There is so little organic matter in the topsoil due to modern farming practices and it gets worse every year. The result is soil that doesn't retain water, it just runs off. This means that irrigation has to be more and more frequent, and it means that fertilizer runs off (causing algal blooms etc) more than it percolates into the soil
I'm not sure why the general tone of HN seems to be that modern farming isn't changing at all.
Erosion has been on everyone's radar for decades. We went from plow -> till -> low till -> no till. Believe me, the folks who do this talk about plowing practices and cover crops. They also discuss GMO crops and the crazy legal restrictions around seed that come with it.
> Brown earth has a deep top layer where most of the nutrients are and biological activities take place. At around 20 centimetres deep
Fun fact, where I grew up there is over 10 feet of black dirt before you hit bedrock. A lot of the Midwestern US is like that. Even with all that runway those guys _still_ discuss erosion.
> I'm not sure why the general tone of HN seems to be that modern farming isn't changing at all.
Indeed. Perhaps somewhere out there is a parallel forum filled with farmers opining about computer programming, with equally inane remarks like "Have those programmers ever thought about making languages that translate into machine code instead of writing everything out as ones and zeros?"
Most of those forums (which I have visited) are in person; they’re almost always complaining about the proprietary locked down code. Frankly, farmers are a more libertarian bunch than programmers.
Farmers are well aware of water and the sustainablity of its sources. It just so happens that the equilibrium point they aim for is sustainability for them, not them & everybody else that happens to live downstream
The rate of depletion of large aquifers suggests that farmers don't care very much about sustainability of their water source. I think price is pretty much the only signal that farmers can afford to care about.
Depends where you live, but farmers around me are always monitoring everything — rainfall, water retention in the soil, aquifer levels, river and creek levels, etc.
That said, you’re right, they’re running a business. What they tend to do is use the smallest amount of water to produce good yields.
The only real thing a farmer can control are what they plant, when they water, when they fertilize and what they harvest (plus some maintenance, like weeding, but water isn’t impacted).
What farmers tend to do is water when necessary (between rain periods). They’ll also select different plants to grow based on price and watering schedule. That said; I’ve also seen farmers try to improve water retention (through tilling in cover crops and / or adding organic material). They’ve also built dams, etc to capture rain water and reduce erosion.
As far as I can tell, farmers do indeed try to conserve and utilize what they can. At the same time, water is being subsided by government and / or regulated. So places like California have a weird things like building farms in the desert. If the water prices were more free and people still build farms, I don’t see an issue frankly. They’re just using every drop before it gets to the sea. As the water depletes (ie too many farms) I imagine farmers will go elsewhere or change crops to become more efficient.
To be honest, I don’t see water management being too much of an issue at the moment. Plants have become increasingly drought resistant and we have the ability to breed and genetically modify them more so.
What they don't seem to be talking about is learning from indigenous farming communities who use things like diversity in crops and rotation to keep soil quality high. These problems were solved decades ago, just not by the industrial farming community
It's like everyone who's ever watched a YouTube video about planting a 3 sisters garden has an opinion for the people actually staking their livelihood on this now.
It is more about that fact that people talking about sustainable food production do not share many goals with commodity farmers exchanging corn and soybeans for as much cash as possible.
At least farmers have the humility to not go on the internet and smear you based on their opinion of your use of a document database over a relational database.
"I've never farmed in my life, but I'm pretty sure I know more than the guy who has been doing it for decades and whose entire livelihood is based on it."
Pretending indigenous communities “solved” this is a farce. If we switched to their methods 90% of the population would need to die because they don’t scale.
Not a good look to strawman things like this when you have sibling comments elsewhere in this thread saying the discussion needs more nuance.
I actually did napkin math awhile back comparing a particular 16th century indigenous agricultural yields with 20th century American agriculture [0]. The indigenous system came out favorably until the second half of the 20th century despite the limitations of hand tools and natural fertilizer. There's still a gap between that and current yields, but I think it's fair to point out that most advocates of these systems are actually arguing for a synthesis with modern technologies that allow them to scale rather than a complete rejection of modernity.
It’s not a strawman and there isn’t much nuance to what you yourself said. It’s not even close to being adequate.
Claiming that people are arguing for “synthesis” is just a weasel word escape route. Indigenous farming is completely inadequate and the parts that are useful have already been incorporated into modern farming.
What is it you think is still on the table for this “synthesis”?
Are you familiar with how traditional agricultural systems tend to work? They're vastly different than modern industrial agriculture in my personal experience. You won't find average farms in Central Valley or the midwest doing intercropping (especially anything besides strip intercropping), hyperlocal heirloom varieties, terracing, and complex crop rotations.
Tractors don't like intercropping or terraces, complex rotations are logistically difficult and expensive without a meaningful market to back them. Distributors also don't want your optimized hyperlocal varietals nor do farmers want to manage seed production, so most people buy commercial varieties.
You don't need to explain why these things are true because I already get it. It's beside the point here.
> Are you familiar with how traditional agricultural systems tend to work?
Yes, they produced terrible yields that would starve the current population.
There is a reason farmers’ markets are for the upper middle class. Anything that isn’t done at scale can’t feed 8 billion people. If it can’t be done with combines/tractors/etc, it’s fucking useless.
Without experience, land, and modern industrial farming techniques? No, "everybody" would not start subsistence farming. There would be massive famines, billions would starve and die.
But if you ignore the labour demands per mouth fed, the education needed, the amount of land to feed current western population to sustainable replacement level, the requirement to maintain advanced defence systems to prevent land being taken or otherwise destroyed, the issues with the global climate affecting whatever you do in this agrarian society, could it be done?
Like the rest of industrial age development, farm automation has historically been built around treating everything uniformly (even distribution of seeds bred for easy harvest in evenly spaced rows evenly fertilizied with no rocks etc etc). Moving away from that introduces all kinds of complexity, mechanical problems, data problems, etc, which are not easy to solve even when you have historical existence proofs of potentially better ways to do things. It's happening though.
What I'm getting at is things like applying fertilizer based on estimated need from imaging data, using robots with lasers to kill weeds, mechanized intercropping, etc. Not something consumers will necessarily see any direct impact from but that improve the quality and economics of production.
A historical existence proof of a system or technology working has essentially nothing to do with whether it's being practiced in industry today, and whether it's being practiced today has very little to do with the product or pricing you see when you for example stop by KFC to eat a piece of chicken that's largely created out of corn, soy, and methane. That's the beauty of capitalism and commodity markets, John Deere can roll out technology for say computer-controlled planting that improves efficiency and the dividends get spread across the value chain without everyone having to know about it or change what they're doing.
We do. Perhaps you may not recognize our lingo. For example, around here we humorously refer to wheat as 'poverty grass' because there is no money in growing it but recognize it as a necessity to keep in the rotation for the ecological health benefits it provides.
Crop rotation seems to be pretty widespread. I remember as a kid learning about it and knowing I’d see different crops each year to help the soil for future harvests.
Crop diversity is great. And you also need lots of organic matter to go on top of the soil: to build life in the soil. that's much better than trying to duct tape the matter with fertilizer.
Crop rotation has been standard practice my entire life. One of the many kickers though is soybeans are the fallback crop for really wet springs. Many crops need to be planted by a certain date or the growing season will be too short. Soybeans can "make up for lost time", so to speak. If your first planting gets flooded, or if it's too wet to get any crop in, you can wait until it's dry and toss in some soy to recoup some of the cost. Thing is soybeans use a lot of nitrogen.
Many years ago one of my neighbours tried not rotating is crops. It worked out okay the first couple of years, but it wasn't long before his yields nosedived and within the five years he was bankrupt.
My family's been farming corn on corn for 20+ years. Started strip-tilling in the 80's High residue fields help trap as much moisture as we can with limited irrigation capacity. Farmers have no choice but to take care of their soils to remain viable. And more than viable, be profitable as there are many people who depend on them both for their livelihoods as well as an ever demanding population with mouths to feed.
It’s strange that the article you linked doesn’t mention no-till farming. Farmers replace the plows on their tractors (which turn over the soil) with knives that have fertilizer injectors on the tips. Rather than plow, then spray fertilizer on to the surface, they inject fertilizer into the ground. After a few years, earthworms reestablish themselves and naturally aerate the soil.
This can be combined with other (well established, commercially available) precision agriculture techniques to minimize irrigation and fertilizer waste.
The big problem is the up front cost of replacing tractor implements, and training labor.
Anyway, this is much easier than agroforestry, building glass hydroponics towers, etc.
Thanks I was looking for a youtube video that I couldn't find so I grabbed the first article I saw that explained that problem well. As for solutions, you are right no-till is a big one (the main one?) and is worth reading about elsewhere
CSAs where I live are a luxury good for a few people to feel better about themselves. You pay in much more than you get back (compared to a grocery store), and what you get is geared towards variety to make it more appealing. As such, you get enough of any particular veg for one or two meals, at a cost that is wildly expensive for most people. I tried one summer, and it was cute but replaced approximately 0% of our grocery bill.
Just to throw out some numbers, I pay $27/box for my fruit n' veg mix, which I could mostly replicate for maybe $15-20 at the grocery store. But the freshness can't be beat, and I think it's fun to see what I can do with whatever shows up. It's definitely not replacing my entire grocery bill, of course, but I do think it is worth it.
That' not bad. Where I am for $45, you get a big bad of lettuce, a couple of potatoes and an onion. Last years was so disappointed that we didn't renew. Ten years ago the same CSA was $600 for the season, 4 months, and it was a good sized bag with a pretty nice selection of produce. Granted I think every bag included some beets but by the middle of the season I really liked beets so it was a plus. Now it jut seems to be a better deal to go to the farmers market and get whatever looks good.
I guess it depends on your goals. It will never be as affordable as the grocery store as the economies of scale aren't there. The idea is to provide reliable revenue to a local farm in exchange for high quality produce produced in a sustainable way. It doesn't make me feel particularly "better about myself" to connect with the family that provides us this service, but I do like their mission, and I want them to be successful, so in my case it's worth it. Also, I would imagine pricing varies wildly from one region to the next, so we may be comparing apples to oranges (or swiss chard for that matter).
This sounds like it's begging for an article in 20 years about "Why we never should have used superabsorbent polymers in agriculture".
Won't these things get broken apart after years of working the ground? Won't they potentially contaminate other areas by traveling downstream or being blown by the wind?
Lots of places to read more about this issue and here's a start: https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/soil-degradation.html