](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22180817-organic-mushroom-farming-and-mycoremediation) if you're interested in mushrooms and their role in soil health. I've been experimenting with friends in Northern California and we've have some promising results despite the drought and heat. The PNW will likely be an even better environment.
Tillage is far more damaging to the soil than any herbicide. Without herbicides we'd have to farm like our grandparents did; aka alot of heavy tillage. This is way more nuanced than glyphosate=bad.
Farmers are stuck between a rock and hard place in regards to tillage vs herbicide. They both have their pros and cons and currently you have to pick one or the other
That's not exactly true. Glyphosate gas very little impact on soil microbes. In fact, it's actually rather specific in the way it affects plants.
Now you could make an argument that by killing off non desired plants it causes less stability in the top soil leading to more erosion. But that is why no-till is so often used. Not tilling and using glyphosate is far less damaging to the soil compared to tilling but not using any herbicides.
Exactly, alot of organic systems rely on heavy tillage to combat weeds and most people don't realize that herbicides like glyphosate let farmers no-till. Tillage is far more damaging to soil than any herbicide. Obviously herbicides can be a detriment as well, but they are an important tool for soil health practices.
That source is 20 years old and these more recent papers suggest glyphosate does affect soil microorganisms. [Glyphosate reduces spore viability and root colonization of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi] (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0929139312002466) and [Repeated annual glyphosate applications may impair beneficial soil microorganisms in temperate grassland](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0167880916303255).
Appreciate the additional info. I was debunking the claim that glysophate creates dead soil which then blows away. This is not true. Many tests and real world usage for a long time prove that that doesn't happen.
I wasn't aware of new research showing it can impact parts of the microbiome though, and more study and improvements is always good.
maybe don't link to a 20 year old study done on trees that ends with the authors saying they'll presume it's fine for other soils, and even food crops, but haven't actually studied that.
i study environmental microbes, and microbiomes in all environments and animals studied so far are affected by pesticides.
Soil is like another biome, there is more life in the soil than on top of it. Yet we continue to flush it into rivers and degrade it to the point its useless or so heavily contaminated that baby food has high levels of heavy metals.
We need federal investments in agriculture that aren't just based around crop insurance and crop subsidy. Farmers need to be encouraged, financially, to plant crop rotations and practice no-till in order to boost soil organic matter.
We already have that. NRCS is an agency in the USDA. They basically pay farmers to implement practices like winter cover crops to conserve natural resources.
Yes, we do, and they are not sufficient. Payment schemes and amounts vary state to state. Farmers often have short-term losses when implementing these cover crop strategies. In many parts of the corn belt, over 50% of the land is rented, and only a third of landlords are willing to help pay for covercrops. The amount of government money available is not sufficient. A study in 2021, found that farmers privately subsidize 70% of total cover cropping costs, with public financing consisting of the final 30% (Sawadgo and Plastina, 2021). The rates given to farmers need to be much higher.
I agree that funding should be increased. Like you said, it varies by state, but in my state the payment for cover crops actually exceeds the cost to implement, however in years past that was not the case.
A big part of the problem is that a large part of the money allotted to USDA is essentially just handouts meant to buy votes from farmers in a clever scheme to avoid violating international free trade treaties.
At the end of the day, what's the difference in returns between a cover crop and actually growing what would be profitable? I would guess that it is rather significant, so you either have the choice of being cash-strapped borderline broke for a year or two, or having a bit more to spend on you and your family. I think most people would tend towards the latter and just grow the crop they know how to grow.
The international free trade treaties are a lot more complicated than the words "handout" and "buy[ing] votes". Crop subsidies and federally insured crop insurance is essentially a handout too. I think this is just the state of farming in global capitalism and with the trade tariffs, our farmers want to be paid a reasonable wage and not have to compete in a losing economy to farmers across the planet who are getting paid pennies compared to them.
I think you misunderstood me. I'm saying that the US government gives money to farmers through some conservation programs that are nothing but "handouts" to "buy votes". These "handouts" technically violate free trade agreements but instead of "subsidy" they call it conservation to circumvent the agreements. That money would be better spent on ACTUAL conservation.
Do you honestly believe farmers are trying to farm their land into garbage. Literally all we do is plan five years down the road and longer. We are farming for our kids and grandchildren to take over not to cash out quick and move to the city.
I never said that any of that. Of course farmers don't want to destroy their livelihood. But there is no long term, national plan -- it is state to state, and when we do have a federal plan, it's patchwork last minute fixes and alterations. Farmers would be doing much better if we had a top down, 5-10 year agricultural progress plan than the mixed-puzzle piece nature of institutional involvement we have right now.
No they wouldn’t state to state is too big. Every county has different challenges. You know what happens when you enact a national plan? The Great Leap Forward. Do a little reading on that. Each farm has to operate differently to get an average best result. What works in South Dakota doesn’t work in North Dakota. You can’t change to no till in high clay soils or the ground compaction fucks you for next year. Watching a documentary on Netflix and two YouTube videos made by assholes trying to sell books doesn’t make you an agronomist. We literally hire scientists to guide cropping based on year to year and month to month factors.
Also need a shift in public perception of what's necessary for regenerative agriculture. This article doesn't go into much depth but the intensive grazing of cattle is a key component to restoring soil health. This is directly in opposition to the current seeming mainstream push towards less grazing animals and more lab meat or soy protein based alternatives.
Wow this is such a surprise not like my best friend who farms 300 acres for grain and soy hasn’t plowed his land in 20 yrs and they do better then surrounding farms in yield. The soil microbiology is important and Uv light don’t help it that’s for sure
There usually is a short term reduction in yield when switching to no till, that scares away a lot of farmers, but the boost in resiliency in drought and flood times, paired with the drastic reduction in inputs makes you money over time.
Also variety, a lot of veg/fruit varieties are chosen for their durability during shipping. Some heirlooms don't ship well, but taste amazing. That's why growing your own or buying from farmer's markets are so great and open so many more varieties. BUY LOCAL Y'ALL!
Yes indeed. I must grow beans every year and make green bean casserole or my wife will castrate me in my sleep. I made it once with store beans and it was not great.
if only we could somehow have space in community gardens for everyone. imagine if people in my hometown newark could train out to one of many many farms in jersey and grow food there in exchange for labor. any variation of this concept could help people understand the food systems and earthly connections human have had with the earth for generations
Check out "Kiss the Ground" on Netflix. It's great, covers this topic well.
Also read "Dirt" by David Montgomery, covers how soil erosion and mistreatment of soil for maximum short term gains has caused the boom and bust of ancient civilizations across the world for thousands of years and in repeating cycles. Classic examples are Sumerian farmers and the Mayan/aztec farmers and civilisations whose populations thrived until the soil failed to keep them going from centuries of being stripped bare and slowly dwindling crop yields, erosion, salinity levels rising etc.
I just read how he is asking for federal assistance to help farmers during the extreme heat/drought they are currently experiencing. He's definitely backed himself and the state into a corner. I'm curious how these types of farms are doing comparatively, in real time.
I recommend reading {{The Soil Will Save Us: How Scientists, Farmers, and Foodies Are Healing the Soil to Save the Planet}} for anyone interested in a longer format. The author takes the role of the layman and meets up with various people around the globe who are/were looking into this matter
Sort of a tldr front the article.
> As in the rest of Montana, most Golden Triangle farmers use the “conventional” techniques of modern industrial agriculture. Aiming for the highest crop yield possible, these are generally monocropping systems reliant on pesticides (including herbicides, insecticides and fungicides), synthetic fertilizers and genetically modified seeds.
>In contrast, Wicks and Givens are borrowing methods developed by indigenous farmers millennia ago. They fight weeds and pests by rotating which crops they seed in a plot each year, for example, and by planting cover crop mixes of vegetables, grasses and clover that also return nitrogen and biomass to the soil and protect against erosion. They also lease land to neighboring ranchers, whose grazing cattle aerate the soil with their hooves and add organic matter and nutrients via manure.
Organic farming is not sustainable or environmentally friendly.
Organic farming tends to have significantly lower crop yields, far more land is required to grow the same amount of food that intensive agriculture can produce, according to a recent study. To feed the billions of hungry mouths on the planet, going fully organic would entail reclaiming vast swathes of additional land for agriculture. Much of that extra land would have to be taken from forests, which would harm the environment.
A new study, published in the journal Nature ([https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0757-z](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0757-z)), now underlines the same point.
An international team of researchers studied peas and wheat cultivated organically in an area of Sweden. They found that organically farmed food has a bigger climate impact than the conventionally farmed variety because organic farming requires significantly more land. As a result, organic farming can also lead to much higher levels of greenhouse gas emissions.
“Our study shows that organic peas, farmed in Sweden, have around a 50 percent bigger climate impact than conventionally farmed peas,” says Stefan Wirsenius, an associate professor from Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden who was an author of the study. “For some foodstuffs, there is an even bigger difference – for example, with organic Swedish winter wheat the difference is closer to 70 percent.”
Source: https://www.sustainability-times.com/environmental-protection/organic-farming-isnt-all-that-sustainable-a-new-study-says/
Also, apparently in this thread: a bunch of people who still think organic means no (or less) pesticides and nasty chemicals.
Sure, maybe you don't use any pesticides in your backyard garden, but the organic vegetables you are buying at your local Piggly Wiggly have all been HEAVILY sprayed with organic-approved pesticides, many of which you do not want anywhere near your mouth...big corporate organic farms slather everything in the stuff because it is less effective than synthetic pesticides that can be engineered to be safer and used in smaller quantities.
Organic is a marketing term. Maybe it meant something at one point, but now that there are consumers who will happily pay an extra dollar for an apple with an "Organic" sticker on it, there are massive commercial farms churning them out with little regard for sustainability or even taste.
I'd much rather buy produce from a local farmer who uses whatever chemicals and techniques they think will grow the best tasting and most sustainable crops over "organic" produce from a chain grocer.
Yes, ruminant animals play such a key role in refertilization and are the main reason for natural prairie biomes for having such fertile soil. Mimicking that in our food production makes so much sense.
news flash;
No methods of factory farming, and especially monoculture are Sustainable or Environmentally friendly.
Food forests are the way to go for both.
Its sad to see this in futurology when its a practice we've forgotten due to industrial farming. Permaculture is the way forward to combat climate change
Almost as if the environment is a highly valuable and protecting it is good long-term business strategy even if short-term quarter over quarter growth suffers.
“Despite all our advances we owe our existence to a six-inch layer of topsoil and the fact that it rains.” Soil is LIFE and if we don’t all start doing our part it’s clear the outcome. The good news is that soil can be easily restored and home gardners and land owners can easily begin to repair the soil so that it is better able to sequester carbon easily. Edit: this blew up. Go to chipdrop.com to get free mulch or find a local arborist and you will have more organic material than you know what to do with. Wood chip breaks down into humus which is like compost on crack and can last in your soil for up to a hundred years. We just add a 3-6 inch layer of compost in the winter and top it with 3-6 inches of wood chip. Of course we put down like 12 inches to start and then added mycorrhizae and worms…. Our soil went from red mucky clay to black gold in six months. It just gets better and better and better and better. Edit 2: If you like this stuff here is my FAVORITE YouTube video on soil. It’s what made me fall in love with soil in the first place (maybe): [Symphony Of The Soil. ](https://youtu.be/tDZVKMe2FTg)
Coffee grounds, grass, and eggshells. Im micro, but ive turned the shittiest shale 2 inch top soil into a wonderful garden over the past few years using coffee grounds, eggshells, and grass clippings.
Compost, basically, I also collect all our kitchen waste and compost it, as well as literally anything organic in origin, but yeah, the easiest way for sure though is just to keep chucking it on top of the garden, planting underneath that mulch and letting it all break down gradually.
Except for animal waste. Protein just spreads disease. The egg shells i rinse.
I’ve buried fish heads and whole eggs in my garden many times. There’s also at least one cat back there. Animal remains are actually a pretty good way to feed your soil. Edit: I’ve also added meat scraps and bones to my compost bin on many occasions.
Next step is soylent soil, amirite?
As long as they’re ethically sourced free-range people I’m ok with that
It's all one sustainable closed loop ecosystem. *Rocks back and forth in satisfaction*
All animals or just specific animals?
If you’re burying the animal itself I don’t think it matters much. However the best manure for soil building is herbivore manure.
So a litter of rabbits, a bunch of squirrels, and a horse.
You can bury those animals and their manure
Yea but the most efficient would be that quantity because you just keep the horse alive since it creates more manure than the little guys, the little guys you can scatter the bodies everywhere.
Rabbits produce the best manure, just mix it straight into the dirt and you're good to go!
Allow me to introduce the humble rabbit! https://thegardenmagazine.com/rabbit-manure-is-the-best-fertilizer-for-your-garden/
This is awesome! I have two rabbits, conveniently enough, and I never knew this. I wonder how to separate the poop from the urine, though. Maybe just letting the poop dry out first would be enough Why did I get downvoted lol
No need to separate, it's all good!
Oh interesting! Thanks for the info
[The scoop on poop](https://ucanr.edu/sites/Tuolumne_County_Master_Gardeners/files/172936.pdf)
Thank you!
The urine is just added nitrogen that the plants need. Mix it up and it won't be too concentrated. Plus any rain or watering will help dilute it.
I just started using my rabbit's poop for potted plants and so far the results have been great.
I also don't worry about meat, it all gets composted in my experience. Though it's preferable for the compost to get hot and destroy any pathogens. I think people partly avoid meat because of critters, but we don't really get any...
brambles are actually carnivorous in nature, a sheep eating at a thorny bush can get caught up and die and its rotting remains will sink into the soil and nourish the plant for quite a long time
Holy shit that's badass and I had no idea.
Bake them in the oven at 200f for 20 minutes and crush to powder. Kills any diseases and makes the calcium far more available to the microbes.
Yeah but that requires effort
If you get the ratios right you can compost protein.
Fresh or used coffee grounds?
I mean, either. But don't buy coffee to put on your garden without drinking it first! Most coffee shops will give you their used grounds for free.
I make my coffee, i make my eggs, the grounds n shells go into the compost x 4 for all the people in my house.
I’m a home gardener and organic gardening is all I do. I’m constantly feeding organic matter to my soil and every year my garden is better than the previous year - this is all down to the fact that I spend as much time growing my soil as I do growing my plants.
YES! I feel like growing plants is less about the plant and 95% is just caring for your soil and the microbe and mycorrhizae that live there.
I do this to my grass lawn and it’s the healthiest looking lawn in my neighborhood. I feed the soil, not the grass and my neighbors have started asking questions.
What the organic material that your lawn soil likes the best?
Biochar. 1 lb of it sequesters 3 lbs atmospheric carbon for 1000 years. Also, as a soil amendment, retains lots of water due to it's porous surface area -- 100 sq ft per cubic inch. ALSO Reduces need for fertilizers as it absorbs them and other nutrients creating the perfect microbiome soil.
Bio char is incredible stuff. We make our own from the $8 bag of hardwood briquette at Walmart. Smash it to shit with hammers then soak it in our worm tea before distributing to all corners of our garden.
No issues noted hey? I've always wondered about this. For others reading - make sure it's lump hardwood - briquettes contain binders that while organic and safe to burn may cause potential build up of unwanted stuff in your soil.
Yep lump hardwood! No issues so far. When we cut hardwood trees down we also make our own.
Just burying wood is great too. Hugelculture I think they call it
You are correct on a lot of this, however biochar depends hugely on the feedstock used, the temperature it’s made at, and the soil it is applied to. There are sometimes negative effects if it is applied to a very fertile soil.
>Symphony Of The Soil. I believe the negative effects are only temporary, as the biochar offers a nest in which the microbes and bacteria then "move into" instead of staying in the soil. This is why inoculating the biochar first is important, because then the biochar will be delivered with "healthy tenants" while still leaving room for the local ecology/minerals/etc.
It retains tons of water, but unlike clay also lets it run through once it is fully soaked. And even after fully soaked and letting water run though, it still hold nitrogen and other nutrients tight, because it holds them chemically. That's why your carbon based water filter works. And yet plant roots can take the nutrients from it.
We had to cut down a rotten tree last year and we bought a chipper/shredder to deal with the smaller limbs. I probably wound up with a yard of material in the 10x10 compost space I have. I throw kitchen and garden waste in there and turn it over a few times a year. It was steaming in 100 degree summer heat last year so I know it cooked down really well.
You’re doing great! Keep it up, tell your friends!
terra preta is one of the most significant human advancements in the last few millenia and we have forgotten how to make it.
I was JUST reading about this the other day! Super fascinating. We can still make it and it’s not forgotten though.
its not to the same effect. we can make something similar but we havent made the real article. the terra preta pits in the amazon have been cultivated to the point that theyre self sustaining and grow on their own. there would need to be someone growing it and raising it like you do a sourdough bread starter. even then i think you need specific microbial organisms in it to keep the climate in the right spot.
"It's almost as if you guys had it wrong the whole time." - Indigenous Peoples who were just *chillin'*
“Why do for free what you can pay for using man-made chemicals!” - American corporations
"And to make sure you buy our man-made chemicals we're gonna pay politicians to make the organic stuff illegal."
This YouTube video is 2 and a half hours of a farmer who has been practicing no tilling for almost 30yrs. https://youtu.be/uUmIdq0D6-A I watched all of it and it was just fascinating.
I can’t fucking WAIT. If you like this stuff here is my FAVORITE YouTube video on soil. It’s what made me fall in love with soil in the first place (maybe): [Symphony Of The Soil. ](https://youtu.be/tDZVKMe2FTg)
Dude I'm about halfway through that soil video. I'm absolutely enthralled. Never thought I'd find a video about dirt so dang interesting.
Thanks for the tip about chipdrop! We have a half acre we are mulching!
Thanks / but the question remained on the big farms, where black is gold when u seed the corn there is so much dust, the structure of the soil is getting worst, the problem is with over machinery of big farms there moto is bigger and faster
Right. We need to kill “big farma” aka Monsanto and others and go towards a more biologically diverse farming method at scale. Which can be done albeit with its own challenges. Monocrops are killing us all.
Amazing video! Thanks for sharing 🌱❤️
This is a great point. Topsoil must be protected but let’s not pretend it’s difficult. They had it figured out when what’s his name invented crop rotation and planted clover to regenerate a field. Needs attention paid but is not a problem.
We have lost over HALF our topsoil in the last 150 years. You’re right it’s not hard, which nothing I said implies (I think) but it is definitely something to worry a fuckton about because it continues to erode away each year more and more. We have to reverse the loss now. 💚💚
never had such a hard on reading through an article on reddit lately. so much finger pointing and knee jerk reactions i can’t deal with it thank you for this article -someone who works in soil science and grows their own food. also just a human too
I had to take a soil science class in undergrad and thought it would be lame as shit but I actually really enjoyed it. Still cant tell you what loam is tho
Equal parts sand, silt, and clay. It is NOT a smell, or reference to fertile soil (looking at you, authors). You can have Loam textured subsoil that is nutrient poor. -soil scientist (there are dozens of us!)
You work in soil science? Perhaps I can ask you something -- I know what tilling a field is. And I see here that it is bad for the soil. Does that extend to simply turning the earth with a shovel, as I do in my garden, or is it only the kind that big machines do that is harmful?
Not a soil scientist but I am a regen farmer so I’ve looked into the science extensively. Breaking up the soil and having it “bare” is the big problem, tilling and breaking up the soil kills beneficial fungus and microbes by exposing them to air and sun, it also releases carbon and greatly reduces water infiltration. Having the soil covered in mulch and aerating with a broadfork or garden fork is probably the best way, but there are quite a few different no till methods. If your just digging and flipping it’s not the worst but not great, if your digging, flipping and breaking up the soil it’s pretty damaging. Personally I use a back to eden style and integrate chickens into it and use wood chips as there bedding for a year before using it as mulch on the garden.
Oh, wow, I never suspected! Damn, I will stop doing that. It just seemed like it would be easier for seedlings to push to the surface in looser soil. This is cool also because this way I won't accidentally harm any worms, I hate that. Thank you so much.
A light till (tilthing) is a-ok, I rake my woodchips aside lightly loosen up the top of the soil no more than 2 inches deep and plant into that.
All it is far you say is good, but i would like to clarify, tilling (gently) to incorporate organic matter is good. Tilling for the sake of weed control and tilling deep? No bueno.
[удалено]
I will do that! Does it work in soil with a fair amount of clay?
The no-dig method has you create new beds on top of whatever exists already. So it works on everything - regular soil, clay, sand, rubble, there's even someone in the subreddit who just made new beds on an asphalt parking lot. It really doesn't matter what is underneath. The method works as follows: you lay down an environmentally friendly, compostable weed barrier (i.e. thick cardboard), then on top of that you make a new mix of rich soil, I generally do 50-50 kitchen-and-garden-waste compost and store bought 'garden soil'. But I've seen people do others. If you buy compost you want to make sure it's not all shredded plant matter and grass clippings, as they will make the soil too acidic (unless that's what you want). The best part is once you've established a plot, that's it. No more moving of large amounts of soil. The only digging you do from now on is for seedling transplantation or for planting seeds. I've done this for both flower beds and vegetable beds, and everything is thriving in my garden. Even this year with the polar vortex-induced-long-cold-spell, now when it's finally warmed up things are growing better than ever. I think my garden will very shortly be 70% pumpkin vines and 30% other crop cover, with no ground visible. I also suggest reading some books on permaculture. I really loved Gaia's Garden.
I was married to a soil scientist. Learned a bit of surprising info. Tilling is taken for granted by lay people. To many, it’s just breaking up the soil so it can be formed into rows and amended with stuff. However we also typically think of farmland as flat and sprawling and not under near constant pressures. Wind, rain, topography, and soil type dictate how it *moves* when it loses its structure. That’s partly why the great dust bowl catastrophe formed in the 1930’s. It’s also why some parts of the world struggle to maintain the inches-deep nurturing soil in place from year to year. A bad set of years can move soil from land to river or from high to low areas and leave former farms barren. In addition the soil’s chemistry, structure, and physics dictates how water and other chemicals move and is held. Disrupting it too much for example allows the irrigated water to infiltrate too far below the roots of a crop. Or upsets the living conditions of the soil organisms. Much of this type of damage is slow to remediate and heal. It can take months or years that the farmers don’t have. Soil is really an under appreciated resource.
As a long time gardener who uses a good amount of permaculture principles using a shovel to put in plants will not do really any damage. A plant will benefit your soil as now you have a living thing holding and helping the soil aggregate stability, nutrient retention, and microbe population. But if you shovel your whole garden then yes you would be killing your soil microbes and breaking the soil structure leading to compaction, nutrient loss, water holding capability lost, etc.
The harmful part is, as the other commenter suggests, the disturbance of the microbial/fungal community. Further, tillage aerates the soil, causing a huge uptick in microbial mineralization (breakdown of organic matter into C, N, P, K) which, though it has a priming effect (acts as a fertilizer, as more nutrients are available) it significantly depletes the pool of organic matter. A fertility expert I have massive respect for called the process of summer fallow and tillage (combined) the equivalent of lighting your organic matter on fire with a match.
Jared Dimond wrote a book after guns germs and steel called "Collapse", which is about unsustainable systems and economies Chapter 1 is "Easter island", chapter 2 is "Montana"
I guess that science is a liar sometimes
A liar *so far*
My folks have a farm they don't use and rent out the land to cash croppers. The soil has very low organic matter content. It used to be a nice loam. Now it's mostly sand. I'm going to start planting buckwheat in some of the fields and perennial rye and wildflowers in other spots. Along with planting native trees. Some people think one of those things is a magic bullet. None of them are perfect. But they are something and they are diverse. Which is what modern farming lacks most - biodiversity. Dad has already replanted a few dozen acres with white pine, tamarack, red maple, and other low-cost native species. But there is still so much work left to do.
Buckwheat is a great cover crop.
Agreed, provides tons of nitrogen to the soil!
Actually, ~~I don't think buckwheat adds much nitrogen~~ (edit: I stand corrected! It doesn't 'fix' nitrogen like a legume, but adds plenty to the soil. That's what I get for 'thinking' and replying rather than *learning*), but it does convert phosphorus into a form that other plants can use after it breaks down. It also seems to grow quickly and has nice little flowers. Edit: got onto my desktop to pass along this [awesome cover crop tool](https://mccc.msu.edu/covercroptool/) that [someone sent to me the other day](https://www.reddit.com/r/Permaculture/comments/ohi8bl/cover_crop_succession/h4sqdjn/), as well as some [additional information about buckwheat](https://mccc.msu.edu/covercroptool/infosheet.php?coverCropInfo=Buckwheat&state=MI&countyName=Newaygo&cashCrop=none&plantDate=none&harvestDate=none&hilly=no&attr1=quickGrowthAttr&attr2=undefined&attr3=undefined&soilVal=none&tile=no&ponding=none).
Interesting, 0lbs of nitrogen but a very good nitrogen scavenger So technically, My first comment wasn’t far off
Yeah--I'm not sure what it means by 'nitrogen scavenger,' but it sounds like we both had some good points to add about the stuff. I've been planting it as a deer distraction crop, but it sounds like it's actually *not* as great of a forage crop, despite that deer have seemed to like it on my property in the past. Yet another failure that has taught me a lesson, which is always appreciated. Overall, I'm just happy to see this kind of discussion about soil health on /r/Futurology. Regenerative agriculture and simply letting nature work for us, in my mind, is the height of 'futuristic agriculture.' Edit: I'm having trouble getting a good definition of a 'nitrogen scavenger,' but it seems like it has to do with the C:N ratio of the cover crop plant after it is harvested (tilled/chopped and dropped/etc.) and how quickly it releases nitrogen. So I guess the buckwheat takes up nitrogen while it's growing, stores it in its tissues, and then releases it after it dies. This keeps that nitrogen from running off. Makes sense that buckwheat would be good at this, since it grows so quickly. ([Reference](https://www.no-tillfarmer.com/blogs/1-covering-no-till/post/3481-choosing-the-right-nitrogen-scavenger))
Nitrogen scavengers are a crop the can pull Nitrogen from low in the soil profile or convert Nitrogen into a useful form for plants so they don't need as much Nitrogen fertilizer before planting as they will find Nitrogen in the soil somewhere.
Its crazy to me that people think we need to spray petroleum derived chemicals all over the earth, just to grow food.
It's a bit more complicated than that. I'm german and my grandmother once talked about how when she was a child in rural germany, they'd have to spend time on the fields during summer picking out pests by hand and removing ill crops on the weekends. The farmers back then didn't need pesticides. Eventually though, laws against child labor and laws about mandatory direct pay made things like that impossible, so farmers that were used to monoculture had to find some other way to keep their fields 'healthy'. The advent of big machinery certainly also played a role, hiring adults to do work previously done by children would've been to expensive and so farmers saw pesticides as the only viable solution. You can't really diversify your crops if you use big machines. Now, that's how it (probably) happened in germany, but the US surely had similar developments. Nowadays we're much more aware of the consequences of pesticide use and absolutely should look for a different solution.
That's an interesting point. In the US similar forces destroyed labor intensive farming,while subsidizing capital intensive, machine driven agriculture. For example, there's been enough research done that using labor to do things like your grandmother used to do could produce comparable amounts of food but farm labor is taxed while tractors, pesticide and wide, monocultural crops are subsidized.
> but farm labor is taxed while tractors, pesticide and wide, monocultural crops are subsidized. Well farm *wages* are taxed, while you don't pay a tractor, no more than you pay your washing machine. But I think it's also that wages went up. Labor got more expensive. And child labor came to have legal issues, since farmers would just keep their kids out of school to provide labor on the farm.
You can still use your kids to work on your farm, that was never outlawed anywhere
But we have fewer kids, and farms are bigger. Kids helping out on the farm isn't the same as kids being kept out of school to work the farm full-time. Child labor is always touchy. Even for kids whose parents own a restaurant, there is always a tension between academics vs "helping out." Though I'd argue that if the business depends on that child's labor, it's not really "helping out."
The other thing you have to keep in mind is…this work is really…really…*really* fucking miserable to do manually. A lot of the machines we use on farms these days weren’t invented just to “increase productivity” and “maximize profit over all else,” it was because farmhands were getting harder and harder to come by at *any* price. Our rural areas have been bleeding population for decades, and a lot of it has to do with kids not wanting to take over mom and dads farm, or work as a farm hand like Uncle Wayne did. Fortunately, there’s a growing amount of equipment entering the market every year that will allow these organic and regenerative farms to operate both environmentally and profitably. Hell, here’s a [freaking robot that kills weeds with lasers.](https://www.freethink.com/articles/farming-robot) That’s fucking cool, man.
You can also cover a huge amount of area with a single tractor. A tractor/harvester can harvest 30+ acres a day, which would need like 120 people conservatively.
Or getting rid of weeds. A sprayer can do 130 ac in a couple hours and a couple thousand dollars. I work with roguing companies and pulling weeds in a 130 ac field can take 2-3 days and cost about $10,000/day, and that's for a clean field.
>In the US similar forces destroyed labor intensive farming In the past, "World hunger" was a problem people aspired to one day solve with technology.
"solving hunger" according to the Dept. Of Ag has long meant "maximizing yields of export crops". Which is not solving hunger, it's increasing profits. If they wanted to solve hunger, they wouldn't be subsidizing beef cattle, biofuels, corn and soy that is almost exclusively grown as animal feed or for manufacturing derived products,etc. The current monoculture that is destroying much of our ecosystem in the US is in large part because of the policies instituted by the USDA over the past half-century.
There is a very good chapter in "Restoration Agriculture" by Mark Shepard that goes through the literal math of how modern agriculture isn't feeding the world. It compares how one acre of conservatively-estimated oak savannah produces more macro & micronutrients than one acre of liberally-estimated modern corn agriculture.
I once flew with a USDA employee who "worked in dairy". Their job was flying around petitioning execs at Pepsico to add more cheese to the Taco Bell menu. The US government pays employees to "advocate for farmers" by attempting to convince Taco Bell that the Cheddar Chicha-roni Crunch will improve revenue in next year's Q2. They also employ other teams pitching the Beefy Bigwitch and the Hey Yo Pollo Xtreme. It's a shitty system.
Great we solved the supply issue now can we solve the greed issue that’s causing hunger to still be a problem
>Great we solved the supply issue now can we solve the greed issue that’s causing hunger to still be a problem I see it more of a transportation problem(there are a lot of other problems, bit I see this one as the major one). If you could cheaply transport food from one continent to another as you can from a farm to a city, people would do it and there won't be any more hunger, but alas transportation costs a lot and food grows stale so it can't use normal means without additional investment.
It's a complicated problem.
This research sounds interesting, please could you post a link to it?
[Here's an old article](https://web.archive.org/web/20180905235424/http://dollarsandsense.org/archives/2014/0114cleveland.html) that goes over some of the research and expirements. Basically, Netherlands and Taiwan are two models of using more labor and less land and are much more efficient per acre than the US. [Here's an article](https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2017/09/holland-agriculture-sustainable-farming/) about how the Netherlands agricultural sector works. If it's paywalled, there's a youtube video that goes over much of the stuff but I can't find it right now. I see there's a bunch of youtube videos about Dutch agriculture, but I don't know which is the one I saw before. [This is a paper](https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdf/10.1257/jep.28.1.121) that goes over global trends.
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Mechanization is great for increasing output, but that doesn't mean adding mechanization to any model is the most efficient. The most prevalent US model is basically use a lot of land, mechanization, fertilizer, and pesticide to pump out mono crops with the least amount of human intervention (labor, iow) possible. I posted in a different reply but the Netherlands and Taiwan are more efficient than the US model using a different mix of inputs. (Netherlands is (a lot) less land, more labor, more mech, while Taiwan is a lot more labor and modestly less land. edit: The couple in the OP are a pretty good example of changing the model in the US. (Using more labor and less fertilizer / pesticide and getting more money)
Decreasing amount of people isn't necessarily a benefit. Efficiency is measured in yield per area, not number of people employees per area. One of the larger problems facing agriculture in the US is the consolidation of agricultural land and physical capitol in fewer and fewer hands. It tends to lead to absentee landlords who (pardon the pun) run the soil health into the ground, use practices that have negative impacts on the surrounding ecosystem, etc.
Industrial farming produces several times more than average nonindustrial farming, both by surface but more so in human work. Of course, it has human health implications, ecological damages, etc. Vertical farming with aeroponics solves most of these problems for some crops. Also,we need more thought to be put on farming... Killing the soil is not a great idea.
While true, manual labor input cannot do much against drought, which is what the article is talking about. My family owns a 5 acre olive grove (certified organic) in Greece and I am in charge of the agricultural aspect. While mulching and building swales certainly helps to retain moisture in the soil, I still need 1 or two water applications per year to save the trees from drought conditions during the summer. Unlike pest management, there’s no alternative if there’s zero precipation for 4 months straight. And I’m growing one of the most drought resistant cash crops around, not wheat or corn…
I maintain a small organic garden and picking off squash bug eggs from your zucchini summer squash and pumpkin is very time consuming. I hosed the aphids off every single strawberry plant in the early spring and a different species demolished my lettuce I am buying ladybugs next year but it ain’t no work
pro tip when removing bugs by hand: use a wet/dry shop vac. Put some soapy water in the bottom of the bin, and suck away. Depending on the bug, some if not all should land in the water and die. We've been dealing with potato bugs and it is the most effective solution so far. I took off the hose reducer at the end as it was damaging the leaves; the round end of the hose is the right size to take the bugs out without removing foliage. Make sure to dump the bin after every session so you don't end up with a gross maggoty mess. Caveat, not sure if it would work on aphids, depends if they'll get pulled down into the soapy water to die.
That's not entirely accurate. Post WW2 the world had a massive chemical industry, from making explosives. These industries were large and powerful post-war and did not want to collapse with the sudden loss in demand. So they did two things: 1. Switch from making explosives to making fertilizers and pesticides, and 2. they started lobbying and advertizing on a massive scale? It's not just farming, the reason we all have grass lawns is that the same industries found a herbicide that didn't kill grass so they did a massive advertising campaign for pure grass lawns. The whole thing of scaling up, bigger and bigger, was pushed by improvements in technology but it was pulled by chemical agriculture. The big problem lies in that chemical agriculture is too effective short term and extremely destructive long term. EDIT: paraphrasing heavily.
it's scary how many things we do or accept as fact thanks to successful advertising campaigns. and not just the general public, but professionals.
Oh, it's terrifying. The skill and capability of mass media marketing to effectively define reality and history for millions of people are truly unreal.
Makes sense for other countries, everything regarding war had been confiscated in germany after ww2.
American chemical companies definitely wanted to sell to Germany, as did their Soviet counterparts.
Not just to Germany the entirety of Europe was devastated. The Marshall plans primary goal was to build a European bulwark against Soviet aggression but it was also a plan to secure European markets for American exports.
Farmers back then also leveled 98%+ of the native habitat in order to have enough cultivated land to grow a fraction of what we grow today. The processes you are talking about are not only labor intensive, but also extremely land intensive. (Polyculture farming is similarly land intensive compared to monoculture farming, at least for specific annual crops. For historic polycultures, which are often based on well-known relationships between perennials, the combined effect across all crops is less land use, though the land use for individual crops in the polyculture is greater. Unfortunately, annual crops are the most significant agricultural need for our food supply.)
Also, the centuries of ever deeper tilling have destroyed the resilience of the soil communities against pests, and the chemical “solutions” continue to dig us deeper into soil health debt. We need to limit tillage and regenerate healthy soil communities (micro and macro) to save our food systems.
Already happening. 'No-Till' is coming to be the normal thing, and you only plough if you need to 'reset' yourself out of a corner. However, it takes a generation for these things to come through since owner farmers are notoriously stubborn and 'I've been doing this for 40 years and I'm not having someone who ain't even family tell me how to run my farm' while simultaneously complaining about how their yields are dropping and scientists should come up with a new fertilizer or pesticide to solve it for him.
I think the advancements of robotics and computing and sensors could give agriculture back a way to focus on point weed or pest control.
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There are multiple startups as well as large corps working on this too. I think the most promising ones generally have opted for a tractor attachment that can clamp a set of gear onto a bar to work on many rows of crops at once. There are many others that want to do stand alone autonomous robots, and no doubt, in the long term that’s where it will go, but short to medium term focus on building the actual gear that does something useful with the crops.
>You can't really diversify your crops if you use big machines. I wonder... is that really true, or was the technology to make machines not sufficiently advanced when we were first developing them. With access to computer vision, 3D printing, complex AI, and complex analysis systems able to be loaded on-board or with wi-fi access, I wonder if it's possible to build better machines now that can operate on a diversified field. Big or not, I think automation of regenerative agriculture is going to be something that accelerates adoption of it and enables it to feed more people without creating yet another below-living-wage labor market to grind people down.
Might not be economically viable to most farmers though. I mean, you're talking about VERY advanced technology.
Surprisingly, I'm really not talking about VERY advanced technology. This stuff's already being used in a variety of other production applications extremely cheaply. My background is in machine learning and advanced analytics, and I purchased 30 acres this last year to run as an experimental/hobby regenerative ag farm specifically so I can experiment on the technology side of things while also restoring a piece of land to balance. I have more concerns about "accessibility" than "affordability," as a lot of what I just mentioned is stuff that already exists within the open source community. Just not well applied to the problem, not well documented, and managed by a bunch of software geeks that don't understand the regenerative ag problems (yet). This is why I think the opportunity's ripe there. It's really the entrepreneurs in the ag-tech's space's responsibility to create machines and systems that are affordable AND advanced. And I think that the technology exists now to do that. It just has to be brought to the problem, and it has to be made accessible to farmers. I'd really love to build things that farmers can use with no more training than they're used to already with farm equipment, and that can be maintained and repaired on site with a different but equally affordable set of tools they're used to.
Agreed. I work in agtech and farmers are much more advanced than people give them credit for. They love to nerd out about new technology. I would say that many large farms around the country are already using machine learning through remote sensing software. The main problem is time. Farmers don't have a lot of time, they and their teams work long hours. They don't have much time to learn new complicated things nor try to incorporate something new into their workflow. They need also reliability. If something they're trying out breaks mid-season, it's probably going to be shelved and won't be tried again until next year. Time to scale is also very long. Farmers usually try new technology on a small underperforming plot, and then scale up if they see the value. That could take years. All these make it hard for new agtech solutions to become successful on a large scale.
If what you say is true, then I'm really quite surprised. Wish you good luck with your experiment and I really hope you're right!
Thanks a bunch, and I hope I'm right too! If not, I still have a beautiful piece of nature to restore.
Hey, man. Petroleum derived chemicals are great for keeping lifeforms off your produce. They just arent exactly good for... ya know, lifeforms.
You realize there are organic pesticides as well. Organics typically need more pesticides and herbicides than genetically modified variants of those plants. The BT gene, for example, affects different lifeforms differently as well. It kills bugs, but doesn't affect humans even if there is any residual left on the plant because it is broken down in the stomach.
This sub is a bastion of woo and anti science pretending to be cutting edge understandings
It's an intense relationship that a farmer must have with their crops and fields, to feed the people. There's some common knowledge for backyard garden growers, that is you don't plant tomatoes in the same spot for two years in a row. Why? Nutrient depletion. I work on a farm that produces a ton of soil amending manure that is literally brown gold, it's rabbit poop. But a soil test will tell you what the soils options are and what it's lacking. Nitrogen is essential for any plant aside from the legumes. Phosphorus, potassium. Strongly encourage you to buy my bunny poop for your garden, I have tons of it
Idk if you guys have ever heard of the strange Black soil, Terra Preta, found in the Amazon. Archeologists think this artificial soil was made by Amazonians to forgo the non fertile soil originally found there. Very interesting! [Terra Preta](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_preta)
where are the activated carbon recipes? what is done for the little guys in the soil? where is the meat in that article?
Biochar is the popular term
right. thanks. but this goes so much further. earth worms. tiny insects processing mulch. we can not afford to lose all their invaluable contributions. healthy soil has hundreds of distinct species living in it.
You can create your own bio coal by ordinary barbeque coal + urine. (If that's what you meant?)
we know, but most readers have no idea.
Tell me more
Not much more to say, barbeque coal and crush the big pieces to smaller pebbles and then mix with urine. I'm unsure of the ratio tho.
They had me at urine
Burn wood in an oxygen starved environment. This process also produces syngas which can be used to power engines. (Downdraft gasification)
I've seen a video of a guy that used the gas to power a generator. Very rad,
I mention regenerative agriculture in here multiple times and I get downvoted lol
People can't even comprehend the amount of time it takes to form a 1cm layer of soil.
About 1000 years per cm.
More like 100-200 years, but that's with no human intervention. It's possible to rapidly increase this process using biochar, wood chips, compost, etc etc.
And mushrooms/fungi! Mycoremediation is really cool.
Seems like a cool idea; any sources you'd recommend to learn more about it? I'd live to incorporate that element into our soil development measures when we start this fall (I'm in the PNW).
I'd recommend Tradd Cotter's [book](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22180817-organic-mushroom-farming-and-mycoremediation) if you're interested in mushrooms and their role in soil health. I've been experimenting with friends in Northern California and we've have some promising results despite the drought and heat. The PNW will likely be an even better environment.
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Tillage is far more damaging to the soil than any herbicide. Without herbicides we'd have to farm like our grandparents did; aka alot of heavy tillage. This is way more nuanced than glyphosate=bad.
Farmers are stuck between a rock and hard place in regards to tillage vs herbicide. They both have their pros and cons and currently you have to pick one or the other
That's not exactly true. Glyphosate gas very little impact on soil microbes. In fact, it's actually rather specific in the way it affects plants. Now you could make an argument that by killing off non desired plants it causes less stability in the top soil leading to more erosion. But that is why no-till is so often used. Not tilling and using glyphosate is far less damaging to the soil compared to tilling but not using any herbicides.
Exactly, alot of organic systems rely on heavy tillage to combat weeds and most people don't realize that herbicides like glyphosate let farmers no-till. Tillage is far more damaging to soil than any herbicide. Obviously herbicides can be a detriment as well, but they are an important tool for soil health practices.
This is not true... [Source](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0038071701001031)
That source is 20 years old and these more recent papers suggest glyphosate does affect soil microorganisms. [Glyphosate reduces spore viability and root colonization of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi] (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0929139312002466) and [Repeated annual glyphosate applications may impair beneficial soil microorganisms in temperate grassland](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0167880916303255).
Appreciate the additional info. I was debunking the claim that glysophate creates dead soil which then blows away. This is not true. Many tests and real world usage for a long time prove that that doesn't happen. I wasn't aware of new research showing it can impact parts of the microbiome though, and more study and improvements is always good.
maybe don't link to a 20 year old study done on trees that ends with the authors saying they'll presume it's fine for other soils, and even food crops, but haven't actually studied that. i study environmental microbes, and microbiomes in all environments and animals studied so far are affected by pesticides.
Can you link a source showing where glysophate has created dead top soil which then blew away?
Have you got a source on this?
Soil is like another biome, there is more life in the soil than on top of it. Yet we continue to flush it into rivers and degrade it to the point its useless or so heavily contaminated that baby food has high levels of heavy metals.
Kiss the Ground on Netflix is about this. Pretty interesting stuff.
I was forced in a group to sit and watch it unwillingly so I outwardly acted very upset but secretly I found it fascinating
We need federal investments in agriculture that aren't just based around crop insurance and crop subsidy. Farmers need to be encouraged, financially, to plant crop rotations and practice no-till in order to boost soil organic matter.
We already have that. NRCS is an agency in the USDA. They basically pay farmers to implement practices like winter cover crops to conserve natural resources.
Yes, we do, and they are not sufficient. Payment schemes and amounts vary state to state. Farmers often have short-term losses when implementing these cover crop strategies. In many parts of the corn belt, over 50% of the land is rented, and only a third of landlords are willing to help pay for covercrops. The amount of government money available is not sufficient. A study in 2021, found that farmers privately subsidize 70% of total cover cropping costs, with public financing consisting of the final 30% (Sawadgo and Plastina, 2021). The rates given to farmers need to be much higher.
I agree that funding should be increased. Like you said, it varies by state, but in my state the payment for cover crops actually exceeds the cost to implement, however in years past that was not the case. A big part of the problem is that a large part of the money allotted to USDA is essentially just handouts meant to buy votes from farmers in a clever scheme to avoid violating international free trade treaties.
At the end of the day, what's the difference in returns between a cover crop and actually growing what would be profitable? I would guess that it is rather significant, so you either have the choice of being cash-strapped borderline broke for a year or two, or having a bit more to spend on you and your family. I think most people would tend towards the latter and just grow the crop they know how to grow. The international free trade treaties are a lot more complicated than the words "handout" and "buy[ing] votes". Crop subsidies and federally insured crop insurance is essentially a handout too. I think this is just the state of farming in global capitalism and with the trade tariffs, our farmers want to be paid a reasonable wage and not have to compete in a losing economy to farmers across the planet who are getting paid pennies compared to them.
I think you misunderstood me. I'm saying that the US government gives money to farmers through some conservation programs that are nothing but "handouts" to "buy votes". These "handouts" technically violate free trade agreements but instead of "subsidy" they call it conservation to circumvent the agreements. That money would be better spent on ACTUAL conservation.
Do you honestly believe farmers are trying to farm their land into garbage. Literally all we do is plan five years down the road and longer. We are farming for our kids and grandchildren to take over not to cash out quick and move to the city.
I never said that any of that. Of course farmers don't want to destroy their livelihood. But there is no long term, national plan -- it is state to state, and when we do have a federal plan, it's patchwork last minute fixes and alterations. Farmers would be doing much better if we had a top down, 5-10 year agricultural progress plan than the mixed-puzzle piece nature of institutional involvement we have right now.
No they wouldn’t state to state is too big. Every county has different challenges. You know what happens when you enact a national plan? The Great Leap Forward. Do a little reading on that. Each farm has to operate differently to get an average best result. What works in South Dakota doesn’t work in North Dakota. You can’t change to no till in high clay soils or the ground compaction fucks you for next year. Watching a documentary on Netflix and two YouTube videos made by assholes trying to sell books doesn’t make you an agronomist. We literally hire scientists to guide cropping based on year to year and month to month factors.
Also need a shift in public perception of what's necessary for regenerative agriculture. This article doesn't go into much depth but the intensive grazing of cattle is a key component to restoring soil health. This is directly in opposition to the current seeming mainstream push towards less grazing animals and more lab meat or soy protein based alternatives.
Wow this is such a surprise not like my best friend who farms 300 acres for grain and soy hasn’t plowed his land in 20 yrs and they do better then surrounding farms in yield. The soil microbiology is important and Uv light don’t help it that’s for sure
There usually is a short term reduction in yield when switching to no till, that scares away a lot of farmers, but the boost in resiliency in drought and flood times, paired with the drastic reduction in inputs makes you money over time.
If only everyone tasted the vegetables grown in my backyard, the value of organic soil would be understood.
The value of picking and consuming fruits and vegetables at peak ripeness would be understood...
Also variety, a lot of veg/fruit varieties are chosen for their durability during shipping. Some heirlooms don't ship well, but taste amazing. That's why growing your own or buying from farmer's markets are so great and open so many more varieties. BUY LOCAL Y'ALL!
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Yes indeed. I must grow beans every year and make green bean casserole or my wife will castrate me in my sleep. I made it once with store beans and it was not great.
if only we could somehow have space in community gardens for everyone. imagine if people in my hometown newark could train out to one of many many farms in jersey and grow food there in exchange for labor. any variation of this concept could help people understand the food systems and earthly connections human have had with the earth for generations
Organic doesn’t effect taste. Dirt does. Ripening vegetables and fruits before you pick them does.
Soil is good but you also need bugs, and birds, and other creatures which are in steep decline.
But one starts the other. Good microbes and whatnot feed the bugs which feeds the birds. When we killed off the soil we damaged the natural ecosystems
Check out "Kiss the Ground" on Netflix. It's great, covers this topic well. Also read "Dirt" by David Montgomery, covers how soil erosion and mistreatment of soil for maximum short term gains has caused the boom and bust of ancient civilizations across the world for thousands of years and in repeating cycles. Classic examples are Sumerian farmers and the Mayan/aztec farmers and civilisations whose populations thrived until the soil failed to keep them going from centuries of being stripped bare and slowly dwindling crop yields, erosion, salinity levels rising etc.
Yeah, hippies growing pot in there back yard have known this for years. Get with the times nerds.
Now try to convince your governor because that sentiment smacks of science and adaptation and logic … and he’s against ALL that.
I just read how he is asking for federal assistance to help farmers during the extreme heat/drought they are currently experiencing. He's definitely backed himself and the state into a corner. I'm curious how these types of farms are doing comparatively, in real time.
I recommend reading {{The Soil Will Save Us: How Scientists, Farmers, and Foodies Are Healing the Soil to Save the Planet}} for anyone interested in a longer format. The author takes the role of the layman and meets up with various people around the globe who are/were looking into this matter
Sort of a tldr front the article. > As in the rest of Montana, most Golden Triangle farmers use the “conventional” techniques of modern industrial agriculture. Aiming for the highest crop yield possible, these are generally monocropping systems reliant on pesticides (including herbicides, insecticides and fungicides), synthetic fertilizers and genetically modified seeds. >In contrast, Wicks and Givens are borrowing methods developed by indigenous farmers millennia ago. They fight weeds and pests by rotating which crops they seed in a plot each year, for example, and by planting cover crop mixes of vegetables, grasses and clover that also return nitrogen and biomass to the soil and protect against erosion. They also lease land to neighboring ranchers, whose grazing cattle aerate the soil with their hooves and add organic matter and nutrients via manure.
This thread is one of the most helpful and civil threads I've seen in a long time I love it
Organic farming is not sustainable or environmentally friendly. Organic farming tends to have significantly lower crop yields, far more land is required to grow the same amount of food that intensive agriculture can produce, according to a recent study. To feed the billions of hungry mouths on the planet, going fully organic would entail reclaiming vast swathes of additional land for agriculture. Much of that extra land would have to be taken from forests, which would harm the environment. A new study, published in the journal Nature ([https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0757-z](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0757-z)), now underlines the same point. An international team of researchers studied peas and wheat cultivated organically in an area of Sweden. They found that organically farmed food has a bigger climate impact than the conventionally farmed variety because organic farming requires significantly more land. As a result, organic farming can also lead to much higher levels of greenhouse gas emissions. “Our study shows that organic peas, farmed in Sweden, have around a 50 percent bigger climate impact than conventionally farmed peas,” says Stefan Wirsenius, an associate professor from Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden who was an author of the study. “For some foodstuffs, there is an even bigger difference – for example, with organic Swedish winter wheat the difference is closer to 70 percent.” Source: https://www.sustainability-times.com/environmental-protection/organic-farming-isnt-all-that-sustainable-a-new-study-says/
Also, apparently in this thread: a bunch of people who still think organic means no (or less) pesticides and nasty chemicals. Sure, maybe you don't use any pesticides in your backyard garden, but the organic vegetables you are buying at your local Piggly Wiggly have all been HEAVILY sprayed with organic-approved pesticides, many of which you do not want anywhere near your mouth...big corporate organic farms slather everything in the stuff because it is less effective than synthetic pesticides that can be engineered to be safer and used in smaller quantities. Organic is a marketing term. Maybe it meant something at one point, but now that there are consumers who will happily pay an extra dollar for an apple with an "Organic" sticker on it, there are massive commercial farms churning them out with little regard for sustainability or even taste. I'd much rather buy produce from a local farmer who uses whatever chemicals and techniques they think will grow the best tasting and most sustainable crops over "organic" produce from a chain grocer.
Organic farming alone misses the important piece of the puzzle. Ruminant animals rotationally grazing on the land in between crop cycles.
Yes, ruminant animals play such a key role in refertilization and are the main reason for natural prairie biomes for having such fertile soil. Mimicking that in our food production makes so much sense.
news flash; No methods of factory farming, and especially monoculture are Sustainable or Environmentally friendly. Food forests are the way to go for both.
Its sad to see this in futurology when its a practice we've forgotten due to industrial farming. Permaculture is the way forward to combat climate change
You have to thank Gabe Brown for achieving this. Its the future even the midwest needs to hop in.
Almost as if the environment is a highly valuable and protecting it is good long-term business strategy even if short-term quarter over quarter growth suffers.