Rice paddies are responsible for 11% of the world’s methane emissions.
...researchers .. have discovered how to dramatically reduce the greenhouse gas emissions output of rice fields. Initial indications are showing a 70% reduction.
So ballpark: Looks like we could reduce (strikethrough: greenhouse gas) methane emissions by 7 percent or so a year while growing more rice to boot from this one change if enough farms adopted it and the article indicates that halfway through the planting season, farmers who had been reluctant to try it spontaneously changed to the new method simply because the crop yield was better:
Even when the pilot was halfway through, the crops were looking so healthy that a further 10 farmers in the village who weren’t part of the project chose to drain their land.
And I wondered what a 7 percent reduction in greenhouse gasses would do for climate change and found this opening paragraph:
Geneva, 26 November 2019 – On the eve of a year in which nations are due to strengthen their Paris climate pledges, a new UN Environment Programme (UNEP) report warns that unless global greenhouse gas emissions fall by 7.6 per cent each year between 2020 and 2030, the world will miss the opportunity to get on track towards the 1.5°C temperature goal of the Paris Agreement.
Unfortunately it's not that simple. If you look at the Wikipedia page on GHG [1], the warming effect of methane is maybe ~20% of the total GHG impact. So a 70% reduction of 11% of methane, which is a ~20% contributor is an overall warming improvement of ~1.5%. Which is still great, but not going to save the planet on its own.
I didn't suggest it would single-handedly save the planet.
Though it's a fair point to clarify that rice is 11 percent of methane emissions, not 11 percent of total greenhouse gasses. There is a lot of math involved here that I don't know how to begin to navigate, frankly, to try to estimate just how big an impact this (potentially) is.
Some of what I view as core problem with approaching this issue is simply how easy it is to do the maths and say "but this is only a small impact in the greater problem".
- Air travel could be banned and we're still hosed
- All the cars could go electric and we're still hosed
- Kill all the cattle and we're still hosed
etc etc. It really is freerider/tragedy of the commons situation, lot of finger pointing and a lot of rational self interest. In the end I can only view this as unfettered good news, assuming we can scale it out
The US, the EU, and China are all likely to have only ~30% of electricity coming from fossil fuels in 10 years, and only ~21% in 15 years, and only ~10% in 20 years.
In 20 years, it's likely less than 50% of cars on the road will be ICE.
~72% of GHG is energy. That number could easily be cut by ~50% in 20 years.
> I'm kind of amazed to learn that cars are only ~12% of GHG emissions
Yep. I am also very unclear that some of the sticks being wielded towards replacing existing ICE stock with new electric cars make sense. Sure my 7 year old petrol car is polluting, but building a brand new electric car to replace it is pretty horrible for the environment too?
The average ICE car uses ~4.6T CO2 per year (in gasoline).
The average electric car costs about ~9T CO2 to build.
Electricity in the US & the EU is currently ~60% fossil fuels.
Electric cars get >2x MPGe of the average ICE car.
So if you say the average car drives ~15k miles to produce ~4.6T CO2. The average electric car driven on ~100% fossil fuels for the same amount of miles would generate less than ~2.3T CO2. Since it's only 60% fossil fuels, it's ~60% of that = ~1.38T CO2.
Payoff is in about 3.33 years.
In ~20 years, when we get to ~10-15% of electricity coming from fossil fuel, the payoff would be only 2.2 years.
Sure, if you're driving a Toyota Prius now, and only putting on ~5k miles per year - you should probably just keep it til it falls apart.
Until we get to like <30% of electricity coming from fossil fuels - I'm not sure we should be encouraging people to needlessly upgrade their car to electric (unless they're getting like 12 miles to the gallon and driving 30k+ miles per year).
But, ideally, everyone would be thinking about getting at least a PHEV for their next car when they do upgrade.
Methane is responsible for about 30% of the current global warming, so it clearly is a priority. That said:
Methane is transient, while CO2 accumulates. Methane decays quite quickly into CO2, which is why when accounted for over 20 years methane is considered 86x more potent than CO2, and over one century "only" 28x as potent. Any CO2 emitted today we will have to deal with for centuries to come. That's not the case for methane.
So while lowering methane will yield the most benefits in the short term, thinking longer term, it's really CO2 emissions that need to be lowered urgently.
Said differently, using a very crude reasoning with a hypothetical scenario: cutting methane emissions in 2025 rather than in 2050 would have little to no effect on the climate of 2100. In both cases the methane will have mostly decayed, and thus will stop capturing heat from the sun (maybe 2100 is a bit early, but you get the idea). But cutting CO2 emissions in 2025 rather than 2050 would have a dramatic effect on the climate of 2100, as these 25 years of CO2 emissions would mostly remain right there in the atmosphere.
It's obviously over-simplified, as global warming is having irreversible effects right now, and methane decaying will not revive species gone extinct in the meantime. So I'm certainly not arguing that we should not do anything against methane emissions. But that should not be done at the expense of fighting against CO2 emissions, rather on top of it...
Thank you. This is why I don't know how to approach the math.
I have a hand-wavy: This is potentially not quite 2 percent of total GHG emissions per year, but I don't know the weighted value of each type of gas and hypothetically something like 50 to 100 projects "like" this one each year for a decade gets us in the ballpark of stopping man made climate change.
Can 8 billion people produce 50 to 100 projects (each year) that move the needle this much? This works in part because it was initially a hard sell to get the farmers to agree to participate in the experiment but it went so well that halfway through the year, 10 more farmers chose to drain their rice paddies of water.
So you don't even have to talk people into taking a hit of some kind for the greater good. They will convert to this because of the higher crop yield and money in their pockets -- assuming (or as soon as) they can afford the transitional costs and a fund could be created to help with that to speed up adoption.
> Methane has GWP (over 20 years) of 81.2[4] meaning that, for example, a leak of a tonne of methane is equivalent to emitting 81.2 tonnes of carbon dioxide. Similarly a tonne of nitrous oxide, from manure or paddy fields for example, is equivalent to 273 tonnes of carbon dioxide.
This feels like the adage of marginal gains. Any one change by itself is small, but they compound. Used successfully by british cycling, I wonder if this would be similar?
It looks like the 1.5 C limit has already been missed. Even this year, we are nudging up against hitting it, and even if we stop CO2 emissions today, temperatures will probably continue to rise for hundreds of years.
Are you implying we shouldn't bother to keep trying?
While I'm here:
Y2K was supposed to be a global financial meltdown. Programmers versed in an "out of date" language fixed the issue beforehand, the first of January came while a lot of VCRs could no longer be programmed, the predicted banking system meltdown did not materialize.
Afterwards, some people went "Nothing happened. I was an idiot to pay you overtime." though nothing happened precisely because that overtime got paid.
The Kuwaiti Oil Fires were expected to burn for years and be a global environmental disaster. Crack teams from around the world converged on the country, invented new techniques on the fly and had them all out in six months.
This accomplishment was not met with global celebrations on par with the previous global handwringing. The desert bloomed like no one had seen in decades. This was a footnote in other stories with more drama.
When things run smoothly, everyone yawns and gets over it, often forgetting how bad it was supposed to be.
Bottom up efforts, like individuals, cities and states, would be best off just dealing with the effects of climate change. Build taller flood defenses. Build more desalination plants. Change crops. Upgrade AC units. etc.
Top down efforts, like global carbon quotas with enforcement via sanctions or even military action, are the only efforts likely to see success. So far, world leaders haven't shown interest in such things, but who knows, as world leaders get old and die and are replaced by the next generation, there might be interest in such a scheme.
In my initial comment, I leapt from methane to greenhouse gasses. Someone pointed out the error and said methane is only 20 percent of all greenhouse gasses.
In a different comment, I said we need 50 to 100 such projects but I think I'm still just making errors in my head. It may be 5 to 10.
Since 1700, we've lost 85 percent of our wetlands. Peat stores a lot more carbon than forests.
I think this project makes it sound doable to find enough threads to pull to calm things down, but I'm really not coping well with the math which is likely convincing people I'm an idiot. People default to thinking this isn't fixable anyway. They need very little in the way of excuses to stand on that.
"in 1947 he took up natural farming again with success, using no-till farming methods to raise rice and barley ... organic and chemical-free rice farming"
"Organic" farming doesn't scale. You still need fertilizer to achieve reasonable yields long-term, though the new method optimizes the fertilizer use.
Historically, this was done by letting fields to flood, bringing in new topsoil rich in nutrients. If you can do that, then it's fine. But there's simply not enough regularly flooded land for this to work.
It simply isn't true that the last word has been said on this. "Modern" techniques (meaning since the "green revolution") have focussed on large areas of monoculture supported by various land additives sold to farmers by a few large corporations. There are so many ways that that can be changed to the benefit of the crops. This sort of evidence is tantalising: https://www.britishecologicalsociety.org/city-allotments-mat...
Scaling up allotment style production is not a trivial ask, but we live in a time where automation techniques look plausible to achieve it.
> "Modern" techniques (meaning since the "green revolution") have focussed on large areas of monoculture supported by various land additives sold to farmers by a few large corporations.
And what's inherently wrong with that? I'm fine getting my CPUs and cars from just a few companies.
> This sort of evidence is tantalising
I wonder, do people really think that all farmers are morons?
> Scaling up allotment style production is not a trivial ask, but we live in a time where automation techniques look plausible to achieve it.
I grew up in Russia during 90-s, during the time of extreme poverty. We had a 1000 square meter plot where we grew some crops: a bit of potatoes, apple trees, pumpkins, tomatoes, etc. It required tending every week, for a day or so, with 4 people working. And it still needed fertilizers.
And even so, we mainly did it to introduce variety in the diet, rather than provide the raw calories.
That's why I'm so utterly skeptical of people bringing up all those ideas.
Rice paddies aren't flooded to "bring in topsoil", but rather to control weeds. Flooding them actually washes nutrients out of the soil, which is why yields improved when the farmers stopped doing it.
You may, somehow, be confusing Bali with Ancient Egypt?
Traditional Chinese agriculture was absolutely relying on topsoil brought through flooding. In places where it was not directly available, workers manually hauled silt from ponds and floodplains.
""Organic" farming doesn't scale. You still need fertilizer to achieve reasonable yields long-term, though the new method optimizes the fertilizer use."
Organic farming in general, or natural farming in this case(which is not the same), do not forbid fertilizers. They just try to avoid it wherever possible and in general try to keep use on a sustainable level (and organic farming certificates require no use of chemical fertilizers).
And apart from that, organic farming surely can scale. It is is just more labour intense, when you do not use pesticides and herbicides, but this can be solved with robots.
And if natural farming can scale, is a different question, which I would answer with "it depends".
Of course they do. Even green hippies don't want to go back to yields that are less than a quarter of modern ones.
> They just try to avoid it wherever possible and in general try to keep use on a sustainable level (and organic farming certificates require no use of chemical fertilizers).
This is a lie by omission. "Organic" farming is dependent on nitrogen from manure. And most of the manure is produced by animals fed with very "non-organic" corn.
Grass-fed cattle (it's only around 5% of the total!) will only supply a small fraction of needed manure, even for the current "organic" farming.
> And apart from that, organic farming surely can scale.
Nope. "Organic" farming is nothing but a cash grab, fueled by chemophobia and the naturalistic fallacy.
Greater yield doesn't mean greater yield in nutrition.
Nutrition in many veggies has dropped significantly since we started chemical farming instead of organic farming, and now that we understand more about the soil web and the complex interactions of the life in the soil we realse that adding fertiliser results in dirt rather than soil, which then results in less nturitous food.
> Greater yield doesn't mean greater yield in nutrition.
Yes, it does. "Nutrition" is mostly raw calories that you get from fat and carbs, with protein sprinkled on top. Modern plants are _more_ rich in protein than historical cultivars.
Vitamins are a non-issue, people in general receive more than enough of them.
You seem very certain that fertilizer is required. Given what we know of agriculture today, that seems reasonable.
But something, somehow grew 4-8ft of deep topsoil on the prairies in the US that are now prime farmland. Haber Bosch wasn't around 300 or 3000 years ago, nor were people tilling and planting. How did these plants get enough nitrogen to thrive?
How do current grass fed beef ranchers grow enough grass to grow cattle today? Surely they aren't fertilizing the grass.
Some folks say that there are free living nitrogen fixing bacteria that can live in the soil, provided that they're getting sugars from growing plants. It seems reasonable.
> Haber Bosch wasn't around 300 or 3000 years ago, nor were people tilling and planting. How did these plants get enough nitrogen to thrive?
They didn't "thrive" in the modern sense. For example, a good yield in 1900 was around 16 bushels of wheat per acre, with the national average of 12 bushels. You could use somewhat better crop rotation techniques, waste a lot of effort on manual pest removal, and get to maybe 20-25 bushels.
Sorry for arcane units, they are traditional when talking about wheat.
> How do current grass fed beef ranchers grow enough grass to grow cattle today? Surely they aren't fertilizing the grass.
Yes, they do. Alfalfa doesn't require a lot of it (it's a nitrogen fixer itself), but other types of grass do. Corn for corn-fed beef certainly needs fertilizer.
And corn-fed beef is around 96% of all beef in the US.
with good management practices, particular crop types and growing conditions—organic systems can thus nearly match conventional yields, whereas under others it at present cannot
Commercial Crop Yields Reveal Strengths and Weaknesses for Organic Agriculture in the United States
The analysis we present here offers a new perspective, based on organic yield data collected from over 10,000 organic farmers representing nearly 800,000 hectares of organic farmland.
Averaged across all crops, organic yield averaged 80% of conventional yield. However, several crops had no significant difference in yields between organic and conventional production, and organic yields surpassed conventional yields for some hay crops.
> If the world adopted a plant-based diet we would reduce global agricultural land use from 4 to 1 billion hectares
> Farmyard manure in natural farming leads to higher yield than conventional method: Study
First, these two items are mutually exclusive. Second, about 95% of manure right now is produced by animals that are fed "non-organic" corn, that is produced with the help of fertilizers.
Honestly, "organic" people should just study the basics: the nitrogen cycle.
> about 95% of manure right now is produced by animals that are fed "non-organic" corn
That's not the only way how to get manure, right? Three field system, for example. And manure is not the only thing we could use, we have also compost and mulch and nitrogen fixing plants and companion plants and agroforestry etc.
If the world switches to a vegan diet, there wouldn't be any manure.
> That's not the only way how to get manure, right?
Nope. Not right.
> Three field system, for example. And manure is not the only thing we could use, we have also compost and mulch and nitrogen fixing plants and companion plants etc.
If you're talking about bilogical methods, then nitrogen-fixing plants are THE ONLY way you can get nitrogen. Animals don't fix nitrogen, they simply concentrate it in the form of manure.
And guess what? Plants suck at nitrogen fixation. So overall yields would be around one tenth of the current ones for many important crops.
> If the world switches to a vegan diet, there wouldn't be any manure.
We could, and probably would still have the animals. There are vegan sanctuaries even in this day and age. But even without manure we'd still be ok.
> So overall yields would be around one tenth of the current ones for many important crops.
Yields were 2-3 times smaller before the "green revolution," not 10 times less.
With better methods, processes, and with automation we could further improve yields. This would undoubtedly require more knowledge than the uniform methods we're currently using.
Animal agriculture is so wasteful and inefficient that we could absolutely free 75% of the lands we're currently using for reforesting and rewilding and still have 2x more space than we have now for veggies, fruits, and nuts, while feeding everyone sustainably.
We should even accept those lower yields than we currently have; the priority should be the restoration of soils and biodiversity rather than the maximal exploitation of natural resources. Soil depletion/erosion is a serious problem, and both industrial and animal agriculture are the culprits.
> We could, and probably would still have the animals. There are vegan sanctuaries even in this day and age. But even without manure we'd still be ok.
Without fertilizers? Nope.
> Yields were 2-3 times smaller before the "green revolution," not 10 times less.
It is close to 10x. I gave numbers for wheat already. Potatoes are similar: 60 bushels per acre in 1900, 500 bushels now. And so on, and so on.
> With better methods, processes, and with automation we could further improve yields.
Nope. They are fundamentally limited by nutrients. Primarily nitrogen.
> This would undoubtedly require more knowledge than the uniform methods we're currently using.
Sigh. Do you think EVERYONE around you is a moron? Do you think that hundreds of thousands of people working in agricultural research are idiots and/or bribed into silence by large companies?
> Animal agriculture is so wasteful and inefficient that we could absolutely free 75% of the lands we're currently using for reforesting and rewilding and still have 2x more space than we have now for veggies, fruits, and nuts, while feeding everyone sustainably.
Look into syntropic and natural farming, for example.
Syntropic Farming:
- Concept: This approach is based on the principles of succession in natural ecosystems. It mimics natural processes to regenerate the land, creating a resilient system where various plant species support each other.
- Yield: Initial yields might be lower than industrial farming, but over time, as the ecosystem stabilizes and soil health improves, yields can be sustained without much external input.
- Advantages: Builds soil health, reduces the need for external inputs, enhances biodiversity, sequesters carbon, and can be more resilient to climatic fluctuations.
- Limitations: Requires deeper understanding and observation of natural processes, may not produce as high yields initially, and might require more labor in the beginning stages.
Natural Farming (or Do-Nothing Farming):
- Concept: Introduced by Masanobu Fukuoka, this method avoids plowing, chemical fertilizers, weeding, and pesticides. Instead, it promotes the use of cover crops and natural fertilizers.
- Yield: Yields can be comparable to conventional methods after the system stabilizes, but there might be fluctuations depending on environmental conditions.
- Advantages: Low external input, builds soil health, encourages biodiversity, reduces erosion, and is less labor-intensive in the long run.
- Limitations: There's a learning curve to understanding the balance of natural systems, initial yields might be lower, and it might not be suitable for all crop types or large-scale monocultures.
> Potatoes are similar: 60 bushels per acre in 1900, 500 bushels now.
Farming practices were less advanced, and there was a limited understanding of pest and disease management. The lack of resistant varieties meant that pests and diseases could cause substantial yield losses (potato blight for example).
> Do you think that hundreds of thousands of people working in agricultural research are idiots and/or bribed into silence by large companies
I believe we stopped developing new methods a long time ago, compromising biodiversity, soil, and human health. The entrenched belief that we need animal products for sustenance prevents us from exploring new, more sustainable methods. Furthermore, the current financial system does not accommodate experimentation, learning, and the adoption of sustainable practices.
> Once we perfect vat-grown meat, sure.
We may destroy all remaining biodiversity before we find ways to achieve that on the necessary scale.
> Look into syntropic and natural farming, for example.
You clearly don't understand what I'm saying. You can "regenerate" this and "natural" that all you can, but it simply won't work.
There is NOT enough naturally fixed nitrogen (and phosphorus) to sustain yields that are needed to feed people.
> Farming practices were less advanced, and there was a limited understanding of pest and disease management. The lack of resistant varieties meant that pests and diseases could cause substantial yield losses (potato blight for example).
Nope. It's all nitrogen and phosphorus fertilizers. Modern cultivars are also more adapted to utilizing the higher levels of nitrogen, and they just won't thrive with the starvation-era agricultural practices.
> I believe we stopped developing new methods
Then you're a moron and/or ignorant of what is actually happening.
He refused to use artificial fertilizers and pesticides. He let most of the land grow naturally, and on 12 hectares (30 acres) he planted bananas and cocoa, cutting back the surrounding trees regularly. Today, he harvests an average 920 kgs (2,000 lb) of cocoa beans per hectare, more than three times the average across Brazil of 300 kg (660 lb) per hectare. And because he doesn’t spend money on fertilizers and pesticides, unlike the farmers around him, Götsch enjoys higher profits.
The yield from the system usually equates to and often surpasses that of the conventional counterpart. The other plants grown within the systems result in additional income for the farmer, covering the labor cost.
Organic agriculture delivers just 5 percent less yield in rain-watered legume crops, such as alfalfa or beans, and in perennial crops, such as fruit trees. But when it comes to major cereal crops, such as corn or wheat, and vegetables, such as broccoli, conventional methods delivered more than 25 percent more yield.
Organic farmers should use best management practices, supply more organic fertilizers or grow legumes or perennial crops.
Yet his acres consistently produce harvests that equal or surpass those of his neighbors who use labor-intensive, chemical-dependent methods. Fukuoka’s system of farming is amazing not only for its yields, but also for the fact that he has not plowed his fields for more than 30 years! Nor does he use prepared fertilizer — not even compost — on his land, or weed his rows, or flood his rice paddies.
> I wonder, do people really think that all farmers are morons?
> You can "regenerate" this and "natural" that all you can, but it simply won't work
> Then you're a moron and/or ignorant of what is actually happening.
I'm not a farmer, and I just love farmers ;)
But I'm aware what's happening, and how destructive "modern" agriculture is.
Do you realize the extent to which we have depleted wildlife, insects, and fish populations, and how limited their numbers have become?
Do you realize the extent to which we have depleted our soils and how little of them remains?
Are you aware what pesticides and herbicides are doing to the wildlife and to our health?
Are you aware we're in the overshoot, e.g. consuming and polluting more than what earth can handle, and that with new countries developing the demands will only continue to grow?
Are you aware that agriculture, and animal agriculture specifically, is a leading driver of deforestation and biodiversity loss?
Are you aware that animal populations have seen 70% reductions just in the last 50 years, insects are 80% gone, seas will be almost empty in 2040's? That we're witnessing the sixth extinction, something that should take apx. 2.8 million years, but we'll manage that in less than 100 years?
Are you truly content with the current situation and genuinely believe that what we're doing aligns with the responsibilities of good stewards of the Earth?
Are you absolutely certain that, considering the world's population has reached 8 billion, we should continue prioritizing our eating habits over sustainability?
Are you aware that we're destroying rainforests to grow and import animal feed?
Are you aware that more of the habitable earth is dedicated to animal agriculture than to forests??
Are you aware that livestock make up 62% of the world’s mammal biomass; humans account for 34%; and wild mammals are just 4%?
Are you aware that poultry weighs more than twice that of wild birds?
Are you really not seeing the need to "regenerate" ?
Clearly, you believe that we have to keep doing what we're doing. As a result, you will likely continue to eliminate every living thing around your fields for the remaining few years, until biodiversity collapses, just to maintain your profits.
Hope you stay healthy and avoid developing Parkinson's, a fate that has befallen many of your colleagues due to the pesticides and herbicides you so readily spray across your fields. Be well.
> The development of agriculture about 12,000 years ago changed the way humans lived. They switched from nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyles to permanent settlements and farming. [1]
> It took over 200,000 years of human prehistory and history for the human population to reach one billion and only 219 years more to reach 8 billion. [3]
> Topsoil depletion occurs when the nutrient-rich organic topsoil, which takes hundreds to thousands of years to build up under natural conditions, is eroded or depleted of its original organic material.[13] Historically, many past civilizations' collapses can be attributed to the depletion of the topsoil. Since the beginning of agricultural production in the Great Plains of North America in the 1880s, about one-half of its topsoil has disappeared. [14]
> Depletion may occur through a variety of other effects, including overtillage (which damages soil structure), underuse of nutrient inputs which leads to mining of the soil nutrient bank, and salinization of soil.
> Soils can sequester carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere, primarily by storing carbon as soil organic carbon (SOC) through the process of photosynthesis. CO2 can also be stored as inorganic carbon but this is less common. Converting natural land to agricultural land releases carbon back into the atmosphere. The amount of carbon a soil can sequester depends on the climate and current and historical land-use and management.[6] Cropland has the potential to sequester 0.5–1.2 Pg C/year and grazing and pasture land could sequester 0.3–0.7 Pg C/year.[7] Agricultural practices that sequester carbon can help mitigate climate change.[8] Intensive farming deteriorates the functionality of soils.
> Methods that significantly enhance carbon sequestration in soil include no-till farming, residue mulching, cover cropping, and crop rotation, all of which are more widely used in organic farming than in conventional farming.[9][10] Because only 5% of US farmland currently uses no-till and residue mulching, there is a large potential for carbon sequestration
FWIU new methods of onsite green ammonia production for fertilizer could help solve food security, but the nitrogen runoff is causing algal blooms in waterways.
A (soap-like) surfactant like JADAM Wetting Agent (JWA) which causes the applied treatments to stick to the plants might reduce fertilizer runoff levels; but Nitrogen-based fertilizer alone does not regenerate all of the components of topsoil. https://www.google.com/search?q=jadam+jwa
Mycorrhizae fungus in the soil help get nutrients to plant roots, and they need to be damp in order to prevent soil from turning to dirt due to solar radiation and oxidation. https://youtube.com/@soilfoodwebschool
Urea breaks down into Nitrogen and CO2 in the soil. Maybe that used to scale (before we had 8b people on here).
TIL that rainwater is higher in nitrogen from falling though air (which contains H2O, CO2, N, O2, CO).
> However, if the soil is under irrigated, it gives poor soil salinity control which leads to increased soil salinity with the consequent buildup of toxic salts on the soil surface in areas with high evaporation. This requires either leaching to remove these salts and a method of drainage to carry the salts away. Irrigation with saline or high-sodium water may damage soil structure owing to the formation of alkaline soil.
From "Idiocracy":
> "For the last time, I'm pretty sure what's killing the crops is this Brawndo stuff.
>> But Brawndo's got what plants crave. It's got electrolytes. [Sodium (NaCl), Potassium (K), Water (H2O))
TIL that basic soil and plant health and farming things are new material for me, an otherwise qualified eater.
The animal agriculture industry is the leading cause of most environmental degradation that is currently occurring. These detrimental effects happen due to overgrazing, habitat loss, overfishing, and more. We are currently in the next mass extinction and animal agriculture is only fueling this catastrophe. Waste in the meat industry, too, is a major problem in of itself.
Tracking the ecological overshoot of the human economy
Our accounts indicate that human demand may well have exceeded the biosphere's regenerative capacity since the 1980s. According to this preliminary and exploratory assessment, humanity's load corresponded to 70% of the capacity of the global biosphere in 1961, and grew to 120% in 1999.
The carbon opportunity cost of animal-sourced food production on land ... shifts in global food production to plant-based diets by 2050 could lead to sequestration of 332–547 GtCO2, equivalent to 99–163% of the CO2 emissions budget consistent with a 66% chance of limiting warming to 1.5 °C
The secret world beneath our feet is mind-blowing – and the key to our planet’s future - Don’t dismiss soil: its unknowable wonders could ensure the survival of our species
Nutrients are of course required and depleted if you keep harvesting and removing them from the ecosystem. So you need a way to deliver some of that back. There are many ways to deliver nutrients and industrially produced fertilizers are merely one of those. A lot of organic farmers instead use things like compost, crop rotation, and no-till. No till keeps the soil healthy (by not disturbing it) and minimizes nutrient losses through erosion. Compost in the form of carbon rich wood chips or dead leaves, or nitrogen rich greens, or animal waste can do the rest. Certain cover crops actually add nitrogen to the soil. They take nitrogen from the air and deposit it in their roots. When the plants are harvested, the roots remain.
Quite a few of nutrients are _dependent_ in nature on erosion. Phosphorus is one of them, it's normally locked in very insoluble phosphates, that get broken down by weathering (erosion).
No-till farming preserves nitrogen, which is the main limiting factor in agriculture. It also allows soil to have better water retention.
The BIG downside is that no-till farming doesn't disrupt pests, so they can easily crowd out crops.
> Certain cover crops actually add nitrogen to the soil. They take nitrogen from the air and deposit it in their roots
Yes. That's why people had to leave fields fallow, to allow nitrogen fixing plants (such as clover) to grow and then compost in-place. The problem with that is an extremely poor efficiency of biological nitrogen fixation.
> That's why people had to leave fields fallow, to allow nitrogen fixing plants (such as clover) to grow and then compost in-place
Leaving fields fallow does allow the land to recover and can reduce certain pests and diseases. However, the primary purpose of leaving fields fallow historically wasn't necessarily for nitrogen-fixing plants to grow. That said, some traditional farming systems deliberately planted nitrogen-fixing cover crops, like clover, in rotation with other crops to replenish soil nitrogen. And let's not forget about nitrogen fixing trees.
> an extremely poor efficiency of biological nitrogen fixation
Biological nitrogen fixation may not be as immediately effective or efficient as directly applying synthetic nitrogen fertilizers, but it's a natural process that has sustained ecosystems for millennia. To say it has "extremely poor efficiency" might be an overgeneralization. In sustainable agriculture, the efficiency of nitrogen-fixing plants isn't solely measured by the speed or volume of nitrogen delivery but also by the myriad of other benefits they provide, such as improving soil structure, suppressing weeds, and promoting beneficial soil microbes.
> It's a wonder that it works at all
Biological nitrogen fixation is a well-established and crucial ecological process.
> They filled one field with water, as is common in Bali, but they drained the other, wetting the soil only when hairline cracks were spotted in the earth
I was told long ago that the water was needed to support the stalks (over the last 20K or so years humans have engineered edible grasses to have absurdly large seeds).
Definitely not the case. At least here in Japan, right now the seeds are large, but the fields are mostly not flooded. I believe the reason for flooding the seedlings is to crowd out weeds, which unlike rice are unable to get established.
Bali has reliably warmer weather than the Riverina in the winter months, so at a guess insulation would be less relevant for Balinese farmers.
[0] Australian rice growing is good for comparison because it necessarily has to be more water efficient and is more heavily industrialised than Indonesia
Not sure where you heard that. Everything I've read (and a quick google search to confirm) indicates that rice fields are flooded because it's a cheap way to prevent weeds and pests from destroying crop yields.
Historically, that may have been an issue. But modern ("Green Revolution") rice varieties are mostly dwarf or semi-dwarf, which plausibly reduces that need.
Kinda interesting that new farming techniques are still being discovered. It seems like someone in the past should have tried this experiment and kept some fields unflooded but no one ever bothered to do the experiment and measure yields.
Something AI might be good at is suggesting new farming techniques and processes for increasing yields. There is probably enough literature in agricultural sciences with data for various experiments that could be used as a training corpus.
"Bio-Resonance Farming is a cutting-edge approach that harnesses the principles of bio-resonance and plant communication to enhance crop growth, health, and yield. Bio-resonance refers to the idea that living organisms emit unique electromagnetic frequencies, and by understanding and harmonizing with these frequencies, we can optimize plant growth and overall agricultural productivity."
Yes, but even a model trained on a bunch of scientific papers will lack understanding in the same fashion, until there's some new technological breakthrough.
AI is simply about finding correlations in large data sets. Computers don't understand anything, they just shuffle symbols. So training an LLM on agricultural research will likely uncover patterns that would not be obvious to people and these patterns could point to new techniques and processes for increasing yields like scheduled flooding (as explained in the article). LLMs don't understand code but they consistently can complete code fragments which end up being correct more often than not. A model for yield optimization doesn't have to understand farming to suggest techniques and processes for increasing yields just like LLMs do for code fragments.
The current models were trained on a corpus that is essentially all fiction with no basis in reality. If the training corpus has real world data (like experimental results from agricultural experiments with crops and planting schedules along with their yields) then the neural network should uncover some patterns that wouldn't be obvious simply because finding correlations in large data sets is a hard problem but it is very well suited to analysis by large neural networks.
I mean, you can go try this now; feed some agricultural scientific journals into a model. I suspect it's going to be substantially harder than you expect.
I agree it is a very easy to do which is why it's surprising someone hasn't already tried it. Most of what I see are toy projects with LoRA for generative models bolted onto existing LLMs for fiction instead of scientific applications. These models already work for software so I see no obvious obstructions why they shouldn't work for agricultural experiments.
People do all kinds of meta-analysis and literature reviews today, I am sure somebody is already applying A.I. to the document handling for this task but doing a quick search it is hard to differentiate it from literature reviews on the subject of A.I. in agronomy such as
It's a big problem that ChatGPT has seduced a large number of people into thinking chatbots = AI and those people have convinced most other people that it is a scam.
Just like many other areas, agriculture responds to knowledge and is a highly competitive international business. For instance, rice is cultivated by very different methods in Louisiana and Bangladesh and rice from either place could make it to your table.
Exactly, and not that hard. My RSS reader has ingested about 250,000 articles from random sources since the beginning of this year and does a cluster analysis of about 50,000 of them every day in under two minutes.
Do they? You're talking the agricultural equivalent of something like "devise a new sorting algorithm with sota performance on x, y, z", not "write me some crud boilerplate".
I just mean finding correlations in data sets that are hard to find in other ways. The main idea is that there are plenty of data sets on various cultivars and experiments for how to increase yields. There are probably patterns in the data that would be amenable to analysis by neural networks. The article gives an example for how scheduled flooding can increase yields and I bet there are a lot of low hanging fruits like that to pick. This doesn't require discovering anything novel but simply surfacing some patterns in the data that is buried across several papers and hard to uncover by classical meta-analysis and statistical techniques. Neural networks are very good for uncovering non-obvious statistical correlations which can then be verified by experimentation.
After reading the article I'm sure there are plenty of low hanging fruits to uncover in yield optimization by trying different schedules for flooding and soil enrichment with different kinds of fertilizers. A neural network doesn't have to understand anything to point out useful statistical correlations just like it doesn't have to understand code semantics for incomplete code fragments to suggest potential completions which are then verified by the programmer/compiler/type system.
I would speculate, but don't concretely know, that this is what will happen. I know papers in other fields that were just this; analyzing conditions that successful and failed experiments were performed in and then using ML to derive optimal conditions.
It's not very easy to do. LLMs aren't capable of understanding, they can merely regurgitate what they've read based on statistical analysis of what words appear to be linked to each other. That doesn't help you when you need to do something new; at best an LLM can tell you what someone else has already done.
There are computer programs that do the kind of thing you're thinking about, for example, for protein structure analysis. They're incredibly complicated and generally require a lot of processing power.
That's a simple application of machine learning algorithms you might find in scikit-learn. Here is a special issue of another alleged "predatory journal" that is full of papers on the subject
LLMs are a type of machine learning. The stupidest type of machine learning.
The OP did not suggest machine learning in generally, they suggested LLMs specifically, which time and time again have been shown to be incapable of this task as a matter of fundamental design. Worse, because LLMs can't understand the their training data, the output of an LLM must be verified, which in situations like this would probably take more time than simply conducting novel research in the form of random experimentation.
Also, you really need to read your citations. The first one found that machine learning was unsuited for the task of agricultural prediction...
Most software dev is repetitive as hell, monkey see monkey do within a computer readable language that has well defined syntax. LLMs can do fairly well in this niche.
Research is by definition not repetitive, the text is free form and the data is never formatted in a way that makes comparison between different papers straight forward.
That's exactly the type of data set that can be analyzed by large neural networks. Heterogeneous data with hidden and non-obvious statistical correlations which would be hard to uncover with classical statistical tools and techniques.
Not at all convinced that this is true, the contrary. Do you have a reference, or something similar that did this successful in another field? (No, that's not ChatGPT and writing some limited software).
"A fundamental problem with Galactica is that it is not able to distinguish truth from falsehood, a basic requirement for a language model designed to generate scientific text. People found that it made up fake papers (sometimes attributing them to real authors), and generated wiki articles about the history of bears in space "
There's no shortage of ideas for improving real-world processes. Most of those ideas are bunk, and we're constrained by the amount of experiments[1] we are willing to run/fund, and the quality of data[1] that those experiments can collect, and the reproducibility[1] of those experiments.
Having an AI shout random ideas is very easy for software people to grok, but isn't going to help. If you want AI to assist with this, you'd need to build an 'AI' that can run the real-world experiments, and that's a few orders of magnitude harder than feeding a text corpus to an LLM.
'Thinking' about this problem isn't the hard part, the hard part is doing it. Even using an LLM for something like a meta-analysis of existing research is unlikely to find many profitable avenues of exploration.
[1] Experimental research is incredibly difficult, which is a fact that's highly underappreciated by people working in abstract and theoretical disciplines.
Why do you expect an LLM would be the tool for this job? There's plenty of “actually smart” AI (well, it's legit, so call it ML) out there that can do mathematical/scientific analysis better than we can.
It’s not a new technique as i understood it from the article. It was just abandoned by the introduction of fast growing hybrid rice. Nonetheless it’s very interesting the experiment has not been done before, couldn’t have been discovered at a better time!
“Lansing, an ecological anthropologist, has studied Indonesia’s rice fields since he arrived in Bali in 1974 to work on his Ph.D. His focus was subak, a rice irrigation system managed by water temples, which had been in place since the 9th century until it was disrupted by the arrival of the Green Revolution in the 1960s and 1970s. Like their counterparts across the globe, Balinese farmers were encouraged to swap slow-growing local varieties for fast-growing hybrid rice, fertilizer and an extra harvest.”
Experiments are difficult in farming. Most land holdings are not big enough and that land is the single source of income. So risking it with experimentation, when profits are anyways not high, becomes problematic
Aye, if you grab a home gardening in the tropics book if it's a good one it's going to give you info on how to deal with the amazingly fast carbon turnover.
There are all kinds of innovations being made in farming, and many more valuable practices from history that have been left by the wayside. Big Ag is and has only ever been interested in the bottom line.
The principal constraint to sustainable rice production in many contexts is cost of land leveling, which context dependent, costs about USD 1,000/ha. The status quo assumption is that farmers should finance this cost through debt, which they are reluctant to do because whilst the costs of change are real, the benefits are speculative: yield may go up, water use may go down, but you might just as well be wiped out by the market.
So the big challenge here is social: how to derisk the investment for the farmer, and who pays.
If I understand correctly the how part, is that to drain the fields and refill once cracks appear, that would mean more water needed. For Bali I am not sure what is the source of water, but for places where it is ground water, it leads to another problem.
One of the benefits of flooding is that it keeps soil pathogens in check - so you don't need to use crop rotation when you grow rice. Would be interesting to see what year 2 of this looks like and whether temporary flooding is enough to do this,.
Methane is produced from bacteria breaking down material in the soil without oxygen. With oxygen, different bacteria can gow there, which produce less methane and more carbon dioxide. I don't think the soil retains much either way.
...researchers .. have discovered how to dramatically reduce the greenhouse gas emissions output of rice fields. Initial indications are showing a 70% reduction.
So ballpark: Looks like we could reduce (strikethrough: greenhouse gas) methane emissions by 7 percent or so a year while growing more rice to boot from this one change if enough farms adopted it and the article indicates that halfway through the planting season, farmers who had been reluctant to try it spontaneously changed to the new method simply because the crop yield was better:
Even when the pilot was halfway through, the crops were looking so healthy that a further 10 farmers in the village who weren’t part of the project chose to drain their land.
And I wondered what a 7 percent reduction in greenhouse gasses would do for climate change and found this opening paragraph:
Geneva, 26 November 2019 – On the eve of a year in which nations are due to strengthen their Paris climate pledges, a new UN Environment Programme (UNEP) report warns that unless global greenhouse gas emissions fall by 7.6 per cent each year between 2020 and 2030, the world will miss the opportunity to get on track towards the 1.5°C temperature goal of the Paris Agreement.
https://news.mongabay.com/2023/08/bali-rice-experiment-cuts-...