In the US, regenerative farming practices require unlearning past advice
170 comments
·October 25, 2024cvoss
PaulDavisThe1st
Edward H. Faulkner published "Plowman's Folly" in 1943.
He revisited his analysis in 1947 in "A Second Look" in which he responded to critics, and doubled-down:
"The soil which the gardener or farmer works is made up of tiny crystalline fragments. The action of soil acids, principally those released through the decay of organic matter, unlocks the minerals required for healthy plant growth. [ ... ] the continuous use of commercial fertilizers is a mistake. [ ... ] The "bank account" theory of soil is bankrtup. It holds that whatever we take from the soil in the growing of crops must be put back - usually in the form of prepared fertilizers. What the soil needs, on the contrary, is the gentle chemistry described above. If man cannot learn this, he will pay and pay, ultimately to his ruin".
1943. 1947. This is not new stuff. By the time "A Second Look" was published, there were 340,000 copies of "Plowman's Folly" in print.
duckmysick
> you'll suffer lower yields for a few years after you stop tilling, while the soil builds up a proper layer of decomposing matter on top.
Anecdotal, but can confirm, I observed lower yields (sometimes minimal, in the range of 5-10%) for a year or two after starting to till. But it's so much worth in the long run. Granted, I'm talking about the market-garden size yield. Could be different in multi-hectare yields, but I can see the difference on my scale. After the initial one or two years I can see increased yields with lowered herbicide use and less frequent weeding activity.
theoreticalmal
What on earth is a regenerative farmer doing on HN? I’m very curious and intrigued
duckmysick
It's funny because I learned about the regenerative farming and no-dig approach from Hacker News out of all places. A couple years ago there was a thread about soil quality and someone mentioned Richard Perkins, who runs a regenerative agriculture farm in Sweden. He also had a Youtube channel which I checked out. Then I found out about Charles Dowding from Britain who popularizes no-dig approach (don't use a spade or a fork to turn the soil, but plant directly in a thick layer of compost), also on a Youtube channel. Down the rabbit hole here we go.
I was sceptical at first - it sounds too good to be true and runs against the conventional wisdom I followed. But I started experimenting with a few vegetable patches and I was happy with the results. Then I expanded over time, still amazed with the outcomes.
It's more of a hobby operation, so I'm not worried about optimizing yields. To me the biggest factor is that gardening became super enjoyable. I guess it's because efforts-to-results ratio got so much better. I got many compliments from strangers about my garden (including incredibly oversized pumpkins), which made me proud.
Not sure how it fits into a hacker's ethos, but there you have it.
SEJeff
You’d genuinely be shocked how many hardcore tech folks own and run hobby or semi-commercial farms.
I run a biodiverse fruit orchard.
blittle
I'm a software engineer, but my wife runs a regenerative flower farm. So I'm exposed to both worlds
kylebenzle
Maybe a lot of farmers don't want to drastically increase their herbicide use?
factormeta
>The other factor, he said, was that you'll suffer lower yields for a few years after you stop tilling, while the soil builds up a proper layer of decomposing matter on top. Or at least, farmers are afraid that could happen. And it's not a risk worth taking in their view.
Maybe it has more the fact that humans are risk averse. We just don't want to make financial sacrificed in the short term to get longer term rewards. Many of us want to do good, but we also don't want our 401ks and subsidies to go down.
ajmurmann
Feels like something you could roll out to a small portion of the land and see what happens. Is that not viable?
Edit: NVM, it was pointed out elsewhere that the needed equipment is different
watwut
These are low margin businesses. Chances are they can't afford it without significant pain.
quartesixte
Farming is a low “shots on goal” business too. You only really get 1 harvest per year. In a 30 year career already marked by high variance, losing 1/6 of your lifetime profits to experimenting with methods is a huge ask.
debacle
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.
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
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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.
analyte123
It’s more about keeping minerals on the field. A big one is reducing erosion, which practices like no-till and cover cropping help. Tons of soil being washed away is a lot of nutrients being lost.
If you look at a regenerative certification program like [1] you’ll see that you’re allowed to apply synthetic fertilizer but it has to be no more than the rate removed by harvested crops. This means, hopefully, that you aren’t losing much to erosion, runoff, or volatization, and that good soil structure is keeping them available.
[1] https://s3.amazonaws.com/media.regenified.com/wp-content/upl...
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.
tastyfreeze
Fungi digest rocks and make the minerals water soluble. It is the life in the soil the regenerates the fertility. Fungi are the first things to die with tilling and chemical application; breaking the nutrient cycle.
ggm
I don't think you're wrong, A good write up of the economic incentives would be really interesting.
Regenerative practices would probably initially look like a reduced high side profit, and reduced land yield intensity but at significantly reduced input costs on chemicals and pesticides. The labour costs might be higher or lower depending. Then over time, yield to use would show for area in production actual profits were better but still to a lower high point. More certainty as long as e.g. massive disease or pest risk didn't strike.
And as long as organics have a higher premium price at lower yield, when the soil can pass the certification tests for residues there's a new profit highpoint.
That's my sense but perhaps there are better takes on it.
insensible
Permaculture designer here. That’s a pretty good take. Biggest aspect missing is that once you abandon the “parking lot” approach to farming, you get many niches where you can profit from multiple crops on the same land. The farmer in the article is grazing under productive trees, for one example. Another opportunity is to stack a bunch of berry bushes of graduated height next to rows of trees. And to graze chickens after a larger animal, yet another enterprise on the same land. And with all the added fertility from the grazing, now you can sell a cutting of hay you didn’t have before.
The profit per unit area can become very high.
harimau777
Does that scale? It seems like the planting and harvesting would be difficult to automate and/or require increased labor. However, I am definitely not an expert.
jethkl
your comment introduced me to the term permaculture, looks interesting. Do you leverage numerical optimization - linear programming or integer programming for example - in your work?
devmor
> This is an economics problem not a knowledge problem.
This is something I have to regularly say to colleagues and contemporaries in the software and electronics space.
I am sure it comes up in many fields. So many things are done inefficiently and with disregard to the future for the sake of short term profitability.
In this case though it may doom us all rather than just create more work for someone a few years later.
null
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.
fuzztester
>What's wrong with corn?
it sucks as a cereal, nutritionally speaking, iirc, based on what I've read earlier. i could be wrong, but don't have time to check it now.
may check out millets and other alternative cereals instead of, or in addition to corn, wheat and rice.
some of them are nutritionally or agriculturally superior.
kasey_junk
It’s weird to say we need to decrease the amount of food made of corn because most of the commodity corn grows goes to animals.
It’s not weird to say we should grow less commodity corn because it is resource intensive and broadly subsidized.
harimau777
Personally, what I've seen and read suggests that the best general strategy for lowering obesity is to shift calorie consumption away from carbohydrates and towards protein (although to be clear, I don't think it's necessary to take a hardline "all carbs are bad" approach). Corns seems like a poor food for someone trying to shift their calories more towards protein.
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.
jonathanlydall
Raw materials are very often not the biggest contributor to cost of manufacturing something.
Look at CPUs, for a fabricator the cost of the silicon alone is a constant cost which is dwarfed by capital investment and yield cost.
Then there are other costs like labour, administration and shipping.
jkdufair
Pretty sure most corn is grown for animal feed. We could help by eating less - or no - meat.
Scarblac
The majority of the current output is used to feed lifestock. We're going to have to stop eating meat almost entirely to make room for human plant based food production.
manvillej
my family has been getting into this very seriously in the last few years. There are several very serious challenges to the adoption of regenerative farming.
1. most farmers are stubborn and OLD
2. most of the industrial equipment is not meant for regenerative practices meaning many farmers simply can't afford to switch technologies
3. regenerative farming takes time & there simply isn't enough expertise out there
4. agricultural land shrinks every year. EVERY year. new farms are harder and harder to start & we really cannot afford to dip our food supply
5. Economically, the government has a very strong interest in keeping food cheap. Hungry people have a tendency to overthrow governments. farming has extremely thin margins.
6. There is a lot of funding in the form of grants and programs to encourage growth, but it means most farmers need to become grant writers. Large scale farms now have professional grant writers, smaller farms where the regenerative practices might have the most impact are having a difficult time accessing these programs.
7. Carharts are fashionable and really expensive. My dad found my first carhart on the side of the road with treadmarks across it and I got made fun of for it. Give me back my carharts.
Here are some of the things that are really helping with these problems though:
1. most farmers are really stubborn and will push through problems because its just work
2. Agritourism is bringing in a lot of renewed interested in farming & money.
3. Food chain issues (looking at you boarshead & mcdonalds) is bring a renewed interest in buying local.
4. Regenerative farming simply makes better food. Seriously, I cannot eat grocery store pork or chicken. The meat looks and tastes different.
5. Ignoring no-till techniques, there are techniques that can be started at a low cost for small scale farms. Chicken tractors, rotational grazing, soil health programs, etc. My family has been doing chicken tractors for chickens and turkey for personal consumption. Its been pretty easy for 1-2 person to raise 1500+lbs of meat with only about an hour of work a day. The only labor intensive day is harvesting and we've really gotten it streamlined. Its also eliminated the need for fertilizing or aerating the area they are run in.
6. I've noticed its really bonding family farms together and bringing in younger farmers in with a sense of ownership and purpose
rmosolgo
Thanks for sharing all these reflections on the topic. Regarding Carhartts, I can really recommend Super Casuals, which sells Carhartt factory seconds: https://www.supercasuals.com/category.cfm/449
They're stamped "IRR" on the inside... but that's more subtle than tread marks XD I usually order several sizes of what I'm interested in and send most of them back.
dehrmann
> the government has a very strong interest in keeping food cheap
I'd go further. Governments and society want to overproduce food for resiliency. Markets aim for efficiency, so you need some amount of subsidies for production.
> Food chain issues (looking at you boarshead & mcdonalds) is bring a renewed interest in buying local
Buying local doesn't really solve this.
_zoltan_
> 4. agricultural land shrinks every year. EVERY year. new farms are harder and harder to start & we really cannot afford to dip our food supply
of course we can.
for corn, circa 40% is used to feed livestock and 35% for ethanol production. there is very little human consumption.
for wheat, in the US and Europe, only around 35% is used to feed humans.
we really should do much more regenerative agriculture so people eat better food down the chain.
Cornbilly
> for corn, circa 40% is used to feed livestock and 35% for ethanol production. there is very little human consumption.
Good luck with getting Americans to pay more for and/or eat less meat.
We’re practically addicted to eating meat in some form at every meal. Not to mention the weird group of folks that have tied eating meat to masculinity.
_zoltan_
nobody talked about eating less meat. I love meat as well. if you feed your livestock better, you get better quality meat!
I was shocked how cheap meat is in the US. I was at Costco looking at some briskets and pork belly.
Here in Switzerland for good quality meat you're going to pay between 30-50 CHF/kg for pork and up to 120 CHF/kg for beef.
codingdave
> most farmers need to become grant writers.
That seems like something a tech community who is looking for a problem to throw AI/LLMs at... really ought to be able to help out with.
throw10920
> agricultural land shrinks every year
What's the cause of this? Nutritional deficiency? Economics? Or something else?
bluGill
Suburbs expanding.
Schiendelman
Another reason to abolish zoning in our major cities. Let people go upward, it will reduce pressure outward.
destitude
Simply switching to no-till in the fall would be a huge improvement. I drove by hundreds and hundreds of miles of just pure black dirt fields that were recently tilled up after harvesting in western MN. Even though I live a ways away from there we've had dirt deposited on top of snow in the winter when strong winds come through and pick up small bits of all that exposed soil.
hnmullany
No-till conservation cropping systems produce better physical soil health and higher soil organic carbon, but they do require higher herbicide use:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/360507198_Are_No-Ti...
fredgrott
Note, it is far different for these crops that were once farmed:
-cotton
-Tobacco
Even in land producing corn...the soil loses enough that several tones need to be added per acre. They use to rotate between beans and corn to keep that expenditure down....as beans replaces nitrogen taken from soil by corn...
my bias, worked Uncles farms during childhood each summer.
TheRealPomax
is it "unlearning", and was it "advice", when you were forced into a practice because otherwise you and your family would die due to destitution?
Regenerative farming practices require not doing what the US ecoomic landscape forced agriculture to become. Corporations were given too much power, allowing them to erode cooperations with with good, varied yield by buying up farms one at a time until the coop as a whole didn't have good, varied yield anymore, and going "oh poor babies let us buy your entire coop, you can keep farming but we, instead of the market, will pay you", and the law went "this is fine, there is no problem here", and it continues to say that to this day.
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.
analyte123
Most agricultural land is not double-cropped, in the US less than 3% of farmland was double-cropped in 2015 [1]. You actually have it backwards: when possible, cover crops or double cash crops are a key regenerative practice because they prevent erosion and keep living roots in the ground which can enhance soil health in other ways [2].
[1] https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2014/june/double-croppi... [2] https://www.nrcs.usda.gov/conservation-basics/conservation-b...
throw88888
> Modern industrial agriculture relies heavily on two crops per year on the same land
Depends on how you define modern industrial agricilture I guess.
From https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_cropping
“However, only 5% of global rainfed cropland is under multiple cropping, while 40% of global irrigated cropland is under multiple cropping.”
Most farmland is rainfed. Only about ~20% is irrigated globally.
That means less than ~10% of all farmland globally is double-cropped.
silexia
Farmer of 5,000 acres here. You have a choice between no till farming which requires lots of chemicals or till which requires lots of heavy machinery. Nothing else works at commercial scale or is capable of feeding the world.
The closest alternative I have seen is Joel Salatin's approach which does not use chemicals and has minimal tillage... But is extremely labor intensive and is not profitable at commodity prices.
Pick your poison.
whoitwas
Go look at videos from the 70s before we began ingesting chemicals and tons of calories. Everyone is half the size with 99% less body fat.
spease
> Go look at videos from the 70s before we began ingesting chemicals
You’re going to have to be more specific than “chemicals” unless you’re asserting that humans had fusion cells.
Der_Einzige
What they meant should have written was "tons of refined sugar". That's the chemical that makes you fat, through making your food over-calorized while not leading your body to realize you need to stop eating.
The fake lie answers that they will give might include zero calorie sweeteners because people hate the idea that you can "have your cake and eat it too" (no meta-pun intended).
harimau777
I think that you could probably put together a reasonable working definition of something like:
Substances which are artificially synthesized or heavily processed which are added to food. For the purpose of this definition, ingredients which have a long history of use such as salt, alcohol, fermented foods, smoking, etc. are excluded.
Of course the purpose of this definition is to serve as a generalization in order to facilitate discussion. I'm certain that there are exceptions where modern additives are probably fairly obviously harmless such as vitamin/mineral fortification. Likewise there are traditional ingredients that we now know can be harmful such as alcohol, excessive salt, smoke, etc.
spease
What I would imagine happens is that some food producer realizes that a lot of their product is going to waste and they have intermittent reports of food poisoning. So they add salt to be able to continue selling the same volume of product. This also may make the product more flavorful. Seems like a win all around to them.
Now the food is causing long-term issues in some people, but the American medical system introduces a lot of friction towards chronic medical issues. These issues are underreported, therefore there isn’t a lot of money available to reaearch them. And the time between cause and effect is, well, decades before we have clinical diagnostics to allow us to say “you specifically need to eat less salt”.
Now we can slap regulations on the companies involved in food production to revise the levels of sodium in food. I’m not sure we know what the optimal levels are. But it will probably cost them millions of dollars factoring in food waste, changes to established shipping / storage guidelines, possibly even force them to change companies to deliver product faster or pull their product from certain retailers who find it no longer profitable to receive shipments given the low volume they can sell before the product is unsafe to sell.
But it’s only really possible to have the discussion of what the right solution is if the specific objection is stated. If someone is concerned about GMOs, the driving issue may be more related to where they can be grown, size of the product, crop vulnerability to disease, avoiding excessive use of herbicides or pesticides, adapting to ecological changes, and so forth.
whoitwas
There are a wide array of problems from plastics to herbicides and pesticides related to consumption. There's also the sustainability issue as laid out in this article. It's unclear what your contention is other than you might not like general statements about "chemicals". It's not possible to enumerate every issue. You're statement isn't contributing anything.
spease
Everything we eat is “chemicals” that is broken down chemically to be turned into energy (edit: and structural purposes).
Sure in like-minded folks, chemicals may be understood to mean artificial sweeteners, pesticides, GMOs, HFCS, etc. but it’s unclear which they’re objecting to or even what agricultural sub-industry they’re criticizing.
Heck even high amounts of sodium in the American diet is criticized, but strip it out entirely and you’ve got a different set of problems now.
Most likely each change was done for a reason that improved either the cost-effectiveness or the appeal of food, or solved issues relating to storage, availability, changing ecologically factors, vulnerability to plant disease, malnutrition, etc.
It’s just not constructive to say something that’s so generic that it evaluates to “food could have healthier ingredients” or even “food could have more natural ingredients”. It’s just handwaving a bunch of supply chain issues as if people are just choosing to be arseholes.
It’s like taking potshots at tech for centralizing personal information into databases that keep getting compromised for identity theft. Yeah, there are issues with that paradigm, but that’s not to say that solving the issue is as simple as decentralizing all information storage - that introduces another set of issues (eg are end users really going to have sufficient cybersecurity chops to not lose their data themselves instead of a third-party).
It’s easy to complain about the solution when you aren’t familiar with the constraints that keep it from being perfect.
kelipso
No you don't. Every knows what "chemicals" mean unless you insist on being annoyingly pedantic.
Purposely misinterpreting what people say is the worst way to argue.
mmiyer
"chemicals are those ingredients with scary names" is not a useful definition - unless you think foods containing 3-Methylbutanal are problematic (bananas [1]). You have to be more specific, otherwise you end up deriding ingredients based on how they sound rather than how safe they are. HFCS for example, is 55% fructose and 45% glucose while regular sugar is 50% fructose and 50% glucose. So since fructose might be worse for the body (although this is disputed and it might be that glucose is worse), HFCS might be a little worse but it really is the quantities of sugar that matter than the kind.
1. https://jameskennedymonash.wordpress.com/2013/12/12/ingredie...
AlexandrB
I don't know what "chemicals" means. Are you talking about preservatives, artificial colors/flavors, artificial sweeteners, certain natural fats, processed fats, contaminants, environmental chemicals, microplastics? I could go on. Saying "chemicals" is just a way to make an unfalsifiable claim. If someone shows evidence that, let's say, aspartame is harmless it's possible to just move the goalposts to the other "chemicals" because the list is nearly endless.
QuadrupleA
Every molecule in your body is a chemical.
dyauspitr
Also in 1970, 33% of the global population was malnourished. That number is less than 8% now.
Arn_Thor
Apples and oranges. We can produce a lot of food without turning all of it into ultra-processed products stuffed with high-fructose corn syrup.
bluerooibos
> chemicals and tons of calories
If you mean ultra processed food then, yes.
perihelion_zero
Regenerative farmers posting on hacker news gives me hope for humanity. Thanks.
Apparently anyone in US/Canada can just ask for a farm and practically get one at this point. Either via USDA / private loans or indie farmers giving you great lease-to-own terms because you don't look like a corporate billionaire. Urban rent is so darn expensive now that some of y'all can probably get rich just by farm squatting and having a good time.
(Seriously thinking about solo farming in real life now. Not that it would really be solo because of all the animals.)
fred_is_fred
The idea that you can just get a farm for free by walking in and asking for one is pure fantasy. Agricultural land is worth money and a good amount of money in most cases.
micromacrofoot
natives knew of some of the best farming practices hundreds of years ago and european settlers while initially relying on them eventually disregarded them as savages
> It takes a long, long time for agriculture methods to change
My relatives, corn farmers in Iowa, have been preaching no-till for three generations now. I asked my uncle why it's not been universally adopted after all this time.
He said it's partly lack of awareness, which was astounding to me. I learned about the loss of our soil and the importance of no-till in the classroom in middle school in an urban area, of all places! The evangelism is occurring, but maybe it's just not reaching the right ears, or it's reaching deaf ears.
The other factor, he said, was that you'll suffer lower yields for a few years after you stop tilling, while the soil builds up a proper layer of decomposing matter on top. Or at least, farmers are afraid that could happen. And it's not a risk worth taking in their view.
There is a role here for government incentives to accelerate the transition. I think they already exist, but they should step it up, since we have been moving so slowly. The government is quite accustomed to tweaking the economics of farming to stabilize such an important part of our society.