> 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.
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.
> 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.
>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.
For sure, economic assessment is one way to figure out what to do.
When we as a civilization making decisions ending up where we are now (depleted soil and what else not looming). It does make one wonder if the current financial incentives is NOT aligned with the incentives of living beings on the planet? How can we make it so?
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.
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.
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.
> Living soil consumes rock minerals making them available to plants.
Thank you. This is one of those super-underappreciated biological facts.
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.
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?
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.
Every unit of a crop has a specific amount of minerals forever taken away. Nitrogen comes from the air and to isn't an issue. but where are you going to get those tons of phospeous from? Farmers now have to add sulfur because while not much is needed some is taken away and needed - they used to get that from acid rain but we cleaned up that source (overall a good thing but one unexpected issue)
i don't know how much iron crops need compared to what is in most soils. I know farmes are adding sulfar and other mineral.
Yes it is. And not only does fertilizer take significant amounts of power, it also uses hydrogen as a reagent which is sourced from fossil fuels. But despite that, it is still "cheap" because the alternative is using twice as much land, and smaller farmers who are most interested in regenerative farming don't have the capital to double their land usage which is a problem. They are getting beat out by larger scale corporate farms that aren't worried about the state of the land 30 years down the road.
You sure? I vaguely remember that the Green Revolution was roughly a 10x in yield. That sounds pretty significant. What's the yield difference using modern techniques?
Nitrogen fertilizer alone is a long way from 10x yield. The initial program got 3x yields over 20 years from a host of changes (pesticides, farm equipment, new hybrids etc), but at the core it was really a mix of education and loans not just some novel techniques.
Unless you are doing nuclear physics, those elements will persist. Let's say you are growing grain for cattle. The manure gets spread on the fields. Closed loop.
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.
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.
I think most municipal waste systems in the U.S. do this. Probably other developed countries too. And they probably do it to a higher standard of safety and not allowing leaching or runoff.
Some municipalities actually have separate stream food waste composting, which is great, but rare. Turning solid waste in sewage into fertilizer is a thing (I don't know if it's most places or not, i think not), but is pretty problematic in how it's done, it's a pretty toxic product. Definitely not the same as a composting toilet. https://missouriindependent.com/2024/08/09/fertilizer-from-h...
It's about unknown unknowns, right? But we could map out where those may be.
I guess chemical toxicity, drugs with long half-lives that affect soil organisms, and antibiotics that promote resistance.
(yeah yeah they are all chemicals.)
For the chemical toxicity, it's chemicals that are harmful to plants but allowed for human consumption, or chemicals in sufficient quantity to disrupt soil balance. Doesn't seem like a real concern?
With metabolic disruption to soil organisms, yes, there may be real danger there. That smells like previous environmental mistakes.
Antibiotics, yeah, some danger. Livestock is exposed, and resistance-conferring genes might jump directly to human pathogens.
It's worth studying. There are requirements for both sewage processing and fertilising soil, so the value of a solution would be high.
But seriously check out the links, especially the second one. That's precisely the point — to close the nutrient loop but still 100% interrupt the pathogen fecal-oral route.
> "If all the earth's crust was converted into bio-mass, what would be the limiting element?"
I think selenium would run out long before phosphorus.
The crust contains selenium at 0.05-0.09 ppm, but most plants require around 0.1-1 ppm. It's also one of the hardest nutrients to remediate because you can't just dump a bunch of selenium on the surface when 5-10 ppm starts to become toxic to lots of other organisms.
While all animals need selenium and many plants contain some variable amounts of selenium, because they take it from the soil instead of sulfur, all the sources that I have read say that it has not been proven that selenium is required by any plant.
Selenium is one chemical element that, like nickel and cobalt, has been needed by all living beings already some billions of years ago, but nowadays there are many living beings which have lost their dependency of selenium, which has been a beneficial trait for them, due to the scarcity of selenium.
The terrestrial plants, because of their environment which frequently lacks many minerals, have lost their dependencies of several chemical elements, e.g. of cobalt, of sodium, for most of them also of nickel, which is optional even in those which can use it, and apparently also of selenium.
If you have seen any source which says that it has been discovered that some plant needs selenium, please indicate it.
As I have said, many plants happen to contain selenium only because they are not selective enough in their sulfur intake, not because they need selenium for anything, unlike the animals, which would die without selenium.
I was supplementing with selenium for various reasons, and it seemed clear that it's one of the minerals that used to be supplied via our diet, but is quite deficient now, due to exhaustion in the soil.
Selenium, along with taurine, is one of the supplements which genuinely drove my physicians vehemently crazy, so I doubled up, and ensured that they were the focal point of my daily regimen.
> Selenium, along with taurine, is one of the supplements which genuinely drove my physicians vehemently crazy, so I doubled up, and ensured that they were the focal point of my daily regimen.
Selenium is commonly recommended by doctors in New Zealand.
No, they get pissed because the supplements can actually heal illnesses and support better health, which means they wouldn't be able to push drugs on me.
Psychiatrist's parting shot was, "they're all bio-active!"
Micronutrients are no fad, because guess what, they used to come in our fruits, vegetables, and meats.
Phosphate builds up in soil, converted to insoluble forms. Most applied phosphate isn't absorbed by plants. So "regenerative agriculture" could actually make sense if there are ways of tapping into this phosphate bank, say by encouraging the growth of phosphate mobilizing microorganisms.
One issue with phosphate ore is contamination with undesirable elements, like cadmium and also uranium and its decay products, like radium. The waste stream from sulfuric acid treatment of the ores is radon-emitting gypsum.
Sulfuric acid itself may become limiting once we're off fossil fuels, since almost all of it is currently produced by oxidation of sulfur extracted in the desulfurization of oil and gas.
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.
instead of mining rocks thousands of miles away, crushing them, and then spreading the result in your fields, convince local fungi to do all that work locally!
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.
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.
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.
The promises of many permaculture proponents, are close to a scam.
Basically, the claim is establish a working ecological system - and then it runs by itself, while producing lots of yield. Permanent Culture.
But in reality, wild nature takes over quite quickly, if you don't do anything. A fruit tree does usually not have benefits by making big red apples for example. Small ones are good enough for wild reproduction. But we want as many apples as possible, which means pruning, etc.
And a vegetable garden ... they like care, but if you don't tend to them, they will remain tiny and soon displaced by weeds.
So what I have seen in my experiments in my garden and on other permaculture farms - is that the result looks nice, but it is a lot of work and low yield. Some ideas like fruit forests are a nice additionm but all in all I doubt permaculture can feed the world. (I have not seen one permaculture farm, that could feed itself)
I have never seen a permaculture designer, or anyone, make such a claim. We aim to reduce maintenance by design, using methods that overlap with Lean Manufacturing and other process study, but it would be absurd to claim that it’s possible to reduce gardening to zero maintenance. Fukuoka was more extreme than many permaculture specialists by quite a large factor but he put his maintenance right in the title of his signature work: “one-straw revolution”.
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?
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.
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.
Nutritionally speaking, corn is an excellent source of energy.
In many parts of the Earth, e.g. in Europe, maize a.k.a. corn and wheat are much cheaper energy sources than anything else and wheat and corn are about as cheap.
Wheat may be preferable to corn only because it has a double amount of proteins, so it can also be used to provide a big part of the daily intake in proteins, if it is supplemented with at least another source of proteins that is rich in lysine. However, wheat is more suspicious from the point of view of its health effects, so when the absolute minimum cost for the daily food is not the target, corn might be the best energy source in food.
The bulk of the food that is needed daily is required for providing energy and corn can do that at a minimal cost and it can be cooked into tasty food.
The rest of the food must provide proteins, essential fatty acids, vitamins and minerals, but much less amounts are needed for that.
So corn is perfect nutritionally for its right purpose. Obviously it cannot be the only kind of food that is eaten.
Except for energy (i.e. starch), most cereals do not contain anything in sufficient amounts to be an adequate source of it. Wheat is an exception by having a useful amount of protein, which is however harder to digest than most other proteins and the undigested fragments may have undesirable effects. Only oats has a higher protein content than wheat, but oats is much more expensive, so it is not really competitive from this point of view.
Therefore it makes no sense to claim that corn is worse nutritionally than other cereals, because it is better than most (except possibly rice, which cannot be cultivated in the places where corn is grown) at the only thing for which cereals are really good: providing energy.
Whether you pasted LLM content or your own, so much is wrong about what you said (in such a confident tone), including logical, English usage, and scientific / factual errors, that I do not want to argue more, except to leave you with this link to peruse, and another sentence or two below:
That link was of a reply by me to another comment(er) in this same overall thread.
Make sure to see my own reply to my own comment, at the link below the link given, and in particular, the Wikipedia links given there, about the nutritional value of various food items discussed here.
Now, that sentence or two that I mentioned above:
Factual error: near the top of your comment, you say that wheat has about twice the protein of corn (maize).
Wheat actually has more than three times the protein of maize - as a ratio. It also has a lot of other nutritional value.
See the relevant Wikipedia articles that I linked.
And in an absolute sense, it makes even more of a difference, because maize is below 3.5 grams, and wheat is above 12.5 grams in protein. So wheat has 9 grams more protein per 100 grams, than corn / maize. That makes a hell of a lot of difference to poor people, or others, who cannot afford or do not want to eat meat, for religious, cultural, ethical or other reasons.
And there are an increasing number of people in the west or in "developed" countries who are becoming vegetarian for ethical or climate reasons.
The founder of Y Combinator, and of this site, Hacker News, Paul Graham, also became vegetarian some time ago.
When asked why, by someone, he replied, "I was grossed out by factory farming".
See his reply here, 17 years ago, via this search:
> Factual error: near the top of your comment, you say that wheat has about twice the protein of corn (maize).
> Wheat actually has more than three times the protein of maize
No factual error here.
The wheat flour from which I make bread has 13% proteins, while the cornflour that I use has 6.4% proteins.
It is likely that unlike me, you do not cook your own food, which is why you are not aware about the content of nutrients in food ingredients.
The protein content in other parts of plants does not matter. Only the content in the products that you can buy and use for cooking matters. The 6.4% protein content for cornflour is pretty much the same in all brands of cornflour that I have seen in Europe. The wheat flour that I use is the one with the highest protein content. Most other brands have a lower protein content, down to 10% of protein.
> Corn / maize: less than 17 grams carbs per 100 grams
This must be a hallucination. Cornflour almost always has around 75 grams of starch per 100 grams. Wheat flour has a slightly lower starch content, the value written by you, 71 g per 100 g is indeed correct and typical.
The energy content of the cornflour I use is 3410 kcal/100 g and of the wheat flour is 3530 kcal/100 g. Nevertheless, the slightly higher value for wheat flour is misleading, because the gluten is never digested completely and even for the part of the gluten that is digested, the body spends more energy for amino-acid processing than for starch processing, so the net energy intake is actually slightly lower for wheat flour.
It is possible to eat only fat for energy. It is also possible to eat only carbohydrates for energy. This does not mean that the extremes are the best choices.
So you should better check your facts, because the values are so far from correct as to qualify for "hallucinations" (i.e. "more than three times" vs. 13/6.4 and 17 g vs. 75 g).
>It is likely that unlike me, you do not cook your own food, which is why you are not aware about the content of nutrients in food ingredients.
Such a pompous, uninformed, creepy, incredibly illogical and retarded statement you made, to say that, because a person does not cook their own food, they are not aware about the content of nutrients in food ingredients.
Going that same "logic" implies that many people in your friends circle, your relatives, your village or city, your country, and the whole world, are not aware about the content of nutrients in food ingredients. Because a lot of people worldwide, do not cook, you know. Maybe due to being too busy, having others who can do it for them, being partially disabled, or being enough well-off that they do not need to cook, sometimes, or ever. But they have the ability to read ingredient information on packages.
Is that not blindingly of obvious to you?
And further, I do know how to cook, and do cook my own food - sometimes, not always, because I am in that well-off category above. So I don't need to cook all the time.
dang (pun intended), this sounds like the tone of an llm, including hallucinations, which are just an euphemism for factual errors,
so I'll send it to another llm to verify, before I reply. :)
>if all you've got is a vague recollection of stuff you read ages ago
I didnt say "vague", you added that. Kindly don't.
And I said "earlier", not "ages ago". That "earlier" could span a wide range of times ago. How did you manage to make the jump from my "earlier" to your wrong interpretation, "ages ago? That is sloppy / inaccurate thinking / writing.
In fact, it sounds more like misrepresentation than misinformation, which is even worse. Don't do it.
Ha ha. Clearly (not vaguely, ha ha, pun intended), you can't think clearly, and you are inaccurate in saying that 'vague" is an accurate description of your comment'.
(Howdja like my wordplay up there? ;)
Dude (as in dude on a dude ranch, meaning a rank newbie), take a piece of advice: don't try to punch above your level, or, in other words, don't bring a knife to a gun fight.
Your arguments are pathetic and fake.
And, as a knockout blow: I noticed that you avoided replying to my above point about my use of "earlier" vs. your absurdly wrong (or intentionally fake) interpretation of it as "ages ago". That was either stupid or cowardly of you.
End of this subthread for me. I don't waste my time arguing with fakes and cowards. Rant on, if you like, into /dev/null.
> it sucks as a cereal, nutritionally speaking, iirc, based on what I've read earlier. i could be wrong
You are wrong. Sorry. I can't even imagine where you could have read that.
I would rebut you with actual facts, but since you haven't given any information to rebut, there's nothing for me to say except that you've been misinformed.
I like your style of reply. It is at least somewhat more sensible than that of another one in this subthread (from the guy who misinterpreted my words, and talked about my "noise", ha ha). But it is not quite sensible enough, in this case.
Do you really need information from me to rebut, when you can so easily look up relevant words like corn (maize), wheat, rice, millets, and balanced diet, to name just a few of the words / terms I talked about, in Google or other search engines, and particularly in Wikipedia?
The Wikipedia articles for many such common human food items often includes a table of nutrient names and corresponding percentages for that food item, such as for the percentage of carbohydrates, proteins, fats, vitamins and minerals, by needed daily value (DV), with a citation to the USDA article on the same subject.
Okay, I didn't talk about balanced diet earlier, but I did, now.
That is the one of the most important points in my argument above, about why corn sucks nutritionally.
Of course, I did not mean that it is totally useless. Obviously it has some nutrients, just like any other food item has. Maybe I should have mentioned that earlier, in my first comment in this subthread.
I did not mention balanced diet, because I kind of thought that all educated people would know what that means and what it's constituents are - such as carbohydrates, proteins, fats, vitamins, minerals,
Just compare the nutrition from corn (maize) with the nutrition from some of the other food items I mentioned, in said Wikipedia articles.
Here you go, I'm pasting some relevant links below:
Also, for vegetarians (who don't eat meat in any form, land or sea based), which is hundreds of millions of people in the world, due to culture or religion or lower income), legumes are equally important, along with cereals, to give the proper balance of essential amino acids needed to make the needed protein for our bodies.
Google "essential amino acids" and "complete protein" topics.
And I have only scratched the surface of the subject of nutrition. I am by no means an expert. I am just a beginner, who has an interest in the subject, for my own personal use, and to share any info I pick up, with friends.
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.
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.
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
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.
> 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
> 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.
While a good idea, a lot more than zoning needs to be fixed.
Fire codes requiring two stairways have the unintended effect of making 4 bedroom apartments impossible to build and so in turn push anyone who wants just a little more space to single family houses. Those same fire codes have prevented a lot of deaths, and I've never seen a property study on if we can really get rid of them (everyone proposing it points to other countries without those code having lower fire deaths - but they are comparing overall rates including old buildings and lots of different construction styles - so I'm not sure if it something we can safely get rid of in the US context)
If we don't also build great mass transit traffic will get worse - sprawl is a solution to heavy traffic (not a great solution but it is one).
Most places in the US with high density are friendly to specific life styles. They have great bar scenes, theater, live music, arts (and others), but there are lots of other things they do poorly. Importantly the parts with high density are very unfriendly to families and so a lot of people who live in high density in their early 20s feel forced to move to the suburbs in their 30s as they settle down - better schools, parks and other things you want to do with a family become important (these are things that other countries do well in high density but not the US)
On the transit and lifestyle aspects - I think those actually come naturally if you allow the density. And I say that is someone who was an organizer for transit for a decade in Seattle. It would have happened on its own, and probably better, if we did the development first.
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.
Note, it is far different for these crops that were once farmed:
-cotton
-Tobacco
And that is about 30 percent of USA farmland....the main pollutant being arsenic
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.
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.
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.
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].
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
The main constraint to a solution is the size and scale of chemical companies who lobby to create rules in their favor. There's no practical solution to this problem, the best we can do is educate people to live and consume sustainably.
"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.
What’s great about this comment is how damn complex just fucking water is.
You’ve got tap water, which can have chlorine or chloramine added to it. Yes, the water that you drink can be chlorinated. They do this because it kills off microbes that might be living in the pipes between the water distribution center and your faucet, because right now we believe that ingesting trace amounts of chlorine is better than contracting bacterial disease from your drinking water.
Then you have water that’s run through your filter, which might cut down on some larger particles.
Then you have reverse osmosis, which removes smaller particles, and usually includes a carbon filter. This can actually be harmful over long periods of time because the reverse osmosis process removes the trace magnesium etc that you usually get from water and lead to mineral deficiencies.
Then you have distilled water, which has been vaporized and condensed. Same risk applies as reverse osmosis water.
And then you have deionized water, which has gone through an extra filtration step. Not usually intended for drinking, and same risk of mineral deficiencies with long-term consumption applies.
Now, in the context of “remove everything artificial”, deionized water is probably the closest to being pure H2O. On the other hand, you need to additives to avoid health issues from drinking that.
On the other end of the scale, tap water sounds horrible-it’s chlorinated!
And I suppose if you keep going, you get to a point where you find the nearest natural lakebed composed of non-saltwater and just stick a straw into it. That’s probably the most “natural” source of freshwater, with absolutely zero additives, save for local pollution. There’s probably plenty of fecal matter from the local wildlife, but that’s natural, right? Note: Please do not try this at home or anywhere else.
So that’s…six varieties of water, each with their own profile of additives or “chemicals”. And in practice the water you get in your food is probably just going to be a mix from the municipal water supply, runoff, local wells, moist fertilizer, etc.
So before we even get to the chemicals in the food, we have to worry about the chemicals being put into the food to grow it. Oh, plus the chemical composition of the soil…hopefully there’s no heavy metals nearby, some plants are particularly greedy about snatching them up.
So it’s a really complex problem. We can’t just say “no chemicals in food”. It’s just not that simple.
Casual conversations are not about the technical aspects of food production and distribution that has been refined for thousands of years.
Also, chemistry? As a subject? Incredibly pedantic. The exception is the rule for practically everything.
There are formulations of medications that are selecting for this one shape of the particular molecule which has otherwise identical composition. And that may determine insurance coverage.
If you don’t want to have pedantic discussions, organic chemistry is not going to be a pleasant topic for you.
Odds are none or very few of the people on hacker news are farmers or chemists deeply involved with the agricultural industry, but I imagine this would come across about as favorably as a hacker news perspective on farmers complaining about the way apps on their phone work. Or complaining that computer nerds have ruined John Deere tractors by making them impossible to repair.
Ie it’s going to totally lack any sense of nuance about the business, politics, and logistical constraints involving the existing solutions.
I skimmed all of that but I gather you are saying don't talk about food production unless you are an expert or you want to be pedantic or some bullshit like that. Everyone eats food, everyone can influence food production in one way or another, whether through grocery habits or local or national politics. There is absolutely no way I would want to be associated with such a limiting viewpoint such as yours.
What you’re doing is spreading unqualified FUD towards the work of scientists and engineers involved in bioengineering. We don’t need more ignorant opposition to STEM in the US. We already have large swathes of the population rejecting vaccines with an excellent safety record because taking their chances with an unknown disease known to do permanent neurovascular damage was more “natural”.
As opposed to you encouraging naivite among the general population about bioengineered products? We do need a good amount of opposition to this incredibly naive viewpoint that so many people like you have of accepting whatever nonsense some scientist says as unquestionable truth. If the people involved in bioengineering feel so strongly that the population need to take particular drug, make that argument scientifically instead of going into histrionics about FUD or whatever.
Trust in scientists have plummeted in the last few years because of very good reasons (vaccine mandates, for one). Trust is hard to build back up, so if you want the trust back, you will have to do the decades long hard work of building it back up instead of complaining about it. It's not coming back just because you complain about it.
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.
It's all of those things. Yes the list is nearly endless and by default they all should be considered harmful to humans.
Also, there is no need to stop using the word just because it can be used in arguments to make unfalsifiable claims. Talk about the claims instead; it's silly to talk about the word.
You seem to come from a perspective that we should consider these chemicals to be safe unless proven otherwise. That is an extremely naive perspective.
> You seem to come from a perspective that we should consider these chemicals to be safe unless proven otherwise. That is an extremely naive perspective.
Whatever you’re talking about has been ingested by millions or billions of people, so I don’t think it’s “naive” to assume a certain degree of safety for…whatever you’re talking about in American food.
Yeah, America’s health profile is different than other countries and we have a high rate of obesity, but only to a certain extent. We don’t have a whole lot of people who walk into McDonald’s and then drop dead after having the fries.
There’s a degree of reasonableness between “we should assume nothing is wrong” and “we should throw our food economy into chaos by outlawing ‘chemicals’ until we can have a two-generation double-blind randomly controlled study of every single one to prove safety.”
And this would probably have to include herbicides and pesticides which might get taken up or broken down by the plants, or which trace amounts might still exist on the product if it isn’t properly prepared, etc.
It’s a dead-end proposal because you can’t shut down food production to that degree without, you know, starving people and causing the collapse of modern society. Which, I’m just spitballing here, is probably going to have worse acute effects than all those “chemicals” put together.
So clearly you need to prioritize what you think is causing harm, and I suspect that’s exactly what relevant research is doing.
Reminds me of a particularly sassy medical paper:
> Advocates of evidence based medicine have criticised the adoption of interventions evaluated by using only observational data. We think that everyone might benefit if the most radical protagonists of evidence based medicine organised and participated in a double blind, randomised, placebo controlled, crossover trial of the parachute.
Your argument is something like if it doesn't work 100% perfectly, then don't try it at all. No need to go whole hog, there is a perfectly fine list of banned chemicals published by the EU right next door. We should start with that.
It's the literal definition of a chemical. Your body is a metabolic machine made of chemicals and performing all kinds of metabolic chemistry. People hysterical about "chemicals" and "toxins" are almost always uneducated and unspecfic about which ones they mean. Plenty of manufactured chemicals are nontoxic or even good for us. And plenty are bad for us. So we won't get any improvement health-wise by making a vague blanket boogeyman term like "chemicals". Learn some chemistry, educate yourself, and be part of the solution rather than just a ignorant voice adding to the noise.
This is a reductive and simplistic viewpoint. You are basically looking at a dictionary definition and trying to argue from that. You are not in 8th grade anymore and you are not talking to people who have just learned the definition of the word chemical anymore. Level up the conversation and learn that the sense of a word changes under different context, for a start.
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.)
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.
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
> 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.
I hope we do, but modernified. You grow most of your staples and you reduce your reliance on the system, acting as a true UBI because you can take care of your family. Work becomes increasingly optional for those who seek more than what modern abundance self gardening could achieve. A few hours of daily work and all the time waisters of modern tech. Just need enough money to pay property taxes.
If the transition doesn't happen, we're looking at it dropping to 1-5% of its size now.
I hope we do this before we take out the rest of the earth with our cancerous global-scale genocide of everything - animals, plants, cultures, 'different' humans, languages and cultures.
Agriculture uses only a bit over 1% of US primary energy demand. We use more energy cooking food than we do growing it. And that's with the large inefficiency of growing feed crops for livestock.
Replacing fossil fuel use in agriculture is a minor problem compared to replacing it in the economy as a whole.
The U.S. has centuries' worth of proven natural gas reserves. If we ran out of oil (that's not happening anytime soon) we could use natural gas for transportation just fine. Much of the world already uses natural gas for transportation. We could then save the remaining oil for plastics.
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.
Doing regenerative farming does not mean abandoning half a century of knowledge and technological progress. Rather, it is using all we now know and know how to do to heal the land and maximizing output. In a lot of cases yes, the output may be smaller of some crops, but the net total calories extracted might not be that different.
Not to mention, if your land is all but barren and it requires fertilizers to grow, when prices spike or supply disappears and the farmer can’t afford to plant…the output is zero.
It is also ignoring what conventional ag has figured out. Most of the soil loss was pre WWII and conventional ag has figured out how to grow more soil (about 1mm per year in the best case and typically slower)
The soil loss during the great depression was not due so much to bad farming practices (though tilling is harmful) but to massive farming bankruptcies following the last harvest, so much land was left unseeded -- that is, with no cover crops of any kind. The wind did the rest.
It's not simplistic because something could have been done (plant cover crops) but nothing was done. The textbooks I had claimed it was about monocultures and such, but the real issue was tilling, and we still till the soil today. So no, it's not a simplistic view.
The type of plow used then is almost never used today. they used to turn the soil over butting top soil (aerobic stuff) under lower layers (anerobit stuff). Now they break up compaction but don't turn the soil over.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
What on earth is a regenerative farmer doing on HN? I’m very curious and intrigued
You’d genuinely be shocked how many hardcore tech folks own and run hobby or semi-commercial farms.
I run a biodiverse fruit orchard.
I'm a software engineer, but my wife runs a regenerative flower farm. So I'm exposed to both worlds
Maybe a lot of farmers don't want to drastically increase their herbicide use?
>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.
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
These are low margin businesses. Chances are they can't afford it without significant pain.
For sure, economic assessment is one way to figure out what to do.
When we as a civilization making decisions ending up where we are now (depleted soil and what else not looming). It does make one wonder if the current financial incentives is NOT aligned with the incentives of living beings on the planet? How can we make it so?
Where and when did that misalignment happened?
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.
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
Every unit of a crop has a specific amount of minerals forever taken away. Nitrogen comes from the air and to isn't an issue. but where are you going to get those tons of phospeous from? Farmers now have to add sulfur because while not much is needed some is taken away and needed - they used to get that from acid rain but we cleaned up that source (overall a good thing but one unexpected issue)
i don't know how much iron crops need compared to what is in most soils. I know farmes are adding sulfar and other mineral.
> Nitrogen comes from the air and to isn't an issue
I thought it was a huge issue because natural nitrogen fixation was slow and unreliable, and that's why Haber-Bosch was such a big deal.
Yes it is. And not only does fertilizer take significant amounts of power, it also uses hydrogen as a reagent which is sourced from fossil fuels. But despite that, it is still "cheap" because the alternative is using twice as much land, and smaller farmers who are most interested in regenerative farming don't have the capital to double their land usage which is a problem. They are getting beat out by larger scale corporate farms that aren't worried about the state of the land 30 years down the road.
By not an issue I mean we have plenty and it is 'easy' to replace. Of course fixing is slow and so we need to add a lot but supplies won't run out.
You sure? I vaguely remember that the Green Revolution was roughly a 10x in yield. That sounds pretty significant. What's the yield difference using modern techniques?
Nitrogen fertilizer alone is a long way from 10x yield. The initial program got 3x yields over 20 years from a host of changes (pesticides, farm equipment, new hybrids etc), but at the core it was really a mix of education and loans not just some novel techniques.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Revolution
Unless you are doing nuclear physics, those elements will persist. Let's say you are growing grain for cattle. The manure gets spread on the fields. Closed loop.
Mostly it isn't though as we ship the crops elsewhere where cattle grow but corn dose not (technically it grows but not wel)
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...
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.
You need to return your waste to soil, maybe?
Composting the food waste, and use composting toilets to create a "circular economy".
That is apparently how it was done in the old days...
I think most municipal waste systems in the U.S. do this. Probably other developed countries too. And they probably do it to a higher standard of safety and not allowing leaching or runoff.
Some municipalities actually have separate stream food waste composting, which is great, but rare. Turning solid waste in sewage into fertilizer is a thing (I don't know if it's most places or not, i think not), but is pretty problematic in how it's done, it's a pretty toxic product. Definitely not the same as a composting toilet. https://missouriindependent.com/2024/08/09/fertilizer-from-h...
Problematic? You are taking elements that cause ocean dead zones and recycling them to generate food. Sounds close to the best possible system.
See The Humanure Handbook. https://humanurehandbook.com/
See also, Paul Wheaton criticism of The Humanure Handbook ("No, do fear your poop! Fear it!!"). Timecode link, but I recommend the whole video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vZPTPIHO8w&t=4980s
Yes, let's put human waste containing a whole Walgreens' of drug residues onto a field growing our food crops. What could possibly go wrong?
Milogranite and similar are exactly that. Burned up human waste fertilizer.
Good question.
It's about unknown unknowns, right? But we could map out where those may be.
I guess chemical toxicity, drugs with long half-lives that affect soil organisms, and antibiotics that promote resistance.
(yeah yeah they are all chemicals.)
For the chemical toxicity, it's chemicals that are harmful to plants but allowed for human consumption, or chemicals in sufficient quantity to disrupt soil balance. Doesn't seem like a real concern?
With metabolic disruption to soil organisms, yes, there may be real danger there. That smells like previous environmental mistakes.
Antibiotics, yeah, some danger. Livestock is exposed, and resistance-conferring genes might jump directly to human pathogens.
It's worth studying. There are requirements for both sewage processing and fertilising soil, so the value of a solution would be high.
Yes, at an industrial level it's a problem. But as a small scale regenerative farmer, its the thing to do.
Like many things, poop doesn't easily scale....
I don't see what scale has to do with it. The concentration of drug residues in manure is independent of the quantity.
I too am a connoisseur of dysentery.
But seriously check out the links, especially the second one. That's precisely the point — to close the nutrient loop but still 100% interrupt the pathogen fecal-oral route.
I watched the video and all he said is that if it smells bad, it is bad but I don’t see anything about closing the nutrient loop
Isaac Asimov once conducted a thought experiment: "If all the earth's crust was converted into bio-mass, what would be the limiting element?"
Remember all those post WWII photos showing how fertilizing with phosphorous resulted in incredible crop yields?
Guess what element China (which has some of the world's largest reserves) has quit exporting?
> "If all the earth's crust was converted into bio-mass, what would be the limiting element?"
I think selenium would run out long before phosphorus.
The crust contains selenium at 0.05-0.09 ppm, but most plants require around 0.1-1 ppm. It's also one of the hardest nutrients to remediate because you can't just dump a bunch of selenium on the surface when 5-10 ppm starts to become toxic to lots of other organisms.
While all animals need selenium and many plants contain some variable amounts of selenium, because they take it from the soil instead of sulfur, all the sources that I have read say that it has not been proven that selenium is required by any plant.
Selenium is one chemical element that, like nickel and cobalt, has been needed by all living beings already some billions of years ago, but nowadays there are many living beings which have lost their dependency of selenium, which has been a beneficial trait for them, due to the scarcity of selenium.
The terrestrial plants, because of their environment which frequently lacks many minerals, have lost their dependencies of several chemical elements, e.g. of cobalt, of sodium, for most of them also of nickel, which is optional even in those which can use it, and apparently also of selenium.
If you have seen any source which says that it has been discovered that some plant needs selenium, please indicate it.
As I have said, many plants happen to contain selenium only because they are not selective enough in their sulfur intake, not because they need selenium for anything, unlike the animals, which would die without selenium.
I was supplementing with selenium for various reasons, and it seemed clear that it's one of the minerals that used to be supplied via our diet, but is quite deficient now, due to exhaustion in the soil.
Selenium, along with taurine, is one of the supplements which genuinely drove my physicians vehemently crazy, so I doubled up, and ensured that they were the focal point of my daily regimen.
> Selenium, along with taurine, is one of the supplements which genuinely drove my physicians vehemently crazy, so I doubled up, and ensured that they were the focal point of my daily regimen.
Selenium is commonly recommended by doctors in New Zealand.
When you say it drove your physicians crazy, what do you mean?
They wanted social validation for their fad diet from the doctor and didn't get it.
No, they get pissed because the supplements can actually heal illnesses and support better health, which means they wouldn't be able to push drugs on me.
Psychiatrist's parting shot was, "they're all bio-active!"
Micronutrients are no fad, because guess what, they used to come in our fruits, vegetables, and meats.
The clue is in the name. We'll mine it on the moon!
Phosphate builds up in soil, converted to insoluble forms. Most applied phosphate isn't absorbed by plants. So "regenerative agriculture" could actually make sense if there are ways of tapping into this phosphate bank, say by encouraging the growth of phosphate mobilizing microorganisms.
One issue with phosphate ore is contamination with undesirable elements, like cadmium and also uranium and its decay products, like radium. The waste stream from sulfuric acid treatment of the ores is radon-emitting gypsum.
Sulfuric acid itself may become limiting once we're off fossil fuels, since almost all of it is currently produced by oxidation of sulfur extracted in the desulfurization of oil and gas.
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.
instead of mining rocks thousands of miles away, crushing them, and then spreading the result in your fields, convince local fungi to do all that work locally!
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.
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.
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.
"Does that scale?"
Not in my experience.
The promises of many permaculture proponents, are close to a scam.
Basically, the claim is establish a working ecological system - and then it runs by itself, while producing lots of yield. Permanent Culture.
But in reality, wild nature takes over quite quickly, if you don't do anything. A fruit tree does usually not have benefits by making big red apples for example. Small ones are good enough for wild reproduction. But we want as many apples as possible, which means pruning, etc.
And a vegetable garden ... they like care, but if you don't tend to them, they will remain tiny and soon displaced by weeds.
So what I have seen in my experiments in my garden and on other permaculture farms - is that the result looks nice, but it is a lot of work and low yield. Some ideas like fruit forests are a nice additionm but all in all I doubt permaculture can feed the world. (I have not seen one permaculture farm, that could feed itself)
I have never seen a permaculture designer, or anyone, make such a claim. We aim to reduce maintenance by design, using methods that overlap with Lean Manufacturing and other process study, but it would be absurd to claim that it’s possible to reduce gardening to zero maintenance. Fukuoka was more extreme than many permaculture specialists by quite a large factor but he put his maintenance right in the title of his signature work: “one-straw revolution”.
The idea is that the crops are more profitable per unit of time spent. The pasture operations are very low labor.
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
>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.
Nutritionally speaking, corn is an excellent source of energy.
In many parts of the Earth, e.g. in Europe, maize a.k.a. corn and wheat are much cheaper energy sources than anything else and wheat and corn are about as cheap.
Wheat may be preferable to corn only because it has a double amount of proteins, so it can also be used to provide a big part of the daily intake in proteins, if it is supplemented with at least another source of proteins that is rich in lysine. However, wheat is more suspicious from the point of view of its health effects, so when the absolute minimum cost for the daily food is not the target, corn might be the best energy source in food.
The bulk of the food that is needed daily is required for providing energy and corn can do that at a minimal cost and it can be cooked into tasty food.
The rest of the food must provide proteins, essential fatty acids, vitamins and minerals, but much less amounts are needed for that.
So corn is perfect nutritionally for its right purpose. Obviously it cannot be the only kind of food that is eaten.
Except for energy (i.e. starch), most cereals do not contain anything in sufficient amounts to be an adequate source of it. Wheat is an exception by having a useful amount of protein, which is however harder to digest than most other proteins and the undigested fragments may have undesirable effects. Only oats has a higher protein content than wheat, but oats is much more expensive, so it is not really competitive from this point of view.
Therefore it makes no sense to claim that corn is worse nutritionally than other cereals, because it is better than most (except possibly rice, which cannot be cultivated in the places where corn is grown) at the only thing for which cereals are really good: providing energy.
Wow.
Whether you pasted LLM content or your own, so much is wrong about what you said (in such a confident tone), including logical, English usage, and scientific / factual errors, that I do not want to argue more, except to leave you with this link to peruse, and another sentence or two below:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41957679
That link was of a reply by me to another comment(er) in this same overall thread.
Make sure to see my own reply to my own comment, at the link below the link given, and in particular, the Wikipedia links given there, about the nutritional value of various food items discussed here.
Now, that sentence or two that I mentioned above:
Factual error: near the top of your comment, you say that wheat has about twice the protein of corn (maize).
Wheat actually has more than three times the protein of maize - as a ratio. It also has a lot of other nutritional value.
See the relevant Wikipedia articles that I linked.
And in an absolute sense, it makes even more of a difference, because maize is below 3.5 grams, and wheat is above 12.5 grams in protein. So wheat has 9 grams more protein per 100 grams, than corn / maize. That makes a hell of a lot of difference to poor people, or others, who cannot afford or do not want to eat meat, for religious, cultural, ethical or other reasons.
And there are an increasing number of people in the west or in "developed" countries who are becoming vegetarian for ethical or climate reasons.
The founder of Y Combinator, and of this site, Hacker News, Paul Graham, also became vegetarian some time ago.
When asked why, by someone, he replied, "I was grossed out by factory farming".
See his reply here, 17 years ago, via this search:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=58051
"It wasn't a deliberate choice. I just got grossed out by factory farming."
Factual error, or almost: in your last paragraph, you say that corn is an excellent source of energy.
Much less than wheat:
Corn / maize: less than 17 grams carbs per 100 grams.
Wheat: more than 71 grams carbs per 100 grams.
Again, see the same relevant, linked, Wikipedia articles about maize and wheat for proof.
My calculator tells me that 71/17 is over 4x.
Fat content in both is so low as to not matter.
And carbohydrates have 4 calories per gram, while fats have 9 calories per gram.
So should we all just eat fats only, for energy?
Of course not. There is much more to nutrition than just energy or protein or fat or whatever.
> Factual error: near the top of your comment, you say that wheat has about twice the protein of corn (maize). > Wheat actually has more than three times the protein of maize
No factual error here. The wheat flour from which I make bread has 13% proteins, while the cornflour that I use has 6.4% proteins.
It is likely that unlike me, you do not cook your own food, which is why you are not aware about the content of nutrients in food ingredients.
The protein content in other parts of plants does not matter. Only the content in the products that you can buy and use for cooking matters. The 6.4% protein content for cornflour is pretty much the same in all brands of cornflour that I have seen in Europe. The wheat flour that I use is the one with the highest protein content. Most other brands have a lower protein content, down to 10% of protein.
> Corn / maize: less than 17 grams carbs per 100 grams
This must be a hallucination. Cornflour almost always has around 75 grams of starch per 100 grams. Wheat flour has a slightly lower starch content, the value written by you, 71 g per 100 g is indeed correct and typical.
The energy content of the cornflour I use is 3410 kcal/100 g and of the wheat flour is 3530 kcal/100 g. Nevertheless, the slightly higher value for wheat flour is misleading, because the gluten is never digested completely and even for the part of the gluten that is digested, the body spends more energy for amino-acid processing than for starch processing, so the net energy intake is actually slightly lower for wheat flour.
It is possible to eat only fat for energy. It is also possible to eat only carbohydrates for energy. This does not mean that the extremes are the best choices.
So you should better check your facts, because the values are so far from correct as to qualify for "hallucinations" (i.e. "more than three times" vs. 13/6.4 and 17 g vs. 75 g).
Faaakkkk.
>It is likely that unlike me, you do not cook your own food, which is why you are not aware about the content of nutrients in food ingredients.
Such a pompous, uninformed, creepy, incredibly illogical and retarded statement you made, to say that, because a person does not cook their own food, they are not aware about the content of nutrients in food ingredients.
Going that same "logic" implies that many people in your friends circle, your relatives, your village or city, your country, and the whole world, are not aware about the content of nutrients in food ingredients. Because a lot of people worldwide, do not cook, you know. Maybe due to being too busy, having others who can do it for them, being partially disabled, or being enough well-off that they do not need to cook, sometimes, or ever. But they have the ability to read ingredient information on packages.
Is that not blindingly of obvious to you?
And further, I do know how to cook, and do cook my own food - sometimes, not always, because I am in that well-off category above. So I don't need to cook all the time.
And I enjoy doing it.
Fixing a few typos / grammatical errors from above:
>Going that same "logic"
Going by that same "logic"
>your friends circle
your friends' circle
>Is that not blindingly of obvious to you?
Is that not blindingly obvious to you?
dang (pun intended), this sounds like the tone of an llm, including hallucinations, which are just an euphemism for factual errors, so I'll send it to another llm to verify, before I reply. :)
did you see what I did there? :)
If you dispute anything that I have said, present your arguments and point to the hallucinations.
Vague ad hominem accusations are useless.
The only factual error is what you have written "it sucks as a cereal, nutritionally speaking".
Why should I, when you talk utter crap?
Anyway, I did that (replied) already, once.
See my other reply to you, here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41967220
> iirc, based on what I've read earlier. i could be wrong, but don't have time to check it now.
Please, if all you've got is a vague recollection of stuff you read ages ago just don't comment at all. You're just adding noise
Please don't add misinformation.
>if all you've got is a vague recollection of stuff you read ages ago
I didnt say "vague", you added that. Kindly don't.
And I said "earlier", not "ages ago". That "earlier" could span a wide range of times ago. How did you manage to make the jump from my "earlier" to your wrong interpretation, "ages ago? That is sloppy / inaccurate thinking / writing.
In fact, it sounds more like misrepresentation than misinformation, which is even worse. Don't do it.
"vague" is an accurate description of your comment. You can get as defensive as you want but you're just adding more noise
Ha ha. Clearly (not vaguely, ha ha, pun intended), you can't think clearly, and you are inaccurate in saying that 'vague" is an accurate description of your comment'.
(Howdja like my wordplay up there? ;)
Dude (as in dude on a dude ranch, meaning a rank newbie), take a piece of advice: don't try to punch above your level, or, in other words, don't bring a knife to a gun fight.
Your arguments are pathetic and fake.
And, as a knockout blow: I noticed that you avoided replying to my above point about my use of "earlier" vs. your absurdly wrong (or intentionally fake) interpretation of it as "ages ago". That was either stupid or cowardly of you.
End of this subthread for me. I don't waste my time arguing with fakes and cowards. Rant on, if you like, into /dev/null.
> it sucks as a cereal, nutritionally speaking, iirc, based on what I've read earlier. i could be wrong
You are wrong. Sorry. I can't even imagine where you could have read that.
I would rebut you with actual facts, but since you haven't given any information to rebut, there's nothing for me to say except that you've been misinformed.
I like your style of reply. It is at least somewhat more sensible than that of another one in this subthread (from the guy who misinterpreted my words, and talked about my "noise", ha ha). But it is not quite sensible enough, in this case.
Do you really need information from me to rebut, when you can so easily look up relevant words like corn (maize), wheat, rice, millets, and balanced diet, to name just a few of the words / terms I talked about, in Google or other search engines, and particularly in Wikipedia?
The Wikipedia articles for many such common human food items often includes a table of nutrient names and corresponding percentages for that food item, such as for the percentage of carbohydrates, proteins, fats, vitamins and minerals, by needed daily value (DV), with a citation to the USDA article on the same subject.
Those are hard facts, not my opinions.
Check them out, then come back and talk.
Okay, I didn't talk about balanced diet earlier, but I did, now.
That is the one of the most important points in my argument above, about why corn sucks nutritionally.
Of course, I did not mean that it is totally useless. Obviously it has some nutrients, just like any other food item has. Maybe I should have mentioned that earlier, in my first comment in this subthread.
I did not mention balanced diet, because I kind of thought that all educated people would know what that means and what it's constituents are - such as carbohydrates, proteins, fats, vitamins, minerals,
Just compare the nutrition from corn (maize) with the nutrition from some of the other food items I mentioned, in said Wikipedia articles.
Here you go, I'm pasting some relevant links below:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maize
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheat
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorghum
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millet
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finger_millet
And there are some more millets. Google them.
Also, for vegetarians (who don't eat meat in any form, land or sea based), which is hundreds of millions of people in the world, due to culture or religion or lower income), legumes are equally important, along with cereals, to give the proper balance of essential amino acids needed to make the needed protein for our bodies.
Google "essential amino acids" and "complete protein" topics.
And I have only scratched the surface of the subject of nutrition. I am by no means an expert. I am just a beginner, who has an interest in the subject, for my own personal use, and to share any info I pick up, with friends.
You're welcome :) ;).
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.
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.
>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.
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.
Pretty sure most corn is grown for animal feed. We could help by eating less - or no - meat.
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.
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
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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
> agricultural land shrinks every year
What's the cause of this? Nutritional deficiency? Economics? Or something else?
Suburbs expanding.
Another reason to abolish zoning in our major cities. Let people go upward, it will reduce pressure outward.
While a good idea, a lot more than zoning needs to be fixed.
Fire codes requiring two stairways have the unintended effect of making 4 bedroom apartments impossible to build and so in turn push anyone who wants just a little more space to single family houses. Those same fire codes have prevented a lot of deaths, and I've never seen a property study on if we can really get rid of them (everyone proposing it points to other countries without those code having lower fire deaths - but they are comparing overall rates including old buildings and lots of different construction styles - so I'm not sure if it something we can safely get rid of in the US context)
If we don't also build great mass transit traffic will get worse - sprawl is a solution to heavy traffic (not a great solution but it is one).
Most places in the US with high density are friendly to specific life styles. They have great bar scenes, theater, live music, arts (and others), but there are lots of other things they do poorly. Importantly the parts with high density are very unfriendly to families and so a lot of people who live in high density in their early 20s feel forced to move to the suburbs in their 30s as they settle down - better schools, parks and other things you want to do with a family become important (these are things that other countries do well in high density but not the US)
I agree with the fire code issues of course!
On the transit and lifestyle aspects - I think those actually come naturally if you allow the density. And I say that is someone who was an organizer for transit for a decade in Seattle. It would have happened on its own, and probably better, if we did the development first.
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.
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...
Note, it is far different for these crops that were once farmed:
And that is about 30 percent of USA farmland....the main pollutant being arsenicEven 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.
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.
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.
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...
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
Why do you say everything is chemicals like it's some sort of gotcha? That's very obvious.
There's a clear context here. You're rejecting context and screaming, "chemicals!"
The main constraint to a solution is the size and scale of chemical companies who lobby to create rules in their favor. There's no practical solution to this problem, the best we can do is educate people to live and consume sustainably.
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.
"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...
Could be worse! You might have ingested some dihydrogen monoxide!
What’s great about this comment is how damn complex just fucking water is.
You’ve got tap water, which can have chlorine or chloramine added to it. Yes, the water that you drink can be chlorinated. They do this because it kills off microbes that might be living in the pipes between the water distribution center and your faucet, because right now we believe that ingesting trace amounts of chlorine is better than contracting bacterial disease from your drinking water.
Then you have water that’s run through your filter, which might cut down on some larger particles.
Then you have reverse osmosis, which removes smaller particles, and usually includes a carbon filter. This can actually be harmful over long periods of time because the reverse osmosis process removes the trace magnesium etc that you usually get from water and lead to mineral deficiencies.
Then you have distilled water, which has been vaporized and condensed. Same risk applies as reverse osmosis water.
And then you have deionized water, which has gone through an extra filtration step. Not usually intended for drinking, and same risk of mineral deficiencies with long-term consumption applies.
Now, in the context of “remove everything artificial”, deionized water is probably the closest to being pure H2O. On the other hand, you need to additives to avoid health issues from drinking that.
On the other end of the scale, tap water sounds horrible-it’s chlorinated!
And I suppose if you keep going, you get to a point where you find the nearest natural lakebed composed of non-saltwater and just stick a straw into it. That’s probably the most “natural” source of freshwater, with absolutely zero additives, save for local pollution. There’s probably plenty of fecal matter from the local wildlife, but that’s natural, right? Note: Please do not try this at home or anywhere else.
So that’s…six varieties of water, each with their own profile of additives or “chemicals”. And in practice the water you get in your food is probably just going to be a mix from the municipal water supply, runoff, local wells, moist fertilizer, etc.
So before we even get to the chemicals in the food, we have to worry about the chemicals being put into the food to grow it. Oh, plus the chemical composition of the soil…hopefully there’s no heavy metals nearby, some plants are particularly greedy about snatching them up.
So it’s a really complex problem. We can’t just say “no chemicals in food”. It’s just not that simple.
Of course it means added chemicals. You cannot be this pedantic and still have a normal conversation. Well...you can but it's very annoying.
Casual conversations are not about the technical aspects of food production and distribution that has been refined for thousands of years.
Also, chemistry? As a subject? Incredibly pedantic. The exception is the rule for practically everything.
There are formulations of medications that are selecting for this one shape of the particular molecule which has otherwise identical composition. And that may determine insurance coverage.
If you don’t want to have pedantic discussions, organic chemistry is not going to be a pleasant topic for you.
Odds are none or very few of the people on hacker news are farmers or chemists deeply involved with the agricultural industry, but I imagine this would come across about as favorably as a hacker news perspective on farmers complaining about the way apps on their phone work. Or complaining that computer nerds have ruined John Deere tractors by making them impossible to repair.
Ie it’s going to totally lack any sense of nuance about the business, politics, and logistical constraints involving the existing solutions.
I skimmed all of that but I gather you are saying don't talk about food production unless you are an expert or you want to be pedantic or some bullshit like that. Everyone eats food, everyone can influence food production in one way or another, whether through grocery habits or local or national politics. There is absolutely no way I would want to be associated with such a limiting viewpoint such as yours.
What you’re doing is spreading unqualified FUD towards the work of scientists and engineers involved in bioengineering. We don’t need more ignorant opposition to STEM in the US. We already have large swathes of the population rejecting vaccines with an excellent safety record because taking their chances with an unknown disease known to do permanent neurovascular damage was more “natural”.
As opposed to you encouraging naivite among the general population about bioengineered products? We do need a good amount of opposition to this incredibly naive viewpoint that so many people like you have of accepting whatever nonsense some scientist says as unquestionable truth. If the people involved in bioengineering feel so strongly that the population need to take particular drug, make that argument scientifically instead of going into histrionics about FUD or whatever.
Trust in scientists have plummeted in the last few years because of very good reasons (vaccine mandates, for one). Trust is hard to build back up, so if you want the trust back, you will have to do the decades long hard work of building it back up instead of complaining about it. It's not coming back just because you complain about it.
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.
It's all of those things. Yes the list is nearly endless and by default they all should be considered harmful to humans.
Also, there is no need to stop using the word just because it can be used in arguments to make unfalsifiable claims. Talk about the claims instead; it's silly to talk about the word.
You seem to come from a perspective that we should consider these chemicals to be safe unless proven otherwise. That is an extremely naive perspective.
> You seem to come from a perspective that we should consider these chemicals to be safe unless proven otherwise. That is an extremely naive perspective.
Whatever you’re talking about has been ingested by millions or billions of people, so I don’t think it’s “naive” to assume a certain degree of safety for…whatever you’re talking about in American food.
Yeah, America’s health profile is different than other countries and we have a high rate of obesity, but only to a certain extent. We don’t have a whole lot of people who walk into McDonald’s and then drop dead after having the fries.
There’s a degree of reasonableness between “we should assume nothing is wrong” and “we should throw our food economy into chaos by outlawing ‘chemicals’ until we can have a two-generation double-blind randomly controlled study of every single one to prove safety.”
And this would probably have to include herbicides and pesticides which might get taken up or broken down by the plants, or which trace amounts might still exist on the product if it isn’t properly prepared, etc.
It’s a dead-end proposal because you can’t shut down food production to that degree without, you know, starving people and causing the collapse of modern society. Which, I’m just spitballing here, is probably going to have worse acute effects than all those “chemicals” put together.
So clearly you need to prioritize what you think is causing harm, and I suspect that’s exactly what relevant research is doing.
Reminds me of a particularly sassy medical paper:
> Advocates of evidence based medicine have criticised the adoption of interventions evaluated by using only observational data. We think that everyone might benefit if the most radical protagonists of evidence based medicine organised and participated in a double blind, randomised, placebo controlled, crossover trial of the parachute.
https://www.bmj.com/content/327/7429/1459
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC300808/
https://www.bmj.com/content/363/bmj.k5094
Your argument is something like if it doesn't work 100% perfectly, then don't try it at all. No need to go whole hog, there is a perfectly fine list of banned chemicals published by the EU right next door. We should start with that.
Every molecule in your body is a chemical.
A statement that does not say anything. Don't even know why you would bother posting this.
It's the literal definition of a chemical. Your body is a metabolic machine made of chemicals and performing all kinds of metabolic chemistry. People hysterical about "chemicals" and "toxins" are almost always uneducated and unspecfic about which ones they mean. Plenty of manufactured chemicals are nontoxic or even good for us. And plenty are bad for us. So we won't get any improvement health-wise by making a vague blanket boogeyman term like "chemicals". Learn some chemistry, educate yourself, and be part of the solution rather than just a ignorant voice adding to the noise.
This is a reductive and simplistic viewpoint. You are basically looking at a dictionary definition and trying to argue from that. You are not in 8th grade anymore and you are not talking to people who have just learned the definition of the word chemical anymore. Level up the conversation and learn that the sense of a word changes under different context, for a start.
Also in 1970, 33% of the global population was malnourished. That number is less than 8% now.
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.
Nice. This is a bad faith argument as we can attempt progress safely without poisoning the entire planet -- within the laws we pay for of course.
I think the point I’m making is we can’t really. Organic farming would potentially halve the world’s food output.
> chemicals and tons of calories
If you mean ultra processed food then, yes.
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.)
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.
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
A 6mb mp3 downloads automatically when visited, on desktop at least, which seems pretty wasteful.
Might want to send that feedback to https://investigatemidwest.org/contact-us/
Especially not nice if it happens on mobile connections.
Change the extension to .js, boom problem solved
> 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.
We HOPE we never see a return to rural farming life…
I hope we do, but modernified. You grow most of your staples and you reduce your reliance on the system, acting as a true UBI because you can take care of your family. Work becomes increasingly optional for those who seek more than what modern abundance self gardening could achieve. A few hours of daily work and all the time waisters of modern tech. Just need enough money to pay property taxes.
the ghost of Pol Pot has joined the chat
I don't think we'll get every other person to choose farming as a career again.
You realize, once Petroleum runs out this century, humanity is completely screwed right ?
Forget transportation/energy, our economy is chemically hooked on to it like a coke-addict.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VOMWzjrRiBg
If the transition doesn't happen, we're looking at it dropping to 1-5% of its size now.
I hope we do this before we take out the rest of the earth with our cancerous global-scale genocide of everything - animals, plants, cultures, 'different' humans, languages and cultures.
> once Petroleum runs out this century
Weird. I had that on my calendar for _last_ century. I wonder what happened?
Agriculture uses only a bit over 1% of US primary energy demand. We use more energy cooking food than we do growing it. And that's with the large inefficiency of growing feed crops for livestock.
Replacing fossil fuel use in agriculture is a minor problem compared to replacing it in the economy as a whole.
The U.S. has centuries' worth of proven natural gas reserves. If we ran out of oil (that's not happening anytime soon) we could use natural gas for transportation just fine. Much of the world already uses natural gas for transportation. We could then save the remaining oil for plastics.
Love a good opportunity to shill a post from my favorite subreddit of all time!
https://preview.redd.it/every-time-v0-s3c958v8vylc1.jpeg?aut...
we have so much oil and natural gas, we're going to transition off of petroleum before we run out
And coal. Massive amounts of coal which could be gassified in a pinch if there were nothing else.
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.
Doing regenerative farming does not mean abandoning half a century of knowledge and technological progress. Rather, it is using all we now know and know how to do to heal the land and maximizing output. In a lot of cases yes, the output may be smaller of some crops, but the net total calories extracted might not be that different.
Not to mention, if your land is all but barren and it requires fertilizers to grow, when prices spike or supply disappears and the farmer can’t afford to plant…the output is zero.
It is also ignoring what conventional ag has figured out. Most of the soil loss was pre WWII and conventional ag has figured out how to grow more soil (about 1mm per year in the best case and typically slower)
The soil loss during the great depression was not due so much to bad farming practices (though tilling is harmful) but to massive farming bankruptcies following the last harvest, so much land was left unseeded -- that is, with no cover crops of any kind. The wind did the rest.
That's a very simplistic view. Isn't that exactly the same as saying "guns don't kill people, bullets do"?
It's the bad farming practices that created the situation where the soil was vulnerable.
We're not talking about blame, but rather about determining the direct causes.
It's not simplistic because something could have been done (plant cover crops) but nothing was done. The textbooks I had claimed it was about monocultures and such, but the real issue was tilling, and we still till the soil today. So no, it's not a simplistic view.
The type of plow used then is almost never used today. they used to turn the soil over butting top soil (aerobic stuff) under lower layers (anerobit stuff). Now they break up compaction but don't turn the soil over.
Inter-seeding different crops is better still.