In the US, regenerative farming practices require unlearning past advice

Posted by PaulHoule 10/25/2024

In the US, regenerative farming practices require unlearning past advice(investigatemidwest.org)

296 points | 162 commentspage 2

perihelion_zero 10/27/2024|

Regenerative farmers posting on hacker news gives me hope for humanity. Thanks.

Apparently anyone in US/Canada can just ask for a farm and practically get one at this point. Either via USDA / private loans or indie farmers giving you great lease-to-own terms because you don't look like a corporate billionaire. Urban rent is so darn expensive now that some of y'all can probably get rich just by farm squatting and having a good time.

(Seriously thinking about solo farming in real life now. Not that it would really be solo because of all the animals.)

fred_is_fred 10/27/2024|

The idea that you can just get a farm for free by walking in and asking for one is pure fantasy. Agricultural land is worth money and a good amount of money in most cases.

micromacrofoot 10/26/2024||

natives knew of some of the best farming practices hundreds of years ago and european settlers while initially relying on them eventually disregarded them as savages

poochkoishi728 10/26/2024||

A 6mb mp3 downloads automatically when visited, on desktop at least, which seems pretty wasteful.

raybb 10/26/2024||

Might want to send that feedback to https://investigatemidwest.org/contact-us/

Especially not nice if it happens on mobile connections.

lagniappe 10/26/2024||

Change the extension to .js, boom problem solved

akira2501 10/25/2024||

> Before the Civil War, over half of the country’s residents were farmers, Jolliff said, and they worked with small parcels of land in diversified operations. The modern regenerative agriculture movement encourages that same type of farm diversification.

Yea, and before the civil war, we didn't have gasoline engines. You are never going to see a broad return to rural farming life ever again.

BobbyTables2 10/25/2024||

We HOPE we never see a return to rural farming life…

sethammons 10/26/2024|||

I hope we do, but modernified. You grow most of your staples and you reduce your reliance on the system, acting as a true UBI because you can take care of your family. Work becomes increasingly optional for those who seek more than what modern abundance self gardening could achieve. A few hours of daily work and all the time waisters of modern tech. Just need enough money to pay property taxes.

cryptonector 10/26/2024|||

the ghost of Pol Pot has joined the chat

adrianN 10/26/2024|||

I don't think we'll get every other person to choose farming as a career again.

thiuho798928u 10/26/2024|||

You realize, once Petroleum runs out this century, humanity is completely screwed right ?

Forget transportation/energy, our economy is chemically hooked on to it like a coke-addict.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VOMWzjrRiBg

If the transition doesn't happen, we're looking at it dropping to 1-5% of its size now.

I hope we do this before we take out the rest of the earth with our cancerous global-scale genocide of everything - animals, plants, cultures, 'different' humans, languages and cultures.

akira2501 10/26/2024|||

> once Petroleum runs out this century

Weird. I had that on my calendar for _last_ century. I wonder what happened?

pfdietz 10/26/2024||||

Agriculture uses only a bit over 1% of US primary energy demand. We use more energy cooking food than we do growing it. And that's with the large inefficiency of growing feed crops for livestock.

Replacing fossil fuel use in agriculture is a minor problem compared to replacing it in the economy as a whole.

cryptonector 10/26/2024||||

The U.S. has centuries' worth of proven natural gas reserves. If we ran out of oil (that's not happening anytime soon) we could use natural gas for transportation just fine. Much of the world already uses natural gas for transportation. We could then save the remaining oil for plastics.

Der_Einzige 10/26/2024||||

Love a good opportunity to shill a post from my favorite subreddit of all time!

https://preview.redd.it/every-time-v0-s3c958v8vylc1.jpeg?aut...

Kstarek 10/26/2024|||

we have so much oil and natural gas, we're going to transition off of petroleum before we run out

mythrwy 10/26/2024||

And coal. Massive amounts of coal which could be gassified in a pinch if there were nothing else.

fuzztester 10/26/2024||

[flagged]

kaonwarb 10/25/2024|

I'm happy to support farmers who want to turn to regenerative methods, but I can't see them as a solution for feeding today's world. As the article itself notes:

> U.S. agriculture production tripled in the latter half of the 20th century, due in part to chemical inputs.

And, yes:

> But that came with an environmental cost — soil degradation, water quality issues and a loss of biodiversity.

I'm not downplaying those costs, and am happy to see a range of approaches. But this is not a serious proposal for feeding folks at scale.

Arn_Thor 10/26/2024||

Doing regenerative farming does not mean abandoning half a century of knowledge and technological progress. Rather, it is using all we now know and know how to do to heal the land and maximizing output. In a lot of cases yes, the output may be smaller of some crops, but the net total calories extracted might not be that different.

Not to mention, if your land is all but barren and it requires fertilizers to grow, when prices spike or supply disappears and the farmer can’t afford to plant…the output is zero.

bluGill 10/26/2024|||

It is also ignoring what conventional ag has figured out. Most of the soil loss was pre WWII and conventional ag has figured out how to grow more soil (about 1mm per year in the best case and typically slower)

cryptonector 10/26/2024||

The soil loss during the great depression was not due so much to bad farming practices (though tilling is harmful) but to massive farming bankruptcies following the last harvest, so much land was left unseeded -- that is, with no cover crops of any kind. The wind did the rest.

legacynl 10/26/2024||

That's a very simplistic view. Isn't that exactly the same as saying "guns don't kill people, bullets do"?

It's the bad farming practices that created the situation where the soil was vulnerable.

We're not talking about blame, but rather about determining the direct causes.

cryptonector 10/26/2024||

It's not simplistic because something could have been done (plant cover crops) but nothing was done. The textbooks I had claimed it was about monocultures and such, but the real issue was tilling, and we still till the soil today. So no, it's not a simplistic view.

bluGill 10/26/2024||

The type of plow used then is almost never used today. they used to turn the soil over butting top soil (aerobic stuff) under lower layers (anerobit stuff). Now they break up compaction but don't turn the soil over.

cryptonector 10/26/2024||

Inter-seeding different crops is better still.

throawayonthe 10/26/2024||

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