from Hacker News

No-till no-herbicide farming system in trial since 1981

by sudoaza on 10/19/20, 12:08 PM with 281 comments

• by estsauver on 10/19/20, 1:01 PM

  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.

• by mabbo on 10/19/20, 2:35 PM

  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.)

• by zimbatm on 10/19/20, 1:33 PM

  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.

  [1]: https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/arab...

• by zimbatm on 10/19/20, 12:47 PM

  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.

• by kickout on 10/19/20, 12:53 PM

  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

• by JackPoach on 10/19/20, 2:36 PM

  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.

• by srehnborg on 10/19/20, 2:09 PM

  Farmers Footprint is also worth checking out. They have a similar mission. - https://farmersfootprint.us/

  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.

• by chromatin on 10/19/20, 1:10 PM

  Wow! Thanks for posting this link.

  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.

• by exfalso on 10/19/20, 3:07 PM

  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.

  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?

• by Darwingirl11 on 10/20/20, 3:39 PM

  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.

  https://savory.global/

• by jl2718 on 10/19/20, 1:08 PM

  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.

• by motohagiography on 10/19/20, 1:20 PM

  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.

• by docPangloss on 10/19/20, 2:05 PM

  There's a variation of Rodale's approach that is used in gardens. I just shared it on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24826386

  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).

• by kleton on 10/19/20, 3:58 PM

  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.

• by jelliclesfarm on 10/20/20, 1:20 AM

  We don’t have to worry about increasing food production or calories. If anything we need to grow less so we can get a handle on food wastage.

  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.

• by avernon on 10/19/20, 4:52 PM

  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.

• by carapace on 10/19/20, 3:38 PM

  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.)

  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.)

• by brodouevencode on 10/19/20, 5:36 PM

  Surprised no one has mentioned Joel Salatin: https://www.peakprosperity.com/joel-salatin-we-are-the-solut...

• by rudolph9 on 10/20/20, 1:07 AM

  Another org doing research in this area is https://landinstitute.org/

  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!

• by zwieback on 10/19/20, 2:47 PM

  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.

• by jchook on 10/19/20, 6:01 PM

  > We have found that organic no-till practices year after year do not yield optimal results, so our organic systems utilize reduced tillage and the ground is plowed only in alternating years.

  So.. by no-till they mean occasional till?

  My naive thought on no-till is that, in addition to reducing erosion, the soil gains a poorly understood yet very beneficial network of information and nutrient sharing that builds over time (eg mycelium). Tilling destroys that. Also I read it works best with diverse, cooperative planting instead of mono-crop factory farming.

• by roboben on 10/19/20, 2:59 PM

  I wouldn’t be concerned about scale. If we convert every lawn to farm land, we would get three times the amount of current farm land on top. Say we replace it completely, we could still farm 3 times less efficient and would have the same amount of yield.

  https://geog.ucsb.edu/the-lawn-is-the-largest-irrigated-crop...

• by clarkmoody on 10/19/20, 3:44 PM

  This talk introduced me to the no-till, soil health farming paradigm: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yPjoh9YJMk

  TL;DR: focus on soil health and diversify your crops. His results are stunning.

• by aurizon on 10/19/20, 2:52 PM

  How to they handle grasshoppers in swarm? With a swarm of a few million on the move they can graze 12 acres to stubble in an hour. Caterpillars can also do great harm. There are natural effective insecticides, like natural pyrethrins or nicotines - do they work well enough?

  Weeds? There are very few natural weed killers - hank pick? Robot machine weed picking is getting better and better.

• by dehrmann on 10/19/20, 4:59 PM

  > Organic Manure

  I doubt that this scales. There just isn't enough manure (organic or not) to build soil.

• by swalsh on 10/19/20, 12:38 PM

  Sorry if I missed something while reading this. Does this system reduce the dependency on added Nitrogen (given the luming Nitrogen crisis coming in the future if current rates persist)?

• by hosh on 10/20/20, 8:06 AM

  I’d love to see some data on organic no-till + biochar, as well as effects of fungi inoculations appropriate for annual crops.

• by Aerroon on 10/19/20, 1:16 PM

  How much (additional) human labor does this require? Farm work tends to be difficult and on the dangerous side.

• by 0000011111 on 10/19/20, 7:45 PM

  Yes. In short this is environmentally friendly and does not scale globally.