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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
[+] [-] estsauver|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mabbo|5 years ago|reply
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.)
[+] [-] hinkley|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] rch|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] shavingspiders|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zimbatm|5 years ago|reply
[1]: https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/arab...
[+] [-] searine|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] marcinzm|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] refurb|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] zimbatm|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kickout|5 years ago|reply
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).
https://thinkingagriculture.io/incentivizing-regenerative-ag...
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
[+] [-] VBprogrammer|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sudoaza|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kickout|5 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] cmrdporcupine|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] spiderfarmer|5 years ago|reply
Solve this problem and you can really change the system.
[+] [-] sudoaza|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JackPoach|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mcjiggerlog|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mikey_p|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jnmandal|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] srehnborg|5 years ago|reply
They have shown conventional soil will return to normal after 1 growing season, which is pretty wild.
They even reimburse farmers that make the switch, but don't see the same yields.
[+] [-] kickout|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chromatin|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] exfalso|5 years ago|reply
This is one article I read a while back: https://ourworldindata.org/is-organic-agriculture-better-for...
Can someone point to more good literature on this topic?
[+] [-] Darwingirl11|5 years ago|reply
https://savory.global/
[+] [-] jl2718|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stevehawk|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] motohagiography|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fouc|5 years ago|reply
Also getting in grazing animals does a great job of prepping land for new growth.
[+] [-] docPangloss|5 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] kleton|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jelliclesfarm|5 years ago|reply
We have to grow good soil and eliminate manual and low paying jobs in Ag. Protect water sheds. Environment and labour...that should be the priority.
And we need to stop making food a speculative game.
[+] [-] avernon|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] carapace|5 years ago|reply
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.)
https://www.transitionculture.org/2011/09/05/spin-farming-ba...
Quitting Your Job To Farm on a Quarter Acre In Your Backyard? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJx1SPClg6A
Backyard Farming: 2 Year Market Garden Update of Nature's Always Right Farms https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zpn1oGkQrrg
Profitable Farming and Designing for Farm Success by JEAN-MARTIN FORTIER https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92GDHGPSmeI https://www.themarketgardener.com/
Neversink Farm in NY grosses $350,000 on farming 1.5 acres (area in production). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5IE6lYKXRw
- 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:
https://tobyhemenway.com/videos/how-permaculture-can-save-hu...
https://tobyhemenway.com/videos/redesigning-civilization-wit...
There's a very lively and civil forum at https://permies.com/forums
For Syntropic agriculture: https://agendagotsch.com/en/what-is-syntropic-farming/
(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:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEFpzAuyFlLzshQR4_dkCsQ
- 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:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growing_Power
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vs7BG4lH3m4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jV9CCxdkOng
They used an integrated greenhouse/aquaculture/compost system to produce massive amounts of food right through Milwaukee winters.
- Then there is the whole field (no pun intended) of regenerative agriculture, e.g.:
"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 and "Symphony Of The Soil" Official Trailer - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXRNF_1X2fU
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.)
[+] [-] poma88|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] doodlebugging|5 years ago|reply
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.
[0] https://richsoil.com/hugelkultur/ - General introduction to Hugelkultur and the construction of the mounds
[1] https://gardeningmentor.com/keyhole-garden/ - Good introduction to Keyhole gardens and their construction
[+] [-] brodouevencode|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mc_|5 years ago|reply
Greg Judy and Gabe Brown being some bigger names but Chris from Sylvanaqua Farms is a good Black/Indigenous voice to start listening too.
[+] [-] rudolph9|5 years ago|reply
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!
[+] [-] zwieback|5 years ago|reply