In the US, regenerative farming practices require unlearning past advice
20 comments
·October 25, 2024debacle
tastyfreeze
From many examples I have seen of farms that have switched to regenerative practices it takes about 3 years to bring the soil back to life. Some of those had been corn for generations. Living soil consumes rock minerals making them available to plants. It doesn't matter if all the previously released minerals all washed away. As long as there is sand, silt, clay and living soil the minerals are available for plants.
schiffern
> Living soil consumes rock minerals making them available to plants.
Industrial ag treats soil like it's a tank of fertility, and guess who sells the refills? Biologists know that healthy soil is a factory, making new fertility out of rock/air/rain/sun.
Direct from soil microbiologist Dr Elaine Ingham: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2H60ritjag
blackeyeblitzar
Aren’t those minerals depleted by higher and higher yield crops that are industrially farmed and then shipped all over (along with the water)? How does the regenerative practice add back an equivalent amount? Wouldn’t it need additives that are equal in mass to all the plants previously farmed?
Retric
Most of the matter in food comes from water H2O or Air CO2 + N2. Nitrogen fixing bacteria are literally getting that nitrogen from the air not the soil even if they live in the soil. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nitrogen_fixation
Modern agriculture uses fertilizer for extra nitrogen (N), phosphorus (P), and potassium (K).
Plants also need a few trace minerals from soil but it’s a tiny fraction of their mass Iron, Calcium, etc and can also be added back: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock_flour
PS: There’s some really destructive agricultural like sod that’s literally shipping soil, but the premium pays to replace the soil.
debacle
It doesn't. After a few years, the scant resources (phosphates, magnesium, manganese) run out again.
Most small-scale regenerative ag farms are bringing in a lot of outside material to add those minerals back in.
My farmland hasn't been farmed for 50 years. If I clear an area and put a veggie bed in, I get 1 year of great yield, 1 year of "okay" yield, and then it becomes impossible to grow anything due to nutrient deficiencies.
darth_avocado
What a lot of regenerative ag proponents focus on is the value it adds to the ecosystem and the soil. But it gets dismissed because regenerative farming is objectively not capable of maintaining ag output at the level it is right now at the current prices.
We need to talk more about the need for the consumption habits to change if we want regenerative ag to take over. We won't be able to farm the amount of corn and soybean we farm today, but that would mean consumers will have to consume less stuff that is a corn derivative, or even better, consume less. There's no reason we should be selling a single bag of Doritos across the country, let alone for $2.
crazygringo
What's wrong with corn?
I definitely appreciate having corn tortillas and corn chips and cornbread to diversify what is almost entirely otherwise wheat and potatoes and rice, in terms of my starches.
I need to get my calories somewhere. Don't really see what's wrong with some corn chips when I need a quick snack on the go because my last meal was five hours ago.
And heck, plenty (most?) of the fresh food I eat comes from across the country, if not from other countries entirely. But corn chips, having most of their water removed, are far more environmentally friendly to transport due to being so lightweight.
gruez
>There's no reason we should be selling a single bag of Doritos across the country, let alone for $2.
Most of that is markup. The raw materials are on the order of cents.
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kaonwarb
I'm happy to support farmers who want to turn to regenerative methods, but I can't see them as a solution for feeding today's world. As the article itself notes:
> U.S. agriculture production tripled in the latter half of the 20th century, due in part to chemical inputs.
And, yes:
> But that came with an environmental cost — soil degradation, water quality issues and a loss of biodiversity.
I'm not downplaying those costs, and am happy to see a range of approaches. But this is not a serious proposal for feeding folks at scale.
akira2501
> Before the Civil War, over half of the country’s residents were farmers, Jolliff said, and they worked with small parcels of land in diversified operations. The modern regenerative agriculture movement encourages that same type of farm diversification.
Yea, and before the civil war, we didn't have gasoline engines. You are never going to see a broad return to rural farming life ever again.
BobbyTables2
We HOPE we never see a return to rural farming life…
photochemsyn
For large-scale agricultural food production capable of feeding millions of people, the question of double-cropping under regenerative practices is a tricky one. Modern industrial agriculture relies heavily on two crops per year on the same land, which relies on generous fertilizer and water inputs. Regenerative practices would prefer giving up on the second crop in favor of various methods of biomass accumulation, composting, soil generation etc over that time period.
Note one business opportunity for the regenerative sector could be organic healthy soil production. There's a demand for high-quality soil and this could make the second half of the year productive. This could go well with a mushroom production system integrated with composting.
The farmers already know regenerative ag and are executing certain aspects of it, but for most of the US the financial incentives aren't aligned and the mineral losses in heavily farmed soils will take generations to recover.
This is an economics problem not a knowledge problem.