This article mentions that regenerative agriculture as the solution. There is a lot of concern now about the potential for a global food shortage at the end of this year because of rising fertilizer prices (leading to less planting). Regenerative agriculture can help solve this as well by focusing on restoring the biome of the soil, thereby harnessing nitrogen from the air and minerals from the soil.
Regenerative agriculture practices can allow us to make farming sustainable without cutting down production. In fact, we can actually increase production — or at least avoid loss of production due to soil depletion.
I think that the biggest problem with agriculture today is that it's utterly unsustainable. It is ran on fossil fuels and we need to mine minerals for the fertilizers. But still the most worrying issue is that the modern farming is consuming topsoil and we will run out of it in 60 years if we don't change our methods [1].
There are interesting things going on in regenerative agriculture scene where the main idea is to produce new topsoil and through that make farming sustainable. Here is a nice lecture by Richard Perkins - who is one of the most famous regenartive agriculture advocate - explaining the principles of it in a lecture he kept in a food hackaton. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Knn7ZH4Tiw
Regenerative agriculture is another means with which to restore the land without pesticides or herbicides, with the additional benefit of sequestering nitrogen.
At least the soil issues can be fixed through regenerative practices, which also help mitigate climate change to some extent. Farmers should receive funding to safely transition to better practices.
The primary idea behind regenerative agriculture is that manure helps soil. But plants regenerate soil too. Legumes for example fix nitrogen in the soil.
A lot of smart people and savvy farmers are working on regenerative agriculture. Monoculture crops turn the living soil into dirt, and there are simple, cheap practices to bring it back.
Regenerative farming builds soil, capturing carbon, improving water retention. It costs a bit more than conventional farming, in the short-medium term.
Regenerative farming won't help immediately, but it does cut way down on the need for chemicals input while capturing massive amounts of carbon into the soil and growing livestock in the same areas.
It’s a bit of a ramble, but to give you the oeuvre: the problem is that our fruits, vegetables and legumes are not as nutritious today as they were decades ago. The hypothesis motivating regenerative agriculture, is that the explanation for this fact is that we treat soil as a lifeless medium for growing crops, rather than as an organic contributor to a natural ecosystem.
Relevant to this thread, Animals are a core component of a natural ecosystem. This includes grazers, insects and predators. Healthy soil is living soil, full of bacteria that literally digest their environment into free nutrients for a crop to draw from. If we aim to fuel human civilization from the earth, there’s no free lunch — an equal amount of nutrients have to be returned to the earth, and animal husbandry (and consumption) are the historical solutions to this problem.
Regenerative agriculture is agriculture that works in harmony with a living soil and its ecosystem. It means consuming more perennials than annuals, growing polycultures (e.g. the three sisters) instead of monocultures, using crop rotation to let soil lay fallow while it’s used to service the needs of animals.
It’s basically the application of permaculture principles to agronomy.
Other people in this thread have fixated on the climate aspect, and while this is certainly one big motivation for regenerative farming, IMO an equally large one is health — we are fundamentally not as healthy today as our grandparents were at the same age (in terms of cancer incidence, fertility issues, chronic inflammation, diabetes, etc.), and the food chain is an obvious place to scrutinize.
In theory, could you synthesize the perfect cocktail of organic molecules to fertilize soil for healthy crops?
Perhaps, but consider this: would it be less expensive and carry fewer negative externalities than maintaining a herd of animals that have literally co-evolved with these crops for millennia? Especially when you account for the ancillary benefits cattle husbandry (seasonal access to dairy, meat and leather as the herd is culled, etc.)?
It doesn't work this way. Healthy fields require regular, extended downtimes to regenerate. You can't "fix" a depleted soil, this is something that nature must do alone.
The only fix is to legally mandate (or incentivize by subsidies) that soil gets to regenerate. The problem is that this will reduce the amount of usable agrarian fields by a massive amount and so prices will rise - which governments want to avoid like the plague. What they ignore: if we continue down that path the soil is fucked beyond repair in decades...
Organic and regenerative are not necessarily the same thing. Organic can still rely on biocides and fertilizer input. Regenerative practices treat the farm, including the soil, as an ecosystem. Killing any part of the ecosystem by applying biocides of any type is antithetical to the practice. Once the ecosystem has been built there is enough biodiversity that pests problems are minimal.
I disagree with you that regenerative farming can't feed the world. Yields are as good or better than conventional farms. Fortunately, regenerative farming is more profitable so we are going to see a shift to regenerative regardless of the naysayers.
What the univs around here have been teaching have killed soils and the ecosystem to near collapse levels :/ There's a need for those who can afford to be patient for 4-5 years to try regenerative methods. And many farms have gotten there, esp given the tropical climate and monsoons that we have.
Regenerative farming deserves a mention here. Soil is indeed important and industrial scale farming has a negative impact on it because a lot of our modern farming practices are sacrificing soil for short term gains.
Regenerative farming restores soil as a side effect of farming more efficiently and ultimately can restore vast amounts of land with a relatively low amount of effort. There have been quite a few projects, some of which are quite large scale demonstrating this can be done. There's a bit of controversy around some of the claims but overall, there are some nice green bits of land that used to be basically desert. Whatever was done to make that so, we need more of it.
We have degraded 1/3 of the top soil in the last 150 years. At the current rate, we won't be able to grow food in 60 years. This is a significant threat to our food production capabilities as a planet, and has severe 2nd, 3rd degree repercussions as well.
At the moment, agroforestry and syntropic farming are the only large scale solutions, but they need mass adoption.
It isn’t as if regenerative agriculture is not putting nutrients back in the soil either. They are, usually in the form of compost or animal manure.
However, soil fertility is not just about the chemical makeup of the soil. There are soil bacteria and mycellium that symbiotically live at the roots to help plants make use of those nutrients. Root systems of plants grow together, and plants biochemically communicate with each other. Roots also need oxygen, so aerated soil matters. Plants that die back in the soil leave their roots in place, slowly decomposing and releasing other nutrients for use of other plants, and other organisms such as earthworms. Those same roots — both larger tap roots, and fine branches of the root system, changes the absorptive qualities of the soil so that it can hold water and release them.
In other words, healthy, fertile soil is very much alive, and helps store and regulate water and nutrients for the plants that live and die on the soil.
Healthy, fertile soil can support life directly in a way in a much tighter feedback loop. Using amendments requires more intervening steps. If the top soil gets eroded away, that top soil has to get imported, creating a longer supply chain. The longer the supply chain, the more fragile it becomes. It becomes less adaptive, more sensitive to volatility.
Another is that the optimization toward short term yield is often at the cost of long-term fertility. We build these fragile systems that are optimized for scale and yield as if that fertility will not run out. If the soil is depleted somewhere, importing soil amendments, or even top soil, has to come from somewhere. Even if the supply chain is not cut, at some point, the resources to maintain that longer supply chain will run out.
This setup also conditions people into a situation where they now have to rely on currency to supply basic needs. That, in and of itself, drives the growing wealth inequality of today.
To address that wealth inequality, we are now seriously considering universal basic income. But if you looked at universal basic income as just one type of energy and nutrient flow, it is ridiculous that an easier method for obtaining those basic needs can be had by allowing each household, or neighborhood to supply some of those needs locally.
There is a small town in Canada where the community got together to convert one of their public spaces into a food forest. Volunteers came in to dig and plant. Local businesses stepped up to provide transportation to bring in the compost, the perennials, shrubs, and trees. The food forest was designed in a way so that the natural rainfalls can sustain the growth. The perennials all create a long-term supply of food. Once the initial capital was invested, there is little ongoing maintenance.
People in the community can then go into food forest and get free food. There are probably some education on identifying what is edible (and there are plenty of it). Food grows on trees and on the land. A food forest doesn’t require currency to feed people, and as such, is resilient to a deflationary contraction of the economy.
And that is just one regenerative system. Individuals who have access to multiple, local, regenerative food systems have a greater food security than those that do not.
And that is just food, one out of a handful of the foundational survival needs. There is also shelter, warmth, clothing, water.
Permaculture design looks at the whole system, such that all of the basic needs can be partially, if not wholly, met with regenerative systems. A individual within a community that has access to multiple regenerative processes that can meet all of the basic needs do not require universal basic income. When something like the pandemic happens, they are in a far better place than individuals who do not have access to any regenerative processes.
Such an individual can build the higher needs (I am referring to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs) on a foundation of resilient and regenerative processes. With such a solid foundation of abundance, there is less reason to hold others in contempt. Or to cast out and alienate another group out of fear and anxiety over survival needs.
That fertility of the land extends into creativity of the people. The permaculturists I encounter tend to generate many new ideas. There is a liveliness and exuberance that is a contrast to the general malaise and loneliness of many urban and rural residents.
It isn’t as if building this is not for free either. This does require a significant shift in the mindset, in how one views and experiences the world. There is hard work required. Your hands get dirty. But I would say, it is also more fulfilling — not just nourishing the body, but also more intangible needs for people to have meaningful and purposeful lives.
Not much we can do about land use. Regenerative agriculture practices use less water and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Im not sure about long term but switching from traditional to regenerative practices is carbon negative as soil organic matter and soil life is built up.
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