I was always confused by this as well. Then I spoke to a person working in agriculture, apparently chemical fertilizers are cheap enough to make crop rotation redundant.
As a layman I assumed that was the case. But I understand the bigger issue now is that both soil and crop nutrients are dropping in farms due to soil depletion[0].
Yeah. And not only that, the "regenerative agriculture" mentioned in the article isn't just about sustainable practices, where we put back into the soilwhat we take out. Regenerative practices includes practices where soil fertility is built up year after year as a result of the agricultural practices. In other words, you can take a depleted land and bring it back up into productive land, and potentially, become more productive than non-regenerative practices.
You can grow more than a single plant together, and depending on the combination, they can synergize in a way that helps both of them grow. Some of that is due to pest management (where one plant species deters pests that raid the other). Some add nutrients (nitrogen fixers and other dynamic accumulators). Some can grow at different canopy layers (such as growing ground cover to help retain moisture while taller plants are used as trellises for vining plants).
Some plants have deep tap roots that break up compacted soil and help draw out nutrients to make them bioavailable. Many of them are pioneer plants and are considered weeds or considered invasive.
Much of big Ag is an effort to shortcut all this. Use a chisel plow to break up compacted soil. Add ammonia. Use earth movers to create more flat land with useful soils. Etc.
The advantages are clear: you can decide when to do these things, and do them on a short schedule. Its hard to argue waiting 5 years for some remediation project to maybe work, when I have a chisel plow right over there in the shed.
Yeah. Big Ag is not incentivized to be sustainable, let alone be regenerative. Big Ag is certainly not resilient. Its very reward system (like modern commerce in general) is based on the extraction of resources (whether that be in the earth, or people resources), and then controlling access to them. Overharvesting always happen, because we're culturally conditioned to define wealth and status in terms of how much one has hoarded more than other people.
I think the main path out of this is to have decentralized food systems, and this is where regenerative and resilient design patterns really shine. I think it starts with a shift in the mindset, where instead of seeing wealth as coming from extraction and hoarding, to seeing wealth in terms of being stewards of regenerative processes.
We have pseudo-regenerative processes in the financial sector with compounding interest, but you can't directly eat money. I can eat the stuff from my backyard.
The beautiful thing about participating in building a decentralized food system is that I don't have to convince you, or anyone else on HN to affect collective action. I can start doing these things in my home, and trade things with other like-minded people. I can offer up the excess abundance to my friends, family, and neighbors. Some of them may want to take up the practices themselves.
Just to be clear, I used shortcuts too. I am using raised beds and importing compost and manure (buying them from big box stores). But I'm also taking the time to plant edible perennials. I only found out later, there are many ways to get even quicker turn around time -- sprouts, fast growing annuals, succession planting. I'm learning. Next year's growing season will incorporate more.
>Yeah. Big Ag is not incentivized to be sustainable, let alone be regenerative.
Can you expand on this point some? I'm trying to understand but I don't really see the problem. Whether the nutrition comes from the soil or the fertilizer doesn't really seem that important. I get what other posters have said about vegetables in the past being more nutritious but it's not clear to me that this matters terribly much compared to the accessibility gains from produce being cheaper and still nutritious (ableit less so).
Ammonia created from fossil fuels accounts for 2% of carbon emmisions, but it seems likely that ammonia created from air and water with renewable energy will replace it in the future. Theres some pilot plants in existance.
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.
I love "decentralization" as much as the next person on HN, but one the problem is not pricing in the externalities, I am not sure centralization is the problem.
A few bleeding hearts can run a parallel economy for good X with an alternate value function, but this doesn't really scale in and of itself.
Now, if someone combines alt grid / alt farms with lobbying for punitive tax in the smallest surrounding jurisdiction that can enforce it, perhaps that might work.
While they can pump in nitrogen and phosphorus, they can get away with trashing the soil as much as they want. But if phosphorus becomes scarce they'll be suddenly left with ruined soil and no cost-effective work-around.
> we're culturally conditioned to define wealth and status in terms of how much one has hoarded more than other people.
Do you have an alternative to this? This is basically animal behaviour, it's not unique to humans. Most of that hoarding is out of an effort to get a mate, too.
I wrote the alternative: seeing wealth as being stewards of regenerative processes. I'll elaborate.
Plants are generally more cooperative than they are competitive, and groups of plants that cooperate will do better together than by themselves. Trees will establish a network of roots, and shunt nutrients to trees within the grove that are not doing so well. Just because some plant species will engage in chemical warfare with some species doesn't mean it won't cooperate with others, and there are many examples of such cooperation. This idea that nature is based on competitive pressure is not wholly true; there is a whole aspect of cooperative processes that occur in ecology.
Animals (an insects), if you actually observe them, can also be more cooperative than competitive. It depends on how you set it up.
Some examples: chickens are micrograzers, and sheep are grazers. They don't compete for the same niche. Due to the size of their mouth, sheep cannot eat plants past a certain height. Chickens will also eat bugs. That includes eating the bugs off of the sheep, if you let them.
Yeah, my chickens get into my tomatoes sometimes. They scratch at the green mulch I put down in the garden. They will fly over the small fence to get to it.
But a different perspective: I let them out into the main yard, and they like the forage there more than they like it in my garden. They help keep the cricket population down (which helps keep the black widow spider population down. The fertilize my backyard (which has poor soil fertility from the previous owner). Their scratching to get at things help aerates the soil, and bring in more fertility.
So I don't have to compete with my chickens. I can shape the circumstances such that their natural instincts further the overall health of the system.
