They're running 72 experiments on 12 acres. That's mostly interesting to me because that's an incredibly small area of land. US corn agriculture is on about 83 million acres of land. Subsaharan African Agriculture also plants about 83 million acres of maize. They see yields that are 1/3 to 1/4 of US agricultural yields. These yield gaps dramatically close when you start using fertilizer and modern agricultural practices. (The One Acre Fund puts out some pretty good data on this, the Burke and Lobell lab at Stanford have a few good papers on this as well.)
In short, I would just ask people to remember that there are quite a few farmers who would love to stop paying for fertilizer if it didn't impact their yields: all of them in fact. It's one of their biggest costs generally. When an organization says "The Farming Systems Trial was started by Bob Rodale, who wanted scientific backing for the recommendations being made to the newly forming National Organic Program in the 1980s" they've incorporated confirmation bias into their heart.
I'm certainly biased, I'm the CTO of a company that's trying to improve agricultural inputs by financing access to smallholders in subsaharan Africa (Apollo Agriculture, we're actually a YC F1 company also,) but it's worth noting that this is research that's quite a bit outside the normal recommendations that ag scientists believe. I also worked at The Climate Corporation before, to put all my potential biases out on the table.
I live on a 54 acre property: I can picture 12 acres as about a quarter of my property. If I further divide that into 72 plots, I end up with a bunch of little gardens.
What works in a small garden plot is usually totally unscalable at crop production volumes. My experience (over decades) is I couldn't sustain my family for a year on a 1-acre garden plot even if I had the time to work it intensively and used nothing but recycled organic byproduct (compost and, uh, other stuff) as fertilizer. Even if we tried to reproduce the great Kampuchean agricultural experiment of the mid-1970s and put everyone to work in the fields full time we could not feed the world this way.
I don't have a problem with folks idly dallying in this kind of research, and I think useful practices could possibly be revealed, but scale and practicality need to be taken into account when interpreting results.
> My experience (over decades) is I couldn't sustain my family for a year on a 1-acre garden plot even if I had the time to work it intensively and used nothing but recycled organic byproduct (compost and, uh, other stuff) as fertilizer.
I find this surprising. I help run an Atlanta-area non-profit that has a ~1 acre organic farm that donates everything it produces. For the year 2020 we have already donated 3120 lb / 1415 kg of food.
We're not trying to produce a nutritionally complete output on the farm, but that's still ~70 lb / 31.7 kg of food a week on average.
Well, potato is one of the higher-calorie crops, and one pound contains around 350 calories. If you produce 3,120 lbs a year, that gives you about a million calories.
Now, let's assume a family of three - an average person needs around 2,000 kcal a day. That's 2,000 * 365 * 3, or around 2,200,000 kcal a year. So, you come quite a bit short. And that's on a good year; you're gonna have bad years, too.
Also a function of climate and soil. In the 19th century, settlers in the plains - Nebraska, Wyoming, etc - often couldn't make it work on 640 acres granted by the government. In contrast, there are eastern states where 20 acres would be more than enough.
(Farming in the West is now much more viable thanks to deep wells and mechanical irrigation, but that's a capital-intensive and resource-intensive approach that works best at a scale.)
As pointed out downthread, you can indeed feed a family on one acre of land, and many people do actually do this.
The problem with your math is that it assumes the 3k lb yield from gp comment is for potatoes. Your crop yield depends a lot on the crop. Aparently you can get between 10-30 tons of potatoes per acre (that range is from beginner yields to expert) which would be 7-21 million calories per year. Plenty of room, then, to grow a number of other crops to eat a balanced diet.
Potatoes (if you eat the skin) and milk would theoretically be a balanced diet, supplemented with fish/occasional meat it was pretty much the Irish diet pre-potato famine.
Boring as hell after a while but it'd keep you alive.
During the famine, ireland produced way more for/potatoes then it required to feed it's people; they were just taxed to all hell.
Currently the US produces about twice the calories it requires. There are so many calories produced in forms of corn that the industry has made huge efforts to find new ways to use those calories (hfcs, ethanol, etc) in order to justify corn industry practices. The one liner is that we need to be able to feed the people, but obesity is at an all time high. People need more nutrition, not more calories.
Taxes were not the main contributory factor.
"Ireland continued to export large quantities of food, primarily to Great Britain, during the blight. In cases such as livestock and butter, research suggests that exports may have actually increased during the Potato Famine.
In 1847 alone, records indicate that commodities such as peas, beans, rabbits, fish and honey continued to be exported from Ireland, even as the Great Hunger ravaged the countryside."
https://www.history.com/topics/immigration/irish-potato-fami...
Thanks for the clarification. I was actually meaning that they were being "taxed" in terms of food sent to the rest of the UK and not in terms of money. Even with the article you linked, it's not clear to me if "exports" means they were forced/taxed into sending food, or if they were willingly exporting food for money in lieu of eating... Or something else
Most Irish didn’t own property and were tenants. They didn’t “export” in lieu of eating, the English landlord exported the fruits of their labor and left them to starve. The English were very concerned about the Irish and their moral fiber, so they allowed them to persevere rather than get hooked to charity.
Others couldn’t pay their rent and were evicted. Millions of Irish didn’t flee to the slums of NYC, etc for kicks.
You can maybe keep a small family alive on an acre, but not really feed long term. With such little space you need to dedicate nearly the entire plot to high caloric crops such as corn.
Each year, I grow an increasing amount of my food from less than an acre. Corn is not an efficient way to get calories in an organic system, it requires too much nitrogen. As others have mentioned, potatoes are much better. And beans/peas, which require achieve their nitrogen requirements via bacterial symbosis. If you really want to go efficient, grow Azolla. I once calculated that a person in a temperate climate could produce most of their nutritional requireents with a plot roughly 25 square meters. Azolla doubles in mass every 2-3 days in ideal conditions and draws everything but trace minerals from the atmosphere.
You math is wrong. Way wrong. 70lb per week is 10 pounds per day. I'm not sure its feasible for a person to eat that much. Maybe a family could. Maybe.
It's frequently claimed that the average Irish male just prior to the potato famine ate well over 10 lbs of potatoes per day:
On a typical day in 1844, the average adult Irishman ate about 13 pounds of potatoes. At five potatoes to the pound, that’s 65 potatoes a day. The average for all men, women, and children was a more modest 9 pounds, or 45 potatoes.
I have lived almost exclusively on potatoes at several points in my life, and there's just no way. I've watched a bulky manual laborer live almost exclusively on potatoes as well, and still not near 10 lbs a day.
This is kind of inconceivable to me. Is it because I’ve never done enough manual labor to eat 65 potatoes in a day? I can’t imagine even finding the time to cook and eat them.
Arguing against the article, 1/5 lb is a pretty small potato. I just weighed a baseball sized potato I dug last week, and it was 7.5 oz (~1/2 lb, 200 g). So if you are picturing an average baked potato, it's probably only 30 potatoes per day. Which, granted, is still a lot.
Cooking time doesn't strike me as a problem. Boiling 30 potatoes does take somewhat longer than boiling 1 potato because the mass is greater, but it's pretty much boil and forget. Also, the boiling can probably be done by one of those women or children who are only eating 10 potatoes a day!
Probably because they weren't getting enough protein. It's easy to eat carbs forever if you have nothing else because you'll still feel intensely hungry without protein.
And if the calorie count upthread is right, that’s 4550 calories per day purely from potato, not counting any added butter, milk, beans, meat etc! I know people did more manual labour back then, but something seems wrong with that figure.
They may not have had access to much of (barely) higher end foods. I read somewhere that the English, who had conquered them, took away a lot of that sell / use in England, including beef.
Update: Found where I read it - Wikipedia:
[ The Celtic grazing lands of ... Ireland had been used to pasture cows for centuries. The British colonised ... the Irish, transforming much of their countryside into an extended grazing land to raise cattle for a hungry consumer market at home ... The British taste for beef had a devastating impact on the impoverished and disenfranchised people of ... Ireland ... pushed off the best pasture land and forced to farm smaller plots of marginal land, the Irish turned to the potato, a crop that could be grown abundantly in less favorable soil. Eventually, cows took over much of Ireland, leaving the native population virtually dependent on the potato for survival.[41] ]
I used to eat about that much a day when I was running twice a day (and I was losing weight while doing so). Michael Phelps was known for eating 10,000 calories a day.
His math is correct. Also, it's really easy math to verify. It's not surprising either. With the stated yields, you could feed a person. You'd need more for a family.
Of course, the yields could probably be improved in order to get the 140 or so lbs needed to feed a family of 3
When I used to work heavy manual labor I was definitely able to easily put down around 7-8 pounds of food per day. One of my coworkers was into weight lifting and estimated we were burning between 3,000-5,000 calories per day depending on the job.
10 lbs of potatoes is only 3,500 calories. Which, while far in excess of a "normal" sedentary lifestyle, is completely reasonable for people working heavy labor jobs if that's their primary food source.
A typical person eats 3 to 5 lbs of food per day, and that generally includes some very calorie rich meats, dairy, nuts and/or processed foods - not exactly the stuff you'll get in your backyard. You might be able to feed a family on an acre of beans, but not on an acre of generic greens.
A 10lb bag of potatoes isn't really that big. If you take one of those bags, split into thirds, as in three meals a day, that's a bit more than 3lbs per meal. If that's your only source of food, that doesn't seem entirely unreasonable.
Potatoes have great yield in terms of calorie per unit harvested. Other plants, not so much. Think about how much weight you might throw away with a pumpkin or a watermelon.
I have some family members who devoted about an acre and a half to a mix of crops, squashes mostly as they grow the best where they live, and for a family of 5 still had to supplement their diet pretty significantly.
At the same time, they ate more healthily than they ever had before, and often had too much of certain crops that they gave away or sold at the local farmer's market.
The magic valley in Idaho (named after its transformation) is a great example of this. Modern irrigation has turned what is naturally a high dessert climate into a food producing powerhouse.
My guess is your one acre of growing whatever you grow would feed about .6 people per year. A human consumes about 1M Kcals a year (accounting for meat as waste), and at best you can achieve 11M kcals per acre with corn or potatos. Beans yield about 6M and wheat 4M. My guess is you are growing and giving away about 600k kcals of roughage. 70lbs of tomatoes only has about 6000 kcal, so enough for one person for half a week.
Its not 72 experiments, its 72 plots. This is normal for agricultural research, as a control for soil variations within the test area. i.e. you dont compare several big plots, you compare lots of little ones to control for natural variations accross the field such as proximity to a river.
This is very important. Farmers with thousands of acres still divide it all into subfields that are around 2500 square meters that they manage separately. They are looking to go smaller than that, which computers allow them to do.
By manage separately the same tractor crosses over each one in a field, but each subsection gets a different amount of fertilizer, seed, and other chemical based on all the data they can get. Sometimes they even have more than one seed/chemical tank so they can apply different amounts of each in one pass.
When you have poor and good soil in the same field (all fields have this to some extent) you want to put the minimum money into the poor areas, while it is worth putting more into the productive areas. (People often ask about building up the bad soils - this is done too, but you can't really change the sand/clay ratio)
> I couldn't sustain my family for a year on a 1-acre garden plot even if I had the time to work it intensively and used nothing but recycled organic byproduct
Check out “The Market Gardener”[0] if you need help learning how to do far, far better than this. We need more, smaller farms. Biointensive farming and permaculture can save our planet.
Yes, Jean-Martin (JM) Fortier (Quebec) is a good example, though there are better / more comprehensive ones, and at larger scale too, see below. And JM is not even doing full permaculture, e.g. not using multi-height crops (i.e. ground covers through plants of a few more different heights to top canopy trees, 100 or more feet tall), so as to use more of the available sunlight and underground nutrients (shrub roots can go deeper than herbs, and trees even deeper, and what is brought up from deeper can be shared with shallow-rooting plants via compost, chop-and-drop, etc.). And he still makes fairly high profits per acre / person / year, i.e. overall. He has many videos about his work, both the technicals and commercials, on YouTube. Search by his name as well as for a great series titled Les Fermiers.
And some examples higher on the axes of land area as well as permaculture and / or regenerative agriculture, vs. "just" organic farming, include:
- Gabe Brown, 20+ years at it, 4 or 5000? acres, mixed grasses (grains) and broadleaf crops, cover crops, livestock (beef, pigs, etc.), land getting better each year, saves hugely on synthetic fertilizer and pesticide (see a chart in his Treating The Farm as an Ecosystem video), profits better too, and higher than his synthetic-using and tilling neighbors and state averages (ND, USA), and going up the value chain, so getting more of the final consumer dollar vs. middlemen. The average take for "conventional" US farmers is quite low, he says. Oh, and he does not need or take govt. farm subsidies, as many others do.
Has many videos too, search for his name. Check the comparative stats and photos.
- Richard Perkins, Sweden.
Not sure of area, but above a few acres at least, maybe 25. Mixed stuff again. High profits again. Videos again. Many years' good results again.
- Last but one of the best, Geoff Lawton (NSW, AU), long time permaculture expert (learned from Bill Mollison), doer, 66 acre Zaytuna Farm, is real mixed farm plus demonstration site, yearly trains many interns, consultant (to small orgs through to countries). Ditto for many of above points like axes, diversity, profits, improving over time, cost savings, etc. etc.
Also see, very significantly, Elaine Ingham, soil (biology) scientist, Ph.D., also founder of startup soilfoodweb.com (to consult and get her research
applied widely).
Almost all the farmers I mentioned above, quote her work with respect and apply it in their operations, and consider it key to their results. She (along with many other researchers, over years, not a sudden thing) has come out with some rather startling results that, as I said, are being applied by these guys and many others. A key result is that it is the quantity and diversity of the life in the soil that is as (or more) important to soil health and hence farm results (now and long term) as the actual levels of plant nutrients in the soil. And this is because it is the soil life (they use the term "biology" for it, but okay, go with the prevailing term the experts use) that makes the chemical nutrients available in forms that plants can actually use, via a deep symbiosis and mutual helping that happens between plants and the soil biology, which includes bacteria, fungi, archaea, nematodes, arthropods and small animals.
Another quite surprising / non-intuitive result is her saying that most or all soils on earth, already have many times more the amounts of nutrients than plants need, like 1000x more, including macro (e.g. N, P, K) and micro ones (like trace elements), so the limiting factor is really the soil biology, which depends a lot on soil organic matter content (all those critters need to eat), humidity and temperature, all of which are helped by organic farming, permaculture and regenerative agriculture practices like applying organic fertilizer (manure, compost, etc.), mulching, and cover cropping (according to her, more for the organic matter than for the nutrients per se).
Check her video below in which she talks about all these things.
Watch "The Roots of Your Profits - Dr Elaine Ingham, Soil Microbiologist, Founder of Soil Foodweb Inc" on YouTube:
Gabe runs his operation with only a handful of people, maybe 4 total, plus a few interns, who are more of a liability than asset, so also say Richard and JM - at least initially :)
And Gabe uses some machines for scale, including a few he and friends innovated / improvised, IIRC.
Another such farmer like Gabe, JM, Richard etc. above, is Krishna McKenzie, Solitude Farm, Auroville, Tamil Nadu, India. Englishman who studied as a kid in a J. Krishnamurti school in England, came to Auroville ~20 years ago, started Solitude with friends, and has been there ever since. Inspired by Masanobu Fukuoka and his book, One Straw revolution. Has met him. Mixed crops, fruit trees, grains (including millets), many vegetables including common ones, plus less-known but traditionally eaten high-food-and-medicinal-value indigenous local and Indian ones, some in regular beds, some intermixed in a food forest, again utilizing more layers of sunlight and underground soil than single layer traditional monoculture. Again, has intern program, video channel, trains others in the community, gives talks, runs a popular on-premise vegan and raw food restaurant supplied by the farm itself.
Nowadays doing more training work and helping others in the area to bootstrap community permaculture gardens, since there is much more interest in food security, local food, lowering food miles, traditional-but-forgotten-plants-as-food, weeds as food, etc., since the coronavirus pandemic started.
>Search by his name as well as for a great series titled Les Fermiers.
I should have said that Les Fermiers is in French - Quebec dialect, ha ha, they pronounce oui (French for yes) as way instead of wee, for example, but it has English subtitles, so English speakers can easily understand it.
Yes, JM Fortier (who I and another mention elsewhere in this post - the author of The Market Gardener), says that Coleman was one of his main inspirations.
I was going to say! First Fortier video I watched is about leeks and his technique looks identical to what Coleman showed when I visited his Four Season farm in Maine. That place is incredibly interesting for any aspiring gardener - so many techniques and inventions that were new to me.
Right now we over-feed the world, especially ourselves in the West. We produce an enormous amount of low-quality food, and malnutrition is driven more by external interference (misgovernment, wars) than by agriculture. Food is, as a percentage of people's budgets, cheaper than it has ever been.
That suggests that there's a middle ground, where we shift to more labor-intensive practices to grow some more expensive but better produce that's less hard on the environment, without dismantling the entire industrial system. People could introduce more fresher foods, while still growing vast amounts of highly-processed-maize-and-soybeans for people who can only afford that.
There are a lot of dimensions to that. It's not easy to prove that eating this way is necessarily healthier or easier on the environment. But we do know that the Western diet is bad for people's health, and we do know that it's hard on the environment, so it's worth considering alternatives.
I agree to some extent, except that lower cost food means access to higher quality lower cost food. That's a good thing.
Growing up in the UK in the 80s most people were eating a post war inspired limited diet.
> But we do know that the Western diet is bad for people's health, and we do know that it's hard on the environment, so it's worth considering alternatives.
The western diet is all things to all men. In my circle the "Mediterranean" diet is largely what people aspire to on a daily basis with everything else enriching their food experience on a less frequent basis.
There's no reason we have to make farm work unsafe or low-paying. It's a consequence of the state of agriculture a century ago, when we were constantly afraid of running out of food. We put into place a lot of systems to drive down the price of food and increase the quantity.
So yes, we should improve it. This is one suggestion for how to do so. It costs more money, but we no longer have to make price the #1 objective, not in a world where people are willing to spend $4 and up on a cup of coffee or pay a 50-100% premium for a dubious "organic" label (a term that has drifted very, very far from what it meant when Rodale coined it).
That makes more money available for farm labor, to improve safety and pay workers better. It would take only a small increase in costs to make a large increase in wages: they receive only a few percent of the final consumer cost of the product.
>There's no reason we have to make farm work unsafe or low-paying.
Okay. Who is paying for it?
Farming is razor thin margins already. Most people aren't on techie salaries that can afford organic food. Raising the price is just a tax on the poor.
Food cost does not need to go up when the cost of farming goes down. Regenerative ag does take more farmers which means more jobs. The shift to regenerative farming is already happening. Gabe Brown was meeting with General Mills a couple years ago. Now General Mills is promoting pilot programs. https://www.generalmills.com/en/Responsibility/Sustainabilit...
Inputs are drastically reduced or eliminated. That is where the cost saving comes in. There is room to pay more people when you arent spending the majority of revenue on fertilizer.
Farmers, particularly large ones, are pretty savvy about what is more or less profitable for them. If they could add labor and save more money on fertilizer than the additional labor cost, they'd probably already be doing it.
Source: I dated a literal farmer's daughter and talked with him a fair bit about the economics of his farm (corn, soybeans, and dairy, plus associated by-products) and farms larger than his. He was sharp on the numbers in addition to being sharp on the biology.
From stories that Gabe Brown has shared there are many farmers that are afraid to take a leap to an entirely different way of farming from one they know well. He recommends farmers do a trial field so they can prove to themselves that it works.
Watch any of Gabes talks on YouTube. They are usually to small crowds of farmers looking to improve their operation. People are learning but the easy path is to continue doing what you know. Gabe has said he would have done the same if he wasnt flat broke when he inherited his farm. He simply didnt have the money to buy inputs. His choice was find a different way or sell the farm.
By how much? Your link don't say anything about how much fertilizer usage is reduced. Nor does it mention how much formerly crop fields are now being used for ranch land.
The concept of self-sustaining farming and ranching is as old as dirt itself, with various implementations including crop rotation or fallow fields, but it typically means that the are of land dedicated to a staple crop (such as oats or wheat for the exemplar GM) drops dramatically, as would the profits.
Nothing in the linked literature disagrees with this notion or comments on the different costs (other than the grants for a farm that's trying it).
But, if the price increase is to give a better wage to "the poors" working in the farm, because we need more people working there to produce the same amount organically. Then, they would be able to afford those more expensive products right ?
Most of those razer thin margins come from stuff like monopsonies they might push down prices on behest of the consumer but obviously also will run with as much of the profits as they can.
Dont forget government subsidies for corn and soybeans that drive prices stupid low and trap farmers in corn and soybeans. Some farmers would gladly shift to more profitable crops but are stuck on corn and soybeans.
For most farmers corn and soybeans are the most profitable crops. They are easy to farm in large quantities, and they store well. Most crops that you think of as more profitable are worth more, but not always profitable - either because so much labor is needed that you cannot scale as far, or because they spoil so fast that you can't be sure of selling your entire harvest before it rots (Corn can be stored for a few years if you need to, lettuce is not edible after a week). Also there is the demand problem - even if there is more profit in some other crop that doesn't mean there is enough demand to sustain adding another farmer without prices collapsing.
Many of our farmers do sustain themselves (and often their families) on an acre or less in Kenya, so I would suggest that you contact your local agricultural extension school for some suggestions. :)
The library system is helpful as well. In Colorado (and elsewhere, as I understand it) some libraries have seed banks, classes on pollinators and nutrition, and potentially community gardens.
> The library system is helpful as well. In Colorado (and elsewhere, as I understand it) some libraries have seed banks, classes on pollinators and nutrition, and potentially community gardens.
I'm in Boulder county, and many offer(ed) those programs and seed banks but access to Community Gardens has always been limited here. The wait lists can be pretty long and during the pandemic and shortages people ran to local farms and bought out their CSA memberships and meat pre-sales (happening now actually for most livestock) in record timing.
California has it, too. UC Davis is quite involved in Biodynamics in the region and offers classes for winemaking using the practices. These fires have really put a strain on the local economy and programs so I'm not sure what it will look like after this, but I hope it prevails.
With that said, the results of this study are not really that surprising to me and follow my own observations: I did a Biodynamic horticulture apprenticeship in Europe and managed a Biodynamic farm in Maui.
The issue is with the subsidies that distort the prices and perverts the incentives to keep farmers dependent on such a vile system, and this is all over the Western world, and much of the East, in my experience. We should be encouraging our youth that are aware of the climate change they will face to get involved in restorative Ag and offering them low to no interest loans on land and equipment while systematically removing the subsidies for corn, soy and other non profitable crops that heavily rely on dangerous external inputs which only consolidates the Industry more in the hands of large chemical corps.
If I'm honest people should see the transition to organic/ biodynamic Ag as one of not just viable Soil Biology and ethics but also of Climate Science, Carbon sequestration from Ag can make significant in-roads in reducing the atmospheric carbon. Hemp is an incredibly amazing crop at capturing carbon from the atmosphere and building top soil, it sheds most of its foliage throughout the season and create a high canopy to reduce water requirements after 7-10 weeks after germination depending on regions and cultivar. It is a heavy feeder and will require crop rotation, but as seen with the green-rush of CBD products, these have massive Value added Market potential.
While I studied the significance of other plants throughout my apprenticeship none captured my attention as much as hemp and I mainly went to Europe as hemp was legal in the EU and many products were being made from it while it was still illegal in the US at the time (2011-2014).
With that said, I really hope COVID disrupted the paradigm we had been operating for so long and makes people look at these problems with solutions that some of us had been involved in and advocating for nearly decades now.
Your criticism of this study is that is is conducted on too small of plots (6 experiment groups on 12 acres = 2 acres per group) to be scaled up to real farms. However the real farms to which you sell synthetic fertilizer or fertilizer financial products in Subsaharan Africa are of similar sizes?
No, my criticism is it’s a very small sample size to get this result, is clearly run by an organization that has a specific mission and is trying to find results for that, and to point out that while interesting, this research has different results than the rest of the ag research world.
Basically all research is motivated to some extent, people do not choose hypotheses randomly, but on the basis of their own subjective perceptions of the state of knowledge of the field. The “rest of the ag research world” is not uniform and neither are they uniformly in disagreement with the research presented here. Finally, this is a relatively large sample size for prospective research. Many of the studies that purportedly demonstrate different outcomes are retrospective and unable to control for confounders.
For potatoes, about 1 ton of (commercial) fertilizer would be required, and a lot of water (around 2,800m3 of water), which is fine if you live in the mid-west with lots of rain, less fine in the desert portions of California.
Uk Gov. Statistics gives 9 tons per hectar, which is like 2.2 acres. Are we measuring different stuff? Surely yield in Uk can't be 3 times higher.
As for diet: yield of carrots and many vagetables is usually higher than for wheat, but yes getting any real variery from that hectar would be unrealistic.
A hectare is 2.47 acres, almost an 11% difference from 2.2. Also the 9 was an abnormally high year (I think the highest ever in the UK?). This year is down 40%, which is the worst since the 1980s [0].
>Are we measuring different stuff?
Apparently.
Also, why use UK numbers to compare to a story on US agriculture, especially without mentioning you switched countries? Can I cite numbers from Congo without noting it?
>Surely yield in Uk can't be 3 times higher.
Sure it can - variation in wheat production has well over a 50x variation among countries. Not every country has the UK climate, or even the uniformity that the UK has. The climate and rainfall in the UK are very well suited to wheat production.
Also, I just posted the values. And here's [1] another place you can look. From this place you can select countries to compare them. The US is ~1/3 the output. The UK has exceptionally high numbers, nearly the highest in the world.
I've gotten massive amounts of food out of small raised beds with nothing more than compost tea and "plant food". Is it really not possible to consistently produce good yields from tightly packed beds with crop rotation on a 1 acre plot [without pesticides/herbicides]? I know it wouldn't scale up with typical large-scale farming monocultures, but for a mixed family plot?
Aside: it seems we've long been able to feed the world (in terms of meeting caloric and nutritional needs) based on American farm capacity alone, it's just that nobody wants to pay for it.
I can get massive harvests of zucchini from two plants but it can't sustain a family for a year. Even more than a couple of weeks and the only thing it would sustain would be a mutiny.
The tribal wisdom for ecofolks in the 1970s was 2 acres to nutritionally support a family of 4 with environmentally friendly practices that didn’t involve potatoes, beans and cabbage every day...
Hoeing weeds. Bug picking. Fencing to keep out the wildlife. Watering in dry spells. Covering on frosty nights. Tilling, planting, soil conditioning, mulching, harvesting, processing for storage.
Everything from fungus and nematodes to weevils, mice, rabbits, birds, deer, and bears all want what's in my garden. I have seen berry and tomato plants completely stripped of all leaves in less than a day by caterpillars. You can spend a day picking Colorado bugs off your potatoes and start again the next day picking off the same number.
There is no end of work that can't be easily and cheaply replaced by a tank of chemicals and some petroleum-powered equipment to give better yields of better-looking food.
Interesting, thanks. I wonder how much of this will be replaceable by good robots that can use smaller amounts of electrical power. Bug picking seems like a good candidate, watering too. Fencing not so much, etc.
They have 72 experimental plots. Thats not 72 experiments.
They have 3 x 2 = 6 different approaches being evaluated
It is divided into 3 overarching systems: organic manure, organic legume, and conventional.
Each system is further divided into two: tillage and no-till, for a total of 6 systems. There are a total of 72 experimental plots.
It is likely that the 6 main approaches have been divided into smaller plots to act as a control for natural soil variations within the area, or, e.g. one side of the field being nearer to a river than the other. This is normal for agricultural experiment design I believe.
What kind of fertilizer though? I believe this article mentions using manure and organic fertilizers.
I'm no expert, but you cannot maintain a healthy soil without putting stuff back in it - manure, biomass / mulch, etc.
Anecdotal and incomparable, but my backyard (just a few m2 of exposed soil) has had an overhaul in the past year or two; it was very sandy and kinda boring, but mixing in mulch / soil improver made it a lot better. There's worms in the soil now, that kinda thing.
But yeah, you need some kind of fertilizer or the soil will just 'die'. Leave the clippings after harvesting, yeet a load of other biomass on there in between harvests, let it lie fallow, etc.
But I think an issue is that biomass in whatever form is actually quite difficult to get in significant quantities, or hard to balance, so artificial fertilizer is used instead.
There's also the limitations of the nitrogen cycle.
Organic fertilizer is generally cow poop.
Cows are fed almost exclusively grain corn (and then are admittedly grass finished, but generally the manure you could get is from the grain feed period.)
That grain corn is... made with inorganic fertilizer.
To keep making more food, someone has to introduce nitrogen into the system. You can use bat guano (which we actually used to use before inorganic fertilizer) or you can use nitrogen fixing crops (great but typically fix much less nitrogen into the soil then people think!) or something that comes from inorganic fertilizer, whether it's been green washed through a cow's GI tract.
It's also a logistical nightmare as it's much less dense, but that's a separate problem. A huge fraction of the problems of soil health in rural places are logistical.
>> To keep making more food, someone has to introduce nitrogen into the system.
Isnt that the job of nitrogen fixing bacteria? You know, the microbes that probably dont do so well in modern farm soil. Presumably that's part of the reason crops do well in the organic plots.
In the UK, we have a terrible problem with runoff. Its not that we don't have enough nitrogen to put on the fields, its that the soil is so degraded that when it rains it all runs off into ditches and eventually out to sea.
In the netherlands its even more pronounced. There are cow farmers that have bought land especially for dumping effluent on.
So its not a problem of enough, its a problem of keeping it in the right place.
We run our cows entirely on grass and hay throughout their time on our farm. Typically we sell calves at 700lbs. Then they may go to feedlots and taste corn for the first time.
Joel Salatin has been doing no-till, no fertilizer farming at scale for years and his videos are really eye opening on what is possible. As a layman with a small home garden I do not have the expertise to say if this would work for more people but it is interesting to read about.
> there are quite a few farmers who would love to stop paying for fertilizer if it didn't impact their yields:
I think you are over simplifying here. Of course simply stopping artificial fertiliser will hit yields. The question is whether other methods can be introduced that will sustain yields with fewer detrimental environmental impacts.
The linked article suggests that their system will yield "competitive" yields and higher profits. I interpret that as "yes, just stop paying for fertiliser, do something else that's much cheaper than fertiliser, and get the same yields!"
Which would be amazing if true, since it basically means "hey, free money". But as you say, it feels a little over simple.
Organic farming uses fertilizer, and this experiment is no different. They use manure, so unless one's farm is also a dairy and/or ranching operation, the farmer would still be buying fertilizer. It'd just be manure instead of synthetic fertilizer.
The catch is teaching people to farm this way. It requires many more farmers but there is money to be made. My hope is that some of the unemployed millions will see the dollar signs in the soil and start a new generation of farmers.
Most people outside farm country dont even consider farming to be a viable career. Just look at the comments here. High cost of entry to compete on an industrial scale and razor thin margins. Who would want to even try. But a small farm run like the article can be very profitable.
Where do you get that 1/3 to 1/4 of US yield? In that page they claim comparable yields, and particularly "In 2016, our no-till organic manure systems produced 200 bushels of corn per acre". Average US corn bushels per acre is 176.
Trouble is the yields of fertilized crops are unsustainable because over time they lead to soil erosion. If your concern is /sustainable/ yields, fertilizers are the wrong answer.
This doesn't apply to a large amount of farming today, much of the issues with erosion have been solved by reducing tillage and other improved practices like contour farming, adding waterways, cover crops etc. None of this is related to fertilizers and their usage.
Also if you want to get the most out of your fertilizer you will automatically be trying to reduce erosion. No one wants to put investment into soil that is going to disappear or be lost.
There is also an increasing amount of regulation around controlling runoff of fertilizers in order to control water quality in lakes, rivers etc. Follow what is happening in Ohio and Lake Erie for example.
This is a fair distinction, but artificial fertiliser still requires fossil fuels to produce and so isn't sustainable even if it has zero negative impact on the soil's health.
Interesting - so theoretically one could run the process off photovoltaics? Didn't know that!
Still, if we had to change to renewable sources of energy to run these processes tomorrow,the price would likely jump so enormously that their value would be mostly in niche applications.
Because the practices break down soil organic matter which help stabilize the soil.
The American Dust Bowl was a combination of things, but the frequency of tilling was a big part of it. Farmers now till at least one fewer times per year, which makes quite a bit of a difference.
It's complex, because our annual crops are almost all prairie soil plants, prairie soils are typically bacterial dominant anyway, but fungi typically provide a lot of the soil stability. Tilling pretty much kills all of the fungus, and the bacteria run wild breaking down soil carbon (fungal and crop roots).
Modern farming assumes that the soil is a mostly sterile medium to dump both fertiliser and seed.
Basically sand with a tiny bit of organic fluff.
Firstly sand blows away, secondly it doesn't hold water anywhere near as well. This means that you need more drainage channels, which means you get more runoff, which means you need more fertiliser.
_proper_ soil, with plenty of organic matter is both more porous _and_ able to absorb more water.
How long does this process take? Presumably more than a few decades as I imagine much of the agricultural land in the US has been farmed this way for more than that amount of time.
Since everybody's been using fertilizers for a long (?) time, does that mean that farmlands aren't sold for as high a price? What happens when all the soil is eroded away?
Modern farming doesn't erode soil. There have been decades since the dust bowl with less rainfall, but no repeat dust bowl because farming has improved.
The obvious one is that when you conclude your farming operation and cease dispensing fertilizer, you leave behind a sterile desert where there was once fertile soil. This may not bother you if your intention is to farm indefinitely, but it's a bit depressing from a land-stewardship point of view.
Why does a human in Africa have a greater right to landmass and habitat than an elephant, gorilla, or giraffe?
If these humans are thriving thanks to Western technology and aid, I think we have the right to dictate their population levels and environmental impacts.
If you are asking:
Is it better to somehow repurpose the areas of cropland in Sub Saharan Africa that are currently growing maize to optimize for emission reduction?
Then the answer is no, not any time soon at least. Plenty of other land is available.
- SSA has ~ 1.25B hectares of agricultural land.[0]
- The total harvested area under maize in Africa was around 38.7 million hectares in 2018.[1]
- Less than %10 of the Guinea Savannah region (a region where crops much more lucrative than maize can be grown, ~600M hectares) was farmed as of 2009.[2]
Maize ends up being one of the most economically efficient and calorically dense crops to grow. If you have very little money to invest in your land, it's definitely one of your best choices. We're trying to get farmers a bit more capital access to be able to move to more productive systems, but if you don't have an extra 50$ for fertilizer, you definitely are going to struggle to switch to potatoes.
Yes, but it's often less resilient to variations in weather than other crops that are native in the region. So it's great until you get a drought and then you end up with a famine.
Nothing is going to get better until we understand that "yield" isn't just the produce harvested. Synthetic fertilizer yields the most pounds of produce, but the yields of nutrient-dense food, soil microbes, insects, atmospheric carbon sequestration, etc. are all abysmal. Farmers farm right up against waterways which they then pollute with fertilizer runoff because they have to maximize output at all costs. We're systematically killing our soils because capitalism allows for nothing else.
That's the current incentive structure for better or worse. Someone (maybe the USDA, maybe SV) needs to pony up money to compete with using that ground for cropland. In an ideal scenario, the ground surrounding waterways should be easily worth $300/acre (which enables it to compete with row crop rental prices).
Problem is people laugh at that concept and then complain we have overproduction, dwindling soil health, and poor water quality.
I do laugh at the idea that some more capitalism is the solution. In an ideal scenario, the ground surrounding waterways would be unowned wild riparian buffers that prevent erosion and provide long stretches of contiguous habitat for animals.
yeah but the people deprived of the opportunity to develop that land seem to prefer a system where they have opportunities rather than a system where entrenched interests use the power of the state to inhibit anyone from competing. In an ideal scenario agriculture would not have been discovered but once it was then it became necessary to compete or be assimilated.
Using less labor to grow food is what makes society productive enough for scientific and medical research. Those in turn address common public health issues and create more labor saving technologies allowing people to do things that they enjoy.
Yes, in essence, capitalism. But the discussion was about regulating the use of undeveloped land (“idle capital”) and that disproportionately benefits those in society who already own land (“capital”).
> Synthetic fertilizer yields the most pounds of produce, but the yields of nutrient-dense food, soil microbes, insects, atmospheric carbon sequestration, etc. are all abysmal.
Please explain how synthetic fertilizer reduces the yield of nutrient dense food. I can't find anything to support this in my cursory searches.
Along with the synthetic fertilizer comes other interests in our industrialized food system: Plant varieties are bred and grown for their shelf life, not their nutritional density or taste. Here in the US our food comes half way across the country (or all the way if it was grown in California and you live on the east coast) to get to a supermarket so it needs to stay good for a long time. And that's why we end up with cheap, flavorless iceberg lettuce that has no real nutrition in it. The greens worth eating are expensive.
It’s worth noting that the question on yields is actually pretty orthogonal to the question of taste. You can optimize for taste and yield pretty effectively, but humans generally use yield and appearance as what we pick our veggies on.
It’s also really easy to make organic and untasty things, as any struggling gardener will tell you. :)
Are the plots you mention employing no or low til methods as in this study? If not, how is this comparison relevant to this research?
I do appreciate you pointing out your previous work with The Climate Corporation, but it’s probably also useful to point out that they are a subsidiary of Monsanto.
Monsanto's core business is selling herbicides and seeds genetically altered to be herbicide resistant, including maize. This work is directly challenged by the sustainable practices which are being discussed here.
No, they don't necessarily challenge sustainable practices. They just haven't figured out a way to monetization framework. When they do, they'll push it harder than Roundup. Until then, sustainability is good PR and sustainable practices don't have scale, so no threat to their core business IMO.
> These yield gaps dramatically close when you start using fertilizer and modern agricultural practices.
Yes, but only if you start with degraded soil in the first place. Adding fertilizer to healthy soil just messes it up.
Even when you start with degraded soil, the fertilizer and modern agricultural practices only help up to a point and then diminishing returns set in.
Check out what Gabe Brown is doing on his land: "Treating the Farm as an Ecosystem with Gabe Brown Part 1, The 5 Tenets of Soil Health"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUmIdq0D6-A
So at 200 bu/ac conventional corn yield, that’s about 16B bu/year? I ran numbers at one point, and came up with 8 bu/yr corn to provide the calories for a grown adult for a year (protein, nutrients notwithstanding). So ~2B people a year whose calories could be provided by just conventional corn produced by just the United States?
So if a practice reduced yield by 50%, for the US it would mean reducing the calorie yield by 1B people? (Ethanol, feed for animals and the like ignored). How much surplus is in the system to support alternative practices?
As an American software engineer who used to work at a small ag software company but left after it got acquired in part because of business model of the new company, I just want to say that what I've seen of Apollo is extremely promising in understanding how to improve the lives of smaller-scale farms, which I believe is key to the future of agriculture as a leveling power across the world. Thanks for working at, and please keep at helping small ag!
Surprised that nobody in the answers points to the levels of nitrous oxide emissions that nitrogen fertilizers brought along with them. At some point we have to decide which is worse: lower yields or hothouse earth...
> Subsaharan African Agriculture also plants about 83 million acres of maize. They see yields that are 1/3 to 1/4 of US agricultural yields. These yield gaps dramatically close when you start using fertilizer and modern agricultural practices.
I'd just like to point out that these are two different continents with completely different conditions, soils, microbiota, seeds, pests, and climate. So apples and oranges.
Also, you count wrong because you don't count the number of acres needed to produce fertilizer.
> I'm certainly biased, I'm the CTO of a company that's trying to improve agricultural inputs by financing access to smallholders
At this point, yeah, your financial incentives pretty much color your entire worldview. If you stand to make O(millions) and this is your primary line of work, that's a one massive grain of salt.
Yah, the interesting piece happens when you compare what happens when agricultural practices converge. Us historical corn yields prior to 1920/1930 (major introduction of industrial fertilizer happens pretty shortly thereafter) were identical to current SSA yields. Subsaharan African farms close in on US yields pretty quickly when the same inputs are used.
The number of acres to make fertilizer are minimal. It’s very, very small relative to agricultural land under cultivation.
In regards to financial incentives, I mention this specifically so you know I could have a bias and am leaving references to the science so you can make your own judgement. I’m not really in this line of work for the money though.
I haven’t, but definitely do read things from outside my view point pretty regularly. I tend not to find fiction compelling for settling empirical questions though, so I’m likely to pass on reading this for the same reason I have passed on reading atlas shrugged. The best way to convince me of something is generally non fiction.
(To give a few examples of books that have changed my mind, I was a very conservative libertarian growing up in the school of Nozick, but ended up being much more liberal as a result of reading Foucault and his rather compelling recasting of how power dynamics work. I found Peter Singer, Nussbaum and Sen to all be compelling enough writers to basically convince me of what I should spend my life doing. If you have suggestions for science based books, I’d love to read them, but I find religious fiction generally leaves me unmoved and uninterested.)
It’s not religious fiction. It’s more a collection of essays (or lectures, organized in the back of the book) with a sort of thriller storyline in the novel to make the reading more fun and explain better how the narrator is reacting to the lectures. But you could get a lot out of it by simply reading the appendix, which contains the arguments.
This is partly an aside, but I often feel like homogeneity in plant (and animal, I suppose) consumption and production is a part of this that is rarely discussed. That is, I think there's a lot of unused potential in domestication of native plants for agricultural use.
I bring this up mainly because one of my first thoughts in discussing, e.g., US corn agriculture versus Subsaharan agriculture is whether or not you'd even be able to compare them well because the crops optimally suited to each would often be entirely different. I think often probably so, but at the same time I wonder if things would look different if the same volume of money and resources were put into things that assume different consumption preferences.
I'm not opposed to conventional agriculture, and don't believe in pointing fingers when it comes to food sustainability (in an ecological as well as humanistic sense). I do sometimes wonder, though, if conventional practices are often driven by assumptions or factors that are unwarranted or problematic in themselves.
In the same area of thoughts, I am reminded of a farmer my parents knew many years ago. He raised cattle. And he got tired and decided to be lazy.
You see, keeping cattle takes a lot of work. Constant vet bills for inoculations, treatments when they get sick. Corn-feeding, to maximize their size, means buying a lot of corn. Constant attention and work. And my parents' friend, well, he was tired of it.
So he put his cattle out into a field. And he did nothing. If one got sick, it went to the dog food place. They ate grass that grew in the field. They didn't get as big and he didn't make as much money, but he also got to take things a bit slower, easier.
Then, organic beef became a big deal. He did not give a shit about 'organic' or whatever these strange hippies were talking about. But he was more than happy if they wanted to pay him extra for his laziness.
(Note: I am paraphrasing a second-hand story and while I grew up rural, I didn't raise cattle- mistakes are being made here, forgive me.)
Joel Salatin is somewhere in the middle. He field grazes his animals but fairly aggressively moves them around. With his management practices he's getting about 2-3 times the yield per acre of land as the average for his area. The practices and equipment necessary to do that are a better investment for him than buying more land.
I don't know how he's competing on size, but the claim is that grazing down to the ground is less efficient for cattle, and you should move them long before they get to the bottom of the grass stalks.
My sense is that it's like programming in that laziness can manifest in the form of automation, limits on tech debt, and other investments in efficiency.
For example, a more intensive version of the lazy farmer's method would be to set timed gates around the property to induce herd movement for optimal grazing.
At a talk on regenerative farming, one speaker estimated he was making about $150 an hour based on how little time it took to set and maintain a well designed gate system. This was on leased land.
Grass based livestock farming, or grass based with corn finishing, is pretty common in high rainfall areas of the world like Ireland & New Zealand. Considerably lower intensity than feedlots (better for the environment too), easier to handle, and generally a higher quality output so long as you're around area that can process that output & send it to the right market.
Lower intensity is a double-edged sword; you're easier on the land, but you occupy a lot more of it.
Over the past century, increases in agricultural productivity (due to high-intensity farming) in North America and Europe have allowed for the 're-wilding' of an area almost as large as France.
Isn't the issue that the arable land gets destroyed using the current practices[1]? Borrowing into the future and making farmers dependent on chemicals doesn't seem like the best strategy in the long term.
>Isn't the issue that the arable land gets destroyed using the current practices
The changes you are citing are miniscule. A rounding error.
Older methods absolutely destroyed arable land because they had no robust method of replacing what the crops took besides manure. For example, in the US, as soil east-coast farms were depleted by intensive farming in the 1700s and 1800s, people struck out west for fresh soil. This culminated in the dust-bowl era, and a rethinking of farm management.
With modern fertilizer and testing, farmers can replace and renew their soil in detail with the specific macro and micronutrients which are lacking. Furthermore, no-till methods keep the soil anchored in place while more advanced methods of manure and residue use allow for building up organic matter.
There isn't any more land. Farmers are no longer migrant. It is in their bests interests to protect the vitality of their soil, and they are doing that.
by that logic, everyone in the "old world" would have stopped farming in 1100/1500.
Until about 1870 it wasn't possible to "intensively" farm land. Intensive requires mechanisation. Practically that requires internal combustion engines.
Intensive farming started when tractors became cheap enough for everyone to use. As soon as it was practical to plough hundreds of acres in a day, thats when "intensive" was a thing.
In the US thats roughly the 20s.
The second revolution was cheap pesticides with short half-lives. That was Glyphosate in the 70s.
I do wonder tho. Are they retaining enough of the phosphates they use with those actions. It still seems like one of those issues that's ignored too much because sources drying up prices going up is still one of those distant future things but i don't know enough bout what's being done.
Phosphates are a chemical, easy to add if needed - for a price. Many soils have far more than needed, so the farmer won't add more. 30 years ago farmers never measured sulfur content of their soils - acid rain replenished it - now the coal has cleaned up their emissions farmers buy sulfur. Farming is still a learning game. When John Deere bought a tractor company they wrote a letter (in 1918) to their dealers stating more or less that tractors are an interesting fad, but the company is well aware that the horse drawn plow will forever be the backbone of the American farm.
Note that I said for a price. Farmers who buy that stuff and let it run off lose money in the long run and go bankrupt.
I don't see how that plot implies causality onto fertilizers. Population in the US has grown significantly and urbanization has been a trend for the last century. I'm assuming land converted into housing or suburbs or cities is no longer classified as arable.
I’d love someone more knowledgeable to weigh in, but destroyed seems like an overstatement. There is land in Canada that’s been farmed for coming on 150 years. The last 60-80 being “modern” farming methods. It’s still highly productive land.
In terms of your link, it looks like it’s not counted as farmland if it’s abandoned (no intention to farm it in the future). Some of that land may no longer be able to be cultivated, but I’d assume that’s not the only driver of the decrease.
150 years and even 60-80 is a short time though considering plots in e.g. SE Asia being farmed for at least a thousand years. What would the long term for conventional farming look like?
Most people in the US/Canada have no information on what was done a few hundred years ago. This is archaeological evidence that before Europeans came the natives were farmers, but disease (large numbers died) and introduction of horses most of the old knowledge of farming was lost even before the old farms were force-ably taken away.
Since "conventional" farming wasn't even a thing until ~50 years ago I'd say about 60 to 80 years sets an upper bound on "long term" w.r.t. "conventional" farming.
One of the difficulty for smaller farmers is the transition period where the field produces a lower yield. They don't have the monetary buffer available for that. I hope that Governments with a minimum of foresight will fund those efforts.
This is correct. Its not an education problem (most farmers agree with these no-till sustainable practices), its an incentive problem.
No sane farmer who derives their living from farming is going to take such a huge risk when annualized corn-soy production is heavily subsidized by the government (rightly or wrongly) on the _possibility_ of these practices maybe paying off (someday).
edit: There is a carefully crafted statement on the OP link saying increased yields in dry years. Outside of 2020 and 2012, the Midwest has been anything but dry. Can't expect people to adapt unprofitable practices
If there are already subsidies why can’t there be subsidies specifically for adopting organic methods. You could also make the subsidies pay more during the first few years of the transition period.
Milk is very subsidized as well. You could pair local dairies with local farmers participating in similar programs.
That's the million dollar question. There are reasons to subsidize overproduction of food and plant-based biofuels (ethanol) -- food riots are bad. So the current system makes sense even if I don't agree with it 100%. I anticipate we will see governments study/adapt these subsidy markets for more eco-friendly practices (for the purpose of carbon sequestration and/or ground water protection).
Each farm is different - in fact within a field there is enough variation that the best management is not the same across the whole. Thus you cannot subsidies any one practice.
What the subsidies do is subsidize insurance. Buy insurance and if you have a crop failure you get paid as if you had the average yield over the past 10 years. However your average goes down as well for the next failure so better not have too many bad years in a row.
Organic despite the name is not the best thing for the environment. Some of it is, that quickly is normal farming. What is left is not using safe chemicals, instead using much more harmful - but natural - ones, or tillage to control weeds. (Note that this article is pushing no-till which is conventional farming today)
The incentive structure for the people involved in asking for and deciding upon the subsidy structure is heavily weighted in favor of getting the subsidies at least cost to the business. Effectively, large ag producers are faced with a choice between "getting subsidies for labor-intensive sustainable practices" and "getting subsidies for machine-intensive practices".
My impression of this is that the successful farmers are ones who cross from producing corn and soy to producing a variety of products which can be directly marketed at consumers (farmers markets, farm shop, veg box deliveries, pick your own etc) at prices which are far in excess of normal market prices. While this segment of the market is lucrative it's obviously limited in scale; most people want their normally weekly food at industrial scale prices.
The most successful farmers have the best scale (10,000+ acres) of just corn/soy/wheat/cotton (depending on geography).
The 'niche' guys may make good money, but their complexity is probably 1x-5x (maybe more) a 'stereotypical' row crop farmers farmers. That has to factor in somewhere.
This is huge, to be successful today you really need to be in the several thousand acres ranges, where only a few generations ago farmers made a living on 100-200 acres. If you can't afford the capital to expand via real estate niche farming is a more viable option for many folks. It's also often more risk than conventional grains, but with typical tradeoffs with higher reward.
> only a few generations ago farmers made a living on 100-200 acres.
You still quite easily can if you own the land outright, even in the grain business. The problem is that you need multi-millions to buy 100-200 acres, which nobody wanting to start farming has, save situations of inheritance. That means, for most, the vast majority of the potential profit turns into servicing debt or paying rent to the actual landowner. When you are only receiving a small portion of the pie that the land is actually generating, that's when you need thousands of acres to accumulate enough.
To put it another way: The going rate for rent for farmland around here is around $300/acre. $300 * 200 acres = $60,000. If you own the land and don't have to pay rent, that alone is a decent living; more than most people make. And that is ignoring the profit that someone renting would expect to make off the land.
A stellar dry bean crop could push $2,000. But then wheat is a struggle to get much above $500. Corn and soybeans generally ride up the middle between them. Those are the primary crops grown here.
I cannot find the raw data or details about it, but they must have it. The only reason I see any transition loss in productivity would be in building soil fertility/biomass vs synthetic fertilizers which are more readily absorbed. I would guess it's possible to adopt the vegetable cover part of it while keeping the traditional fertilizers without suffering the transition.
Cover crops have been growing fast in conventional farming. It is less energy (read CO2!) to spray roundup to kill them before planting than to run a heavy roller (also soil compaction).
Experiments on soil compaction show the rolling to be better, the roll needs not to be that heavy, only to kill the vegetable. Also, you don't do a separate pass on the ground, you just roll it at sow time, so no extra gas. Also, the vegetable cover absorbs CO2 and later fix it to the ground. Here is a thorough comparison of soils and methods https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUmIdq0D6-A
I think the Rodale people are well intentioned but off in their approach. Need to focus less on the technological aspect or more on the economic and scaling aspect.
The reason people don't do this isn't because they aren't aware of such practices, they don't do it because you have to thread a needle as far as precise management is concerned to simply turn a profit. Not that much room for margin in today's agriculture landscape
In my region most cash crop agriculture is being done on land that isn't even owned by the farmer. Most of my neighbours are leasing at least portions of their land out to a farmer, who then in turn subcontracts most work and just manages things.
In that model there is almost no incentive structure for soil maintenance, environmental stewardship, diversification, etc.
Most landowners here aren't even leasing it for the revenue, which is pretty peanuts for cash cropping on smaller plots, but for the indirect benefit of being able to claim farm tax rate instead of regular residential tax rates.
For many years my vineyard, garden, etc. suffered from herbicide drift from next door -- but there was not a single contact I could go to to talk about this, everyone just points the finger, or you can't find the party involved. Responsibility too distributed, etc.
There is truth in this statement. Land owners want the highest ROI for their investment (land). Farmers, who have a huge safety net from subsidies, have no problem propping up rent prices to grow corn/soy (and mine the soil).
There needs to be economic incentives for farmers AND landowners to adapt these practices. It WILL cost money. See a link to my blog I posted in a different post. I talk about this in semi-depth.
This is why sharecropping is a common rent arrangement - you get a portion of whatever profit comes from your land. It is legally complex to set these up in a fair way, but when you do everyone has incentive to ensure the long term health of the farm. It then becomes easy to tell the landlord he should invest in X - because the yields will go up over the long term. Likewise landlords have incentive to follow the latest research and push the tenant to adopt what makes sense. (sometimes this means you agree to watch an experiment done elsewhere- if it isn't a good idea for your area someone else takes the loss)
This is where environmentalists always say that the consumer should pay more in the supermarkets, ignoring the fact that the supermarkets make the highest margins in the entire chain between seed and consumer. And they have no incentive to pay farmers more, because farmers don't have a lot of places where they can sell their products.
Solve this problem and you can really change the system.
Simple: Make better practices required by law, so that all farmers have to do it. Add some tariffs so that foreign farmers can't compete by ignoring these practices.
Food production is a greater societal need and a lot of corn goes into making ethanol for cars to burn instead of food.
We don't have to outlaw ICE cars to make it more expensive to drive them, we just have to make corn ethanol more expensive for gas companies to cut their fuel with, and food corn cheaper for humans.
Also: We need to grow less corn overall. We make way, way more of it than we need and not enough of other better veg.
Corn is a poor ethanol crop. Period. It should not ever be used for its ethanol purpose. There are better crops suited for that purpose but the infrastructure in the US is set up for.....corn. Humans don't eat corn (or they eat a trivial percentage). 75% of the corn grown goes to feed animals (usually cattle) or cars (via ethanol).
Yea we need to grow less corn. But we can't outlaw it. You just removed the livelihood for the Midwest. The current economic incentive structure is to grow corn (there literally is no downside). A solution that changes that has to include benefits for farmers, landowners, consumers, and society. It's not going to be easy (or cheap).
It's not just an economic incentive structure though: It's subsidies that make it a priority crop instead of anything else.
We could be making so many other things instead. A tax on ethanol & cattle feed would do more to shift things than making it illegal. Make it cheap to grow for humans, but allow other forms of food crop to have a fighting chance.
Biofuels are a gigantic waste. At some point I did the math for Germany. If we took the land used for energy crops and instead covered it with solar panels, that would produce enough energy to basically cover Germany's energy needs (or a least a large part of them, depending on eg storage efficiencies).
No. F that. Consumers aren't paying externalities for transportation costs (think airlines and cars). Why should agriculture be the bad guy? Start with transportation and then come after ag.
Found [this] 2 year study in which one year apparently the cover crop was not enough to stop the weeds totally, there may be some fine tuning needed in the beginning, like which cover crop to sow.
[this] http://umanitoba.ca/faculties/afs/agronomists_conf/media/Car...
Cover crops are a good tool, but there will never be a silver bullet solution for weeds (even autonomous weeding robots). Mother nature is crafty. That said, the 'chemical' era we are currently in is over, even if no one wants to admit it
I've been researching a lot of plants and weeds lately, and quite frequently I am being reminded that there are many plants that are toxic to cows and horses, and so part of your job is to make sure your pastures are free of these plants.
One of the appeals then of broad spectrum herbicides that you scorch the earth and plant what you want in the space. And despite some very loud protestations of horse owners, people who try to garden with horse manure have to contend with herbicides.
Mechanical pest/weed management is still a very powerful tool. And maybe some day we can have robots do that for us, but we don't have to wait that long to get much of the benefit.
In order to kill a weed, you first have to see the weed. Rather than putting all of this onto a drone, there's plenty of utility to be gained by having a system that looks for these plants and geotags them. Then a centralized identification system (possible, the farmer's eyeballs) can filter down the false positives and they can send someone out to dispatch the weeds by hand, and/or adjust their graze rotation patterns to reduce exposure.
And something organic gardeners learn intimately is that every weed has intervals where they are most expensive to deal with. Seedlings may be too labor intensive. Blooming weeds are priority 1. But depending on soil profile, some weeds are easier to kill once their stalks and roots have become more robust - strong enough that you can grab the stalk and pull.
So on any given day you may be aware of a hundred weeds, but only twenty of them are on the priority queue.
Could be possible that some weed adapts to grow through the bush or something, what i like specially about this is using legumes as both cover and fertilizer, which is something permaculture uses a lot too. Also it's reminiscent of how corn was traditionally grown, with beans as nitrogen fixing and squash as ground cover. But on the long run, my bet is on diversity instead of monocrops.
The goal is to increase the combined yield without a proportional increase in labor.
Mark Shepard likes to brag about how he gets less half a harvest of six+ different species in the same field. He's still getting 2-3x as much food out of the space. Most importantly, I believe (and he agrees), when you monocrop you go for broke. If something goes wrong, you have very little to sell at the end of the year. If it's a bumper crop year, prices will be depressed if it's a good year for everybody. In either scenario, the dealer (bank) always wins.
With six crops, the standard deviation between good years and bad years is reduced, which makes farming less of a trip to Vegas. That he gets more out of the same land brings up his average expected income. It's more work, yes, but he points out that many farmers have to take a side job to make ends meet, and he theoretically doesn't (he speaks and consults), so he can invest that time into increasing his farm's productivity.
You don't have to mono crop or go "3-sisters" midevil farmers in Europe generally had many small fields - Barely on the highland, wheat in the best land... (3-sisters is American Crops and so not an option before Columbus). They achieved the same risk reducing diversity without having crops that directly harm each other next to each other.
There’s a pseudoscience within permaculture called guilds, and a skeptics view of that theory boils it down to “plants beside each other that don’t harm each other”.
I am highly skeptical of these claims. Corn is not new. Nor is wheat. Or rye or whatever. We have records of yields pre-green revolution, pre-GMO, pre-mechanization, pre-fertilizers, etc. And they aren't that great. Yes, modern agriculture is not sustainable and we should incorporate as many organic techniques as we can. But we also should be ready to take lower yields. And that's fine. We don't need that much corn. It doesn't go to human consumption, hardly any. It goes toward animal feed and high-fructose syrup production. We can survive with less Coke and less factory farmed poultry. But we should stop romantisizing our past and treat organic agriculture as something new or magical.
Lower yields = more land use to meet demand = more deforestation and loss of wilderness and biodiversity. Maximising yields is definitely something we want to do if we are interested in saving this planet.
AFAIK the debate is still out on what the best long term solution will be regarding intensity versus land-use. The organic approach allows biodiversity on the farm itself, as opposed to a monocrop which becomes a desert for any other species. For example, this article about almond farming where the organic farm has lower yields but doesn't kill off the bees that are used to pollinate it. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jan/07/honeybee...
I am 99% sure that corn ethanol is US and Brazil story. Anyway with oil prices this low, it makes no sense. The whole idea was insane from the beginning as corn ethanol has negative EROI (more energy is spent on producing a single unit of corn ethanol than you can produce by burning it.).
It makes more sense if you think about it as an artificial market for the excess corn produced by US farmers. You have to do something with it, might as well make HFCS and ethanol.
Thankfully, there are other things that can be done (specifically, making food) with that same corn - it just requires a bit more processing (mechanical or chemical) to free the endosperm from the hull.
You are externalizing the factor of soil health. When we start a field with fertile, normal soil, and add extra inputs, yields absolutely go up in the near term. But after decades of that, then your yield is back to where it was when you didn't have inputs, and now your soil has become dirt. Yet the problem is you are required to pay for inputs just to keep that land at par with the year before. And if you want to wean off the inputs and switch back to the original method, yields will go down for a few years until the soil is regenerated. After which point you will still only be back to normal.
The increased yields from input-heavy factory farming can essentially be seen as a loan of yield from the future. If you are overleveraged, and your capital (in this case the nutrients in the soil) is finite then when capital is depleted (leeching into the environment in this case) getting back to square one will require investment or continued increase in leverage.
1 year back to 'normal'? Unlikely. Soil that has been under intense management will almost always need more than 1 year to 'return to normal' which is hard to define.
My mother gave me some years ago a late 80s/early 90s copy of the “Rodale book of composting,” which was excellent and I recommend. I have been applying the principles in my own home garden but was unaware of the larger context.
Last time I looked into organic produce it seemed quite clear that it's a net negative for the environment. This is mostly due to land usage (up to 2x than conventional. Yeah let's cut down more rainforests so that the West can eat healthier sounding food...). The articles I read also mentioned eutrophication of water bodies caused by organic farming. This is because the nutrient content of organic manure has high variance, so farmers always over-fertilize, producing excess nutrients that seep into groundwater.
The rain forest is not being cut down to grow organic heirloom tomatoes. From what I know, it's being razed to grow palm oil, bananas, and cheap corn/soy to feed cattle.
In that vein, see your own link:
The organic-conventional debate often detracts from other aspects of dietary choices which have greater impact. If looking to reduce the environmental impact of your diet, what you eat can be much more influential than how it is produced. The relative difference in land use and greenhouse gas impacts between organic and conventional systems is typically less than a multiple of two. Compare this to the relative differences in impacts between food types where, as shown in the charts below, the difference in land use and greenhouse gas emissions per unit protein between high-impact meats and low-impact crop types can be more than 100-fold. If your primary concern is whether the potato accompanying your steak is conventionally or organically produced, then your focus is arguably misplaced from the decisions which could have the greatest impact.
Very true, dietary choices have much larger impact (I'm currently eating broccoli as I'm typing this because of that very reason). However the claim that organic produce is better for the environment seems false nonetheless. Happy to read literature that proves otherwise.
I don't have literature one way or the other, it's a very hard question that depends a lot on your criteria... But I don't think organic will ever take over completely, I mainly hope that it demonstrates to producers that consumers value attributes other than $/lb, trials a different way of doing things, and leads to industrial ag adopting the best parts.
While we are talking hopes & dreams, I also have my fingers crossed that a growing higher-end market for fruits & vegetables could push back on some of the consolidation & commodification happening in US farmland, which has not been good for small farmers.
I don't know whether that change can originate from consumers alone. Maybe I'm just jaded, but imho any plan that starts with "we need to teach people..." is doomed from the start.
Take a capitalistic system and leave it running for a long time, company structures will inevitably gravitate towards these giant over-optimized organizations living off the tiniest margins that no smaller competitor can compete with. Try to change things locally, your neighbour will blow you out of the water.
I think our best chance is utilizing the social contract. Push for legislative change, taxes/subsidies to control for changes that no single individual/organization would ever have incentive to make. It seems like a boring and daunting task, but isn't this the only way to effect actual change? And we need the changes on a global scale. How should we make our markets less efficient if other countries don't?
I think this over-optimization/homogenization is a general problem of humanity now, and it appears in seemingly unrelated areas too like social media, advertising, even music and tv. Perhaps our best chance is to try to introduce some sort of fragmenting force that reintroduces heterogeneity. Inefficiency is not such a bad thing, it's more robust to change, redundant, and ultimately just more interesting.
Getting quite philosophical and ranty now, but I was also thinking, didn't this very change happen already, in nature, many millions of years ago, when lifeforms evolved the ability to die naturally? Species that don't die have smaller chances to survive environmental changes and adapt to resource scarcity. Doesn't this hint at the kind of decisions we need to make as a species? Introduce some notion of organizational death, or renewal, or limiting force, to make room for differentiation?
There is plenty of cow poop, so the scale isn't a problem. Having that cow poop stay where you put it (in the soil) rather than running off in the nearest creek/river or seep into the groundwater--that's the hard part.
Using cow poop is actually very smart. We (society) want meat so it is good to ensure efficient use of everything in that supply chain, using cow poop as a fertilizer is a great way to do that.
I am a biologist/ecologist by training and there exists a biomimicry technique that can regenerate the most damaged, capped soils and produce up to an inch of soil per year. It mimics the behavior of the great herds and incorporates overlooked factors that contribute to the biological soil cycle including plant succession, coverage, small and large animal impact. It also incorporates permaculture. It arrests the desertification process, doubles the effectiveness of rainfall, promotes deep penetration of water to restore aquifers, brings back the native plants, insects, birds etc. It can be used purely to restore biodiversity on damaged land. And it’s carbon negative. It can be used for agriculture or ranching (or forest fire management). It eliminates the need for fertilizer and tilling. It eliminates runoff. Ranchers who are using it here in Colorado are seeing a 300% increase in hay production and thus the same for number of cattle or bison the land can sustain. It’s become known as concentrated, rotational grazing but there’s a little more to it. Alan Savory developed the technique while studying land degeneration on game preserves in Africa. His book and course explain SO many previously-invisible processes that contribute to soil health. Even without using animals, there is SO much we can do to restore healthy soil cycles, increase the effectiveness of rainfall and stop erosion desertification.
They say crop rotation is their primary defense against pests. My mother’s farm had excellent results with no rotation by mixing in a small amount of tobacco. I’d also be interested to see someone test an omega-balanced cattle feed permaculture using corn and flax, maybe seed hemp too.
Isn't the viability of herbicides just a function of regional labour costs? I ask because I know some permaculture farmers who do these super dense crops with symbiotic plants, and it only works because they're out there working it.
Permaculture farming is fairly low effort actually. Most of the work is in shaping the earth. Generally seeds are sown semi-randomly and whatever pops up is what pops up. There's very little direct management of plants.
Also getting in grazing animals does a great job of prepping land for new growth.
about Ruth Stout and her no-till garden & farming approach.
Admittedly, during her initial year of the garden, she tilled the plot. Subsequent years she used mulch cover (and perhaps some strategic cover crops).
No-till is the norm now for conventional grain in the US. The distinction is that instead of using herbicide to kill the cover crop, they are using mechanical methods that require specific timing.
There are a lot of clever ideas like this that have started getting branded under "regenerative agriculture". It is most in use on land that is already pretty degraded, dry, or has irregular rainfall. It has also had more popularity with animal/grazing systems than row crops. The key is that when you have healthier soil you get tons of benefits for free instead of spraying, fertilizing, and irrigating.
The listed caveat that it takes years to return to previous yields is important. Healthy soil doesn't happen overnight. Farmers that already have a lot of debt will struggle to make this switch.
"The Call of the Reed Warbler" is a book that has extensive case studies and stories about people applying regenerative agriculture to their farms. It is especially focused on Australia.
This is just the start: applied ecology makes money and saves the planet. Grow "food forests", practice regenerative agriculture, make money. It's fun and feels great. You can start right where you are.
Reposting a comment I made a few weeks ago:
A brain dump:
I've been investigating a few systems of agriculture.
- There's Small Plot INtensive (SPIN) which is specialized for market
production, emphasizing minimizing labor and maximizing market crops.
https://spinfarming.com/ (Be aware that these folks are selling their
system as a course, and this is a sales site not an info site. You can
get the details from reading carefully and watching the videos that
practitioners have made.)
- Then there's the "Grow Bioinstensive" method which is designed to
provide a complete diet in a small space while also building soil and
fertility. They have been dialing it in for forty years and now have a
turn-key system that is implemented and functioning all over the world.
http://growbiointensive.org/ (These folks are also selling their system,
but they also have e.g. manuals you can download for free. I find their
site curiously hard to use.)
- Permaculture (which could be called "applied ecology" with a kind of
hippie spin. I'm not a hippie but I'm sometimes mistaken for one.) and a
similar school (parallel evolution) called "Syntropic" Agriculture.
Both of these systems aim to mimic natural ecosystems to create "food
forests" that produce crops year-round without inputs (no fertilizer, no
irrigation.) The process takes 5-15 years or so but then is
self-sustaining and regenerative.
For Permaculture I find Toby Hemenway's (RIP) videos very good:
(FWIW, I find Gotsch's writing (in English) to be impenetrable, even
though I pretty much know what he's doing. Anyway, his results are
incontrovertable.)
I'm afraid I don't have a good link in re: Food Forests and eco-mimetic
agriculture yet. This "Plant Abundance" fellow's youtube channel might
be a good place to start, in any event it's a great example:
- If you really wanted to maximize food production and aren't afraid of
building insfrastucture (like greenhouses and fish tanks) there's the
(sadly now defunct) Growing Power model:
This is very much non-hippie, very much grounded in (often cutting-edge)
science (ecology, microbiology, etc.) and ecologically and economically
superior to artificial methods (e.g. Brown makes money. It's actually
weird that more people aren't adopting these methods faster. You make
more money, have fewer expenses, and your topsoil builds up year-on-year
rather than washing away in erosion.)
Thanks for the multiple links. We are currently using a method that I don't see in your list - hugelkultur.[0]
I currently have two spaces that I have established to try to take advantage of this low water use method. One is a keyhole garden [1] where I currently have a bunch of strawberry plants growing. This is the first time in 20 years of living here that I have strawberry plants that are still alive after summer heat is done. Something is working right.
The other space is one I just completed constructing last week. It is an orchard space using hugelkultur concepts of mounded compostable debris. I don't yet have any idea how that will work but hopes are as high as the summer temperatures in Texas.
I had a lot of logs, branches, limbs, and twigs from various weather events and several piles of composted wood chips and composted yard waste that I used to build the mounds. I had to buy some topsoil since that is in short supply on my place and I bought some composted manure too. I rented a skid steer to manage the construction so that part was easy. Doing what I did with a wheelbarrow would've been a huge job or one requiring multiple weak minds with strong backs or maybe promises of lots of free beer and smoked brisket.
I have a variety of fruit trees planted (avocado, plum, pomegranate, apple, moro orange, lemon, fig) and will be covering the mounds with various deer-resistant plants. Some of the plants will be garden plants - onion, garlic, etc. Others are herbs for home use - mullein, saffron crocus, yarrow, hollyhocks, hyssop, and others.
I chose this method since it seems well adapted to the challenges of growing in rocky soil in an environment where temperatures can get high for extended periods of time, like North Texas. I live on a rock outcrop and nothing grows unless it is in raised beds or heavily irrigated. I get all my potable water from my water well so I'm not inclined to waste it and very much prefer to plant things that are adapted to the area. I have killed off many non-native plants and invasive weeds since I moved here and allowed native grasses and flowers to take over. This saves a huge amount of maintenance since I don't water anything water the first year. It either lives with what the sky gods provide or it becomes a dry twig. I've had my share of dry twigs.
My greenhouse and garden area use rainwater harvested from the greenhouse roof and collected in a tank. The pump we use to fill water buckets is powered by a solar panel with a battery backup. The greenhouse itself is my kids' enclosed sandbox building (I built that a long time ago) modified to a greenhouse since the kids have grown up.
I have followed the Rodale's work since back in the early 90's and have used that over the years to guide my gardening plans and have found information gained to be very useful for those like myself who want to have small gardens for their family use. I'm glad to see they have carried out their long-term tests successfully though I don't know how much uptake they'll get among larger farmers. I do know that the method of maintaining soil fertility is a solid way to guarantee success.
They’ve made great strides domesticating a perennial cousin of wheat which allow use of existing equipment for harvest and doesn’t require replanting each season. It’s Actually a real product called “kerenza” and I have half a pint of kerenza flour sitting on my counter right now (tastes like regular flour)
They have a number of other projects with a lot of potential too!
They’re on Amazon smile also, without even doing anything different than I otherwise would have, (for better or worse) we gave $200 to them via Smile.
They could use your support any way you are able to contribute!
How well would this scale in areas where most of our intensive agriculture is now, e.g. Kansas, Nebraska? We have a ton of farming like this guy is doing around where I live but we have lots of rain and pretty good soil to beging with.
> We have found that organic no-till practices year after year do not yield optimal results, so our organic systems utilize reduced tillage and the ground is plowed only in alternating years.
So.. by no-till they mean occasional till?
My naive thought on no-till is that, in addition to reducing erosion, the soil gains a poorly understood yet very beneficial network of information and nutrient sharing that builds over time (eg mycelium). Tilling destroys that. Also I read it works best with diverse, cooperative planting instead of mono-crop factory farming.
Depends on the soil. Down where I live, heavy clay soils benefit from tilling to break it up the so water can penetrate and plants can develop a decent root system. If you were aiming for 'no-till' I suppose you'd look to do this once or a small number of times by blending in a ton of soil amendments.
I wouldn’t be concerned about scale. If we convert every lawn to farm land, we would get three times the amount of current farm land on top. Say we replace it completely, we could still farm 3 times less efficient and would have the same amount of yield.
How to they handle grasshoppers in swarm? With a swarm of a few million on the move they can graze 12 acres to stubble in an hour.
Caterpillars can also do great harm.
There are natural effective insecticides, like natural pyrethrins or nicotines - do they work well enough?
Weeds? There are very few natural weed killers - hank pick? Robot machine weed picking is getting better and better.
Sorry if I missed something while reading this. Does this system reduce the dependency on added Nitrogen (given the luming Nitrogen crisis coming in the future if current rates persist)?
We are extracting Nitrogen from the atmosphere, that isn’t going to run out. Ammonia is made from Nitrogen and Hydrogen, it’s the Hydrogen that’s extracted from natural gas. However, splitting it from water is again effectively unlimited and not that expensive.
Phosphorus is plentiful, current methods give us a 300+ year supply and other options exist. Potassium is a little more questionable we are likely to need to mine the ocean floors fairly soon which would spike prices, but it could ultimately be a closed loop where we are collecting the runoff.
I agree that’s a problem, however unlike most environmental issues runoff is an inefficiency not a byproduct. Farmers that more efficiently use fertilizer directly have less runoff. So, generally the economic incentives are in close alignment.
The US for example has seen a significant reduction in runoff without that much pushback from farmers. That said, there is a point where with wasted fertilizer costs less than the methods of avoiding runoff, which changes the dynamics.
You can have nitrogen runoff problems whether you use artificial fertilizer or manure, the only difference is that people who use manure typically (though not always) are more careful about it.
Search for nitrogen in the original article, it definitely reduces the need for added nitrogen. Adding lots of cheap nitrogen is something we've become addicted to ... farmers used to rotate crops etc.
There is another article on this site about how corn will uptake far more nitrogen than it needs, so cheap, abundant nitrogen isn't really as necessary as we believe.
If anyone was unaware, urine is high in nitrogen and when added to compost is like "adding gas to fire, but slower". I never had an issue with Nitrogen in my compost.
I can see nitrogen going to waste if food ends up in a landfill, but I imagine our sewage systems recycle this for profit.
It's all machined, no manual labor. Instead of sparying you would roll the pasture with already existing farming machinery. They use the same no till sower as other no-till methods.
In short, I would just ask people to remember that there are quite a few farmers who would love to stop paying for fertilizer if it didn't impact their yields: all of them in fact. It's one of their biggest costs generally. When an organization says "The Farming Systems Trial was started by Bob Rodale, who wanted scientific backing for the recommendations being made to the newly forming National Organic Program in the 1980s" they've incorporated confirmation bias into their heart.
I'm certainly biased, I'm the CTO of a company that's trying to improve agricultural inputs by financing access to smallholders in subsaharan Africa (Apollo Agriculture, we're actually a YC F1 company also,) but it's worth noting that this is research that's quite a bit outside the normal recommendations that ag scientists believe. I also worked at The Climate Corporation before, to put all my potential biases out on the table.