[HN Gopher] Building on soil in Big Sandy: Regenerative organic ...
___________________________________________________________________
Building on soil in Big Sandy: Regenerative organic farming in
rural Montana
Author : emilywolfe
Score : 72 points
Date : 2021-10-18 19:38 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (montanafreepress.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (montanafreepress.org)
| mceoin wrote:
| Slightly off topic, but where is the best place to get a decent
| feed of regenerative-ag, rewilding, reforestation, conservation,
| land trust, indigenous land-rights, creative-land-use news?
|
| (HN for the pragmatic eco-conscious futurists.)
|
| Great post by teh way
| emilywolfe wrote:
| Hey HN! This is Part 2 of my regenerative/organic agriculture
| series, Common Ground. You all had such an interesting, in-depth
| conversation about Part 1
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27809279), that I wanted to
| see what you think about the next installment. It's a combo of
| solutions journalism and a profile (always trying to break things
| over here), in which I explored the 40-year career of pioneering
| organic farmer and entrepreneur Bob Quinn, who also has a PhD in
| plant biochemistry.
|
| Quinn encounters a lot of failures, and I kept thinking how
| unlike a place like Silicon Valley, failure isn't necessarily
| celebrated in rural farming culture, where during the homestead
| era, failure might have meant death. Nonetheless, Quinn told me,
| he's seeing a potential sea change in food and farming:
|
| "I'm not pushing uphill quite as hard against so much tradition
| that says there's no reason to change anything. Thirty years ago,
| fewer people had already gone broke. Everything was really rosy
| with industrial ag."
| rmason wrote:
| While it's great this guy has the money to run his own research
| farm it's a bit unusual. In the Midwest where I live it's far
| more common for universities to do this task. Coupled with
| cooperative extension agents to spread adoption at a county
| level when they find something that works. Universities do
| basic science very well.
|
| When something's brand new like no-till was in the eighties and
| precision ag in the nineties farmers often get out ahead of the
| ag schools. No-till isn't exactly new but perhaps some of the
| Montana variations happen to be?
| dccoolgai wrote:
| Great reporting and great work! I'm really interested in some
| of the "less-cultivated" plants mentioned in the article (like
| Kernza). It seems so weird that of all the plants that exist,
| we grow like 10. Seems like there's a lot of room for that
| "fail-fast" mindset to locate new plants we could grow that
| suit a particular need (or are really delicious and we had no
| idea!).
| Causality1 wrote:
| So how much more effectively could you regeneratively farm
| without being chained to the limits of organic farming? Just as a
| baseline, crops engineered towards this end instead of toward
| pure profit would likely be much better at it than anything
| organic.
| hinkley wrote:
| Complex systems are bigger. If you were building a factory,
| you'd want the shortest supply chain you can manage because
| inventory is a liability. From the standpoint of avoiding the
| worst of climate change, you want the most complicated "supply
| chain" you can manage. This also works for nitrogen cycles as
| well. Nitrogen that spends time as protein in insects or
| microbes is better than metabolizing back into the air.
|
| Petrochemical agriculture is not very sophisticated. It can
| solve simple problems with few moving parts. Genetic
| engineering has started to ask more complex questions but at
| the end of the day we are still just getting past surface
| concerns.
|
| Where science and technology might help is with telemetry, but
| only if everyone prints out Goodhart's Law and puts it over the
| door, on the fridge, the microwave, the coffee machine, etc.
|
| Data filtration is another thing. We think if invasiveness as a
| sort of score for a plant, but that's an average of overall
| behavior. They are both harder and easier to deal with than we
| make it sound. Each plant is vulnerable during some part of its
| lifecycle, and or in certain biomes. It's much easier to "take
| them out" during this window. But they're patient. If you miss
| the window then you have a bigger problem next year. As a human
| my ability to juggle all of these concerns is somewhat limited,
| and a little detection and scheduling would go a long way
| toward helping me keep these problems small.
| hinkley wrote:
| To the petrochemical comment: for example look at Paul
| Stamets. Among the many irons he has in the fire, he knows
| that certain fungal pathogen species have competitors that
| are in some cases benign. But fungicides are broad spectrum.
| They kill off many fungi that would be no problem (and the
| occasional human liver). The worst weeds and the worst
| pathogens can often spread faster than their competitors.
| Only by maintaining a complex ecosystem can you achieve an
| armistice.
| colechristensen wrote:
| While I skimmed, I didn't see anything about "regenerative"
| besides a casual mention of cover crops which you wouldn't do
| anything in particular to already (no pesticides or fertilizer
| or genetic engineering). The other bit was about being very
| local about picking where and how to grow nontraditional crops
| (think farmers market faire) in difficult locations that would
| otherwise grow nothing.
|
| Transgenic watermelons aren't a thing and the markets for these
| like organic.
|
| Basically a bunch of progressive kinds of people are moving to
| Montana to grow fancy food and like to get pieces written to
| show off their virtue. They're not entirely wrong but also...
| eh it's all a little overdone.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-10-18 23:00 UTC)