Emily Wolfe here, I’m the person who wrote this story. As I plan the second story in the series, which will be about new markets related to organic and regenerative, I’m curious to know a couple of things:
-isn’t this a tech/VC blog? How is it that so many of you are so interested in and knowledgeable about agriculture?
-what about this story made you want to discuss it here?
Speaking in generalities but hackers love hard problems, and implementing a 21st century food system is the intersection of most of the biggest problems of our time- climate change, population growth, sustainable energy. The fact that the best solutions seem to involve decentralization, taking a big chunk out of the market cap of destructive megacorporations, and transferring power down the class hierarchy aligns closely with the hacker ethos as well.
Also speaking in generalities, engineers love to come up with glib solutions to complicated problems in domains they've heard about but don't have a deep understanding of.
I actually come here more for these kind of stories than the tech news. From the hacker news guidlines:
What to Submit
On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
It's not a blog, it's a user-submitted news story aggregator.
And we the users are nerds, and while most of us work in software engineering, we're interested in everything and anything deep and tech/science related.
I think hackers like understanding complex systems and problem solving within them (or at least trying). The environment and modern agriculture is a complex system and food scarcity is a problem to be solved. And ADHD.
I work with technology but I'm skeptical that we understand some of the complex systems we claim to understand (or just as likely, something about the bottom line for a big corporation means it's hard to get the full story). 20th century agriculture was focused on short term gains, often resulting in profits for a few big businesses, that eventually resulted in big "unforeseen" problems. Like soil depletion, cancers among farm workers, runoff and polluted waterways. Technology caused those problems, so I guess sometimes it's good to be reminded that sometimes older methods can be better than new.
We run astrobiology experiments aboard the ISS for students around the world. In addition to making life better here on Earth, regenerative Ag is critical for off-world sustainability.
Health and climate mitigation. Trace elements of Glyphosate in food supply. Intensive grazing to reverse desertification (as per Alan Savory) and carbon sequestration.
A 2015 USDA study shows organic corn fetching 3X conventional. But, higher variable costs. What if lowering costs with new techniques changes the roughly equal profit margins to a 2X? That's the sort of questions I and folks like me like to ask.
Aside from that, my housemate sold a cattle ranch in Montana and his family is one of the largest wild rice growers in California before the drought. Now, converting some of that parched land to Solar. Seems like a terrible waste. What if you could do both?
The whole “right to repair” thing gets a lot of traction with this crowd. One of the worst offenders is John Deere, which won’t let you repair your own tractor. Vehicles are mostly software now so tinkering with them is basically criminalized under the CFAA.
This sucks and echoes the repairability problems with modern laptops and phones. Apple and the other major consumer tech companies make more money by selling stuff that can’t be fixed, or that only they can fix. That gets consumers slightly thinner, less expensive stuff, but it’s terrible for e waste and weakens the secondary market for tech, making tech more expensive overall while boosting corporate profits.
So, to answer your question, you could probably get traction by talking about people who are building tools that aren’t encumbered by repairablility and IP problems. Let’s see some open/source crop cycles. Let’s see bootleg tractor repair. Let’s see weird local regulations that force people to play fair.
Thanks for these ideas. I think the right to repair is going to get a lot of traction right now with the new executive order—or at least I hope so. The robotics for weeding are definitely interesting too. In terms of reporting on problems or potential solutions, this project is “solutions journalism,” which means rigorous reporting on responses to a problem. The problem part is built in as you look at the how well (or not) the response is working.
More than the new markets, it would be great to get "boots on the ground" information of real honest no bullshit understanding of the pain points of farmers, agricultural industry in general. Sometimes markets are not well defined or don't exist but taking a fundamental look at problems is fascinating. This information is hard to come by and people like yourself can help.
What I want to know is what steps can be taken to re-engineer incentives so that the major players in agriculture are pushing for regenerative agriculture and organic farming in their financial and political strategies.
I'm interested in small-scale robot farms that take the drudgery out of distributed food growing, particularly in suburbia. Robotic pest control is the most exciting because it would be a nice application of computer vision and chemical free pest control. Gardens in general are good uses of food waste and recycled water; so if you could lower the barrier to entry and operational costs, they might become more common.
In this talk from 2017, around 1h30m in, he says that he hasn't yet found a way to make no-till organic work in terms of weed prevention. But, he said he was close to figuring it out. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uUmIdq0D6-A
Has any progress been made since? Is this an area where technology could help (eg robotic precision weeding machines)?
Disclaimer that I have yet to read your article so it may already be covered.
Personally, I’m fascinated by the system aspect of regenerative (etc.) ag. A lot of what I do as a tech CTO is systems based, but realistically we’re just mere amateurs compared to nature. Plus screens are boring.
>isn’t this a tech/VC blog? How is it that so many of you are so interested in and knowledgeable about agriculture?
It's a moderated forum of scientists, engineers, and intellectuals. ycombinator was one of the original VC funders of reddit and decided to use the same idea for its VC community.
By the broadest definition this is in fact technology. I'm personally very interested in sustainable agriculture both from a technological standpoint and a community impact standpoint
I live in Switzerland and we often vote (referendum) on agriculture. I actively took part to the last political campain (ban on synthetic pesticides, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/13/world/swiss-pesticide-ref...) which forced me to get interested in (and research) the topic.
Agriculture is the next frontier of big tech. The last several decades decades have seen continuous improvements in labor effectiveness with automated equipment. Ag is big business, big data and in the next decade (IMHO) will be big tech.
I believe ycombinator even invested in a few ag tech startups.
Hi Emily. It would be amazing if more farmers would look into participating in the Open-Source Digital Infrastructure for the Agriculture Ecosystem: AgStack https://agstack.org/ by Linux Foundation
Whoa Ag Stack is a fascinating idea. I love when two seemingly disparate disciplines come together to create simple solutions to complex problems. Seems like a lot of potential here!
One of the nice things about software is that it impacts everything, it's relevant everywhere, and the best software and technology is created when you understand both software and the domain where it is applied. "Software is eating the world".
Many readers here came from a farming family, but pursued careers in technology. They might still be actively involved in farming, and some ultimately return to either take over the farm or manage the land.
Some of us have also founded or worked at AgTech companies.
I am not from the US but on the lookout for agriculture related stories since all generations in my family up until my grandfather have only done farming. My uncles still do it full-time.
Emily there will be a lot of reasons here but I bet if you were able to dig deeper you’d find a handful of people here moved to Montana during the pandemic.
tech/VC aren't solely about the quick buck, but about expressing the desires of the technologist or VC in how they engage in the world.
As many of us neo2k hackers are getting to ages where we think about future generations and even legacy, the stranglehold of corporatism on agriculture R&D and production is very worrying - and your blog is quite informative.
I'm a software engineer with a passion for botany and growing vegetables. I mostly attribute this interest to growing up with a gardening mother, but I think the mixture of engineering systems, working with equipment, and trying to balance complex trade-offs all lend themselves to the kind of person who likes to create virtual worlds in their mind. Writing software is like creating a little ecosystem of moving parts and interlocking components, and taming complexity is the eternal battle as systems grow. Many of us are probably drawn to analogous systems and problem spaces. Hacker News is basically a place where we share links, nerd out on ideas, and make snarky comments.
I think part of what is exciting and intriguing in your article is that it paints a picture of what agriculture could look like. Instead of just feeling a sense of dread about how our society is ruining everything, many of us are technological optimists with a core belief that science and engineering can help light a way to a better future. Who doesn't like reading articles that reinforce their existing beliefs? ;-)
I've scoured YouTube and other sources for regenerative ag content over the last few years, and what I crave are more specifics and details of business models, scientific analysis, etc. It would be fascinating to actually see the books for a couple of different farms, conventional vs organic vs regenerative. How much money is spent on chemicals vs labor vs seed, etc.? What does insurance cost, and how much risk is there? Does regenerative ag with higher soil carbon lower this risk? (Maybe there is a smart regenerative only insurance play here?) Many of us would probably love to work on autonomous tractors, computer vision to spot problems, etc., etc., so learning about the key levers and problems underlying this industry would be incredibly thought provoking. While reading your article my head went to: why can't those electric fences both monitor the cattle and move themselves around? Could you attach water or compost to the cows themselves to have them help distribute useful inputs? There is an incredible amount of food waste, yard trimming waste, and other carbon rich waste streams generated by society. Why aren't we spreading that on these farms? Instead of tilling the top inch or two, couldn't we be planting the seeds in a new layer of added material? I guess this would require moving a lot of mass, but maybe if it's an autonomous supply chain it could be constantly bringing beneficial waste streams to farmers? It seems like each crop is likely to take some nutrients and provide others. Could you not auto-sample a farm and then automically determine the optimal crop mix which will most benefit the soil? If you have market data you could also connect this with current market prices. Last, if all you did was grow optimal cover crops for a few years could you dramatically improve a farm? Should we pay farmers to give the land a break and only grow beneficial crops so they can come back in N years as an organic, regenerative operation?
My wife and I have started trying to order all of our meats (fish, pork, beef, chicken) from sustainable operations, and it's actually quite hard to know who to go to. When we do finally find one that seems compelling, they are often sold out. Is anyone creating a centralized marketplace for the output from regenerative farms? I have a feeling we aren't the only ones who want to support these operations.
The state often appears in stories about agriculture in precarious environments (See Jared Diamond's "Collapse" for one example.)
Montana is largely a semi-arid desert, especially over the 2/3's of the state that are northern Great Plains. East of the continental divide, it gets about 10" of rain per year, which is about a quarter of the US average.
And with climate change, it is more precarious. Temperatures have been unusually high this summer, and it's fire season now. Weather has become more volatile. (Cherry crops on the Flathead have been destroyed two of the last three years.)
> Lentils (Lens culinaris
Medik.) are produced on
over 1.5 million acres
throughout the world. They are
primarily used for domestic consumption in casseroles, salads,
soups and stews. Lentils provide an
excellent source of protein (20 to
35 percent), but are limited in the
sulphur-containing amino acids
methionine and cystine. However,
consumption of lentils with cereals
provides a balanced diet high in
fiber, protein and essential amino
acids.
> Lentils in the United States are
primarily grown for export.
Growing lentils is a great idea, but the developed and developing worlds' palates also need to also change course toward consuming less climate-damaging foods like meat and more lentils, chickpeas, and other pulses.
Already today, pea protein is a major constituent of the newer
more realistic meat-substitutes, which is a good trend, but if most lentils just end up being exported and used as some sort of livestock feed, it will make little differences to the climate and environmental issues we are experiencing.
> They also lease land to neighboring ranchers, whose grazing cattle aerate the soil with their hooves and add organic matter and nutrients via manure.
Meat can and should be a part of regenerative ag.
I recently visited a family friend's place/farm. A year ago, the soil was the typical cracked dry light tan clay ground that I have in my yard. It's quite typical in Oregon.
This time, the soil was a dark color with tons of organic material and great water retention. This was entirely due to the grazing. They have goats and an alpaca. Ruminants are excellent for soil health, and the meat they produce is also great for human health.
Growing lentils is a great idea, but the developed and developing worlds' palates also need to also change course toward consuming less climate-damaging foods like meat and more lentils, chickpeas, and other pulses.
If you like lentis, you too can experience the joys of the US Humanitarian Daily Ration, NSN 8970-01-375-0516 [1]. It's vegetarian. It's kosher. It's halal. It's cheap to manufacture. It can survive being air-dropped without a parachute. It's heavy on lentils.The US military gives it out to starving people.
> Growing lentils is a great idea, but the developed and developing worlds' palates also need to also change course toward consuming less climate-damaging foods like meat and more lentils, chickpeas, and other pulses.
Forget about the developing world. This is all about the developed world. You are to blame. Most of the pollution is by the US and Europe, regardless of whether it happens at home or as pollution outsourced to China.
Interesting, I saw a map show chick peas as being a big crop in that region and thought it was surprising, just because it's not seen as a huge money crop.
His book, Dirt To Soil, is what convinced me. It was the first time in a while that I felt optimism about the future of the planet. It also changed how I viewed the morals of meat consumption.
Organic and regenerative ag are built on the assumption that crops must be grown in open air soil. The reality is that crops can be grown in open air soil and, if they are, regenerative ag in particular is significantly better for soil longevity.
That said it is not necessarily better to produce all crops in low density, high volatility, season dependent environments. Some material % of crops can move to more intelligent indoor settings where yields are higher, weather isn't a factor, and production yields can be scheduled without risk of weather impact. I'm actually a partner in one of these high volume operations in Montana (randomly). Uses less water, has zero soil impact, requires little to no chemical agents and is predictable.
What I hope will continue is crops that are capable of producing profitable and predictable yields in indoor environments will move more and more in that direction. This could serve to reduce soil stress and leave soil for crops that need more space (e.g. tubers) and livestock to aid in improving soil longevity.
Note this is not a plug for vertical farming. That's an entirely different mirage of financial engineering.
Sweet, there is only approximately 300 million acres of cropland in the United States alone.
Sun == free, rain == free
How does indoor ag plan on scaling up for anything other than super high margin vegetables and spices when their competitor (outdoor ag) has no cost associated with sun or rain? Not even to mention soil.
edit: I like indoor/vertical ag a lot (when applied correctly) When people try to propose producing things that have no chance of succeeding in our current Kardashev scale, it makes me think they are arguing in bad faith or with a fundamental lack of understanding of the problems faced in food production.
I actually agree with you. It's purely a math problem. Where can predictable yield be profitable (including loss calculations) and where can it not.
Vertical as it is today is an excellent nursery solution to feed growable plants into float ponds with little to no loss. As an independent production method, vertical isn't mathematically sustainable.
40% of fresh food is lost before it makes it to the end user (USDA data). The loss comes from a combo of unpredictable weather, timing issues where market prices dip below production costs at harvest time, and supply chain issues.
So it's a complicated math problem but it's important to consider in the suite of food security tools we look to.
Absent regen, we're likely to decimate soils over generations. If we flip totally to regen, we won't have enough land.
Imagine all the kick in the mid 2000s for "vertical living walls" as all the rage in large scale office complexes.
Imagine that if instead they put vertical gardens in every high-rise and the farming of the veggies was a part of the HOA and the veggies were just included in the cost of the living in the home - and you could opt-out and give the veggies to the homeless/shelters/churches/etc...
Now imagine if the US was like Singapore, where the setbacks in dense urban environs is massive enough to manage handling a ton of eatable growth between all buildings.
There are three things that should be required for every single building going up (aside from structural sound-ness)
1. Parking underground for 3 levels
2. Vertical EATABLE gardens
3. A network of 'non=potable' water supplies (water you can get from a grey-water system run through the entire building to feed the plants in the vertical gardens.)
Sure, sun and rain are free, but the costs for outdoor farming are huge too. Irrigation, pesticides, fencing, harvesting equipment, anti-weed chemicals. Then your yields are super volatile -- weather can be bad, you can just get unlucky, you can have weeds/bugs/mice eating into your yields. Then you need to get your crops all the way from Montana to big markets hundreds or thousands of miles away.
Indoor farming sure does require an input of energy and a high up-front cost, but you can get extremely high yields reliably, and you can dramatically reduce transportation and chemical costs, plus reduced water costs often.
By providing predictability/consistency/efficiency. Yes you end up paying for things that are otherwise free, but those free versions are at the mercy of nature and nature isn't exactly getting more predictable/consistent. You can also create highly efficient watering systems where evaporation is nearly nonexistent and nutrients are easily distributed meaning you're making way better use of that water. And let's be honest - if you're working with 10" of rain per year you're not just relying on the free rain anyway. California's central valley is also a prime candidate for this sort of thing as they're pumping water out of the ground so fast it's sinking and the underground aquifers are getting destroyed meaning the groundwater can't replenish and they're unable to capture as much snowmelt. That's in addition to importing water from other regions that are on the brink of not being able to sustain those exports. Water's already expensive and about to get more expensive.
And that's not even taking into consideration the higher density you can get indoors vs outdoors - the amount of land that is cleared for ag around the globe is staggering. Getting an order of magnitude more output from the same amount of land, but having to pay for water and light, is likely to make business sense and be better overall for the environment.
Do the actual economics work out right this second? Maybe not. Will they in the not so distant future? I'd bet on it.
Good new farming: put solar panels in sun, connect lightbulbs to solar panels, put plants under lights.
(Although it's not totally as daft as I make it sound, because it's theoretically possible to do frequency conversion in a way that makes all the energy of sunlight available to plants instead of everything but green.)
I'm generally referring to float pond greenhouses though some variants are emerging that use artificial light in a vertical setting for the germination stage where loss rates are high and you can get extremely high density. The types of density you can't get in the overfunded vertical pipe dreams in VC.
So that when you hit the float pond for a 12-16 grow cycle, there's marginal loss.
It's mostly high margin vegetables and spices. Look up gotham greens for a successul and properly done indoor ag startup.
Generally tomatoes and maybe peppers have enough margin and volume to be justify indoor settings.
Things like nuts are a no-go or any sort of wheat/cotton/maize/soybean operation (even specialty applications like edamame have severe uphill battles to profitability)
Well, with low yields, financial viability is the problem. It's already difficult to make a living farming, unless maybe you're in an area with lots of rain or where you can mine groundwater.
>>*What I hope will continue is crops that are capable of producing profitable and predictable yields in indoor environments will move more and more in that direction. a*
WTF - I hope ZERO of this happens... Don't attempt to think that youre smarter than ~5BILLION years of earths bio/eco balance until we were weaponized by fungi...
We dont need "higher yields" -- we need more efficient consumption and distribution...
I found it an interesting listen. Of course it's a fairly shallow entry into the topic, but that's what they are about after all; get you interested, give you pointers for more if you feel like it.
Just too bad they'll go spotify-only and thus seize to be a podcast... I'll have to stop recommending (and listening...)
> Just too bad they'll go spotify-only and thus seize to be a podcast... I'll have to stop recommending (and listening...)
Yes, that bums me out too. It must make economic sense (for both parties; presumably the data in the app and exclusive content is a win for Spotify), but it's a real bummer that they are moving from a format that lets me, the listener, control how I want to listen, to a format that requires me to download an app. Not gonna happen, but companies will always try to build walled gardens.
I don't know why they just don't use something like Acast which will take care of distribution (or maybe others I don't know of).
The worst part of it is that Spotify's android app is buggy. Actually, that's an understatement: it's garbage. I shouldn't have it hang waiting for network connection just to navigate the offline portions of the app (e.g. downloaded podcasts). Anyone who writes a simple "music player" android app in a weekend or two could handle that case far better.
Now that I see there’s such a hunger for this kind of storytelling, I want to build on what I’ve done in part 1. To do so, I’m seeking to fully fund parts 2 and 3 of this series, so I can continue digging deeply and telling stories of great characters. What ideas do you have for individuals/entities that might be interested? The money would go through the publisher, which is a 501 c3 nonprofit.
Thank you all for such a great conversation here and asking such thought-provoking questions!
What is the best criticism of regenerative ag? Everything I see about it is so positive that it seems crazy everyone hasn't switched. Are there really no downsides and it's just institutional inertia/caution holding everyone back?
My biggest concern about it is that half its advocates say crazy things. For instance, down-thread we got the line:
"[Paul Wheaton] believes that in a decade the soil will be so rich in organic matter with healthy microbial activity (with no chemical history) could produce food that cures cancer. I believe that in an environment where human body is not weakened by the constant bombardment of chemical compounds, it could heal itself from cancer."
I do my best to keep an open mind because, hey, a lot of bits and pieces sound plausible, but whenever I get to lines about cancer-curing food, I begin to doubt the truth, validity or factual nature of anything else that was said on the topic.
Aside from that, the biggest question is always going to be "Does it scale to growing sufficient food for 10 billion people?" Maybe it does, maybe it doesn't, but whenever food comes up keep in mind that end game. If a particular agricultural system could produce food at lower energy costs, more sustainably, "better", but could only feed a billion people applied globally, it's only an acceptable solution in very particular moral frameworks.
That's a reasonable response, but it's actually totally normal to have expertise in one domain and totally wacky ideas in another one.
It's even possible to combine these things, although that's a dangerous game to play. Biodynamic agriculture is a great example of this, Rudolph Steiner's model of how agriculture (and scientific matters in general) is... heterodox... but biodynamic farms regularly produce good crops of quality food, and the practices cultivate healthy soil by any objective measure you would care for.
I wouldn't go casually trying this with medicine, where practitioners are more likely to do the wrong thing for the wrong reasons, rather than the right thing for the wrong reasons.
Paul Wheaton is a grifter, petty tyrant, and mini Hubbard who has built a cult around himself.
He bans anyone from the permaculture subreddit who disagrees with him, which is why there are multiple off-shoot subreddits, including one specifically dedicated to his malfeasance which broaches into criminality.
I've experienced this, and I've learned to search for the grains of truth. At core, the people doing this are highly disagreeable, and so they form their own opinions and go deep.
I think going deep into crazy is natural, and the hard question is trying to balance that out with a deeper truth. At core, I think there is a deeper value in being the control group outside of the modern world.
So, can food cure cancer? I don't know, but it may be worth looking into. Amish, for instance, have 40% less cancer. Is it the food? the air? the bacteria? the hard work? No Idea!
Myself, I'm getting firmly on the fasting train. I eat every other day, and I feel great.
A person could totally be an expert on soil and sustainable agriculture and know nothing useful about medicine. In fact, that is what I would expect. Listen to the experts on their subject of expertise, and take the rest with a huge grain of salt.
Replies to your questions are good. I'd say the yield downside is the most glaring. Farmers really can't afford a have a self-imposed 'bad' year while they try to adopt new practices. Bankers and lenders (which farmers rely on for operating loans might not even approve--IDK). It absolutely takes some trial and error as no 2 farms are the same. This also hurts testing things out in a smaller scale on your farm. You need to borrow/rent equipment or buy the equipment. But when you buy equipment without the scale, it basically adds overhead (with additional risk to the downside for yields).
People don't like to admit it, but yields under current intense monoculture, fertilizer happy are best-case scenario. This is obvious and intended, we're squeezing as much yield as possible without care for long-term consequences. Those yields might not be achievable under regenerative practices (but they might be in certain farms). For some reason, we have this mindset where we can't give up any yield, but in reality, if the economic models and government subsidies were redesigned, we absolutely could.
I don’t think the yield downside is a given though. Gabe Brown sees >20% more yield than his counties average using regenerative methods. I want to see more data but I’m hopeful that as regenerative ag practices begin to be improved and honed across the United States, the yield problem will go away.
No-till agriculture, as an example, usually requires different capital equipment for the farm.
It's not a blocker, but financing the capital equipment takes some investment and risk. Farms are fairly dialed into their operations already, and getting people to change (especially when they need to pay money to do it) is a slow process.
Crops can be integrated and still planted and harvested mechanically. Planting differing height crops or same height crops with different seed sizes you can still use machines and harvest multiple crops from the same time/land.
Yield for some crops is actually more after the ~3 year transition period. However, for all crops quality is greatly improved. Better quality means you need to eat less to be satiated.
American farms can be truely vast, so any statement on averages is swayed by this. The article says they are planting 4,500 acres this year.
When you look up average US farm sizes it is hard to know what to compare it to as monocropping or single breed farming seem to be the standard. However you do it, the farm planting is a lot smaller than 4500 acres.
They might not be farming at a scale big ag run at, but it’s no small operation.
The below link says “The midpoint acreage for U.S. cropland nearly doubled between 1982 and 2007, from 589 acres to 1,105.”
Would disagree with the automated comment. Most thing in regenerative ag are just as automated as conventional ag, unless you're thinking of something specific?
It takes about 3 years for the soil to come back to life and it does take more management. During the transition period yields are reduced. Regenerative Ag also takes more farmers as a singer farmer can't manage as much land.
It is crazy that everyone hasn't switched. It is more profitable but it is a leap of faith to switch and most ag extensions are still recommending high chem use. There are some hang ups with crop subsidies making it difficult to change also.
But, the tide has changed as evidenced by this article. General Mills is pushing for 1 million regenerative farmed acres by 2030. The transition is happening but as with any paradigm shift it takes time to convince everybody that there is a better way.
It's more that it requires to leave the mainstream system, because the fertilizer and pesticides that destroyed your soil are the money-making machines of "Big Ag" corporations.
Regenerative ag will not make you very rich either, so you have not much money to invest in lobbying activities, to go against the flow.
How do you figure? Regenerative ag is still relatively new, and it’s practices are being honed. Idk what you define as rich but I’d venture to guess that Joel Salatin and Gabe Brown are extremely wealthy.
Look into Chris Newman at Sylvanaqua farms. Scale and social-economic accessibility are some of the big ones. He critiques a pattern of "circle citation" within the community.
Your carbon site explains the "how it works" as essentially a reactive process, i.e. a farmer adopts regen practices and then gets paid for the results -- what about any proactive processes to help incentivize and facilitate farmers' transitions to regen ag?
I ask because I've been researching regen ag for smallholder farms -- a few programs exist, primarily through microfinance, but I've yet to see any quality + accessible programs to accomplish this proactive approach tightly knit with carbon credit markets.
An obvious difficulty with this approach is verifying the transition actually occurs and more carbon is sequestered, but it does seem to be an essential component if we want to move more farms to regenerative ag.
Curious if you have any further thoughts on this space, I'd love to speak more about this.
FWIW, I've been following Indigo and the regenerative ag space for a while and IA is doing some great work, so I don't mean to undermine the impact these programs already have.
Indigo provides resources here: https://www.indigoag.com/carbon-college, including Carbon College - a set of short courses on carbon sequestration and regenerative practices tied w/ economics. Please check it out!
Sounds like an interesting approach. I'm glad there are people working of these issues. When I read this article I was thinking something like this is needed to incentivize the farmers.
Readit News
-isn’t this a tech/VC blog? How is it that so many of you are so interested in and knowledgeable about agriculture?
-what about this story made you want to discuss it here?
Looking forward to learning more!
Agriculture and its future are like candy.
What to Submit
On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
And we the users are nerds, and while most of us work in software engineering, we're interested in everything and anything deep and tech/science related.
I work with technology but I'm skeptical that we understand some of the complex systems we claim to understand (or just as likely, something about the bottom line for a big corporation means it's hard to get the full story). 20th century agriculture was focused on short term gains, often resulting in profits for a few big businesses, that eventually resulted in big "unforeseen" problems. Like soil depletion, cancers among farm workers, runoff and polluted waterways. Technology caused those problems, so I guess sometimes it's good to be reminded that sometimes older methods can be better than new.
A 2015 USDA study shows organic corn fetching 3X conventional. But, higher variable costs. What if lowering costs with new techniques changes the roughly equal profit margins to a 2X? That's the sort of questions I and folks like me like to ask.
Aside from that, my housemate sold a cattle ranch in Montana and his family is one of the largest wild rice growers in California before the drought. Now, converting some of that parched land to Solar. Seems like a terrible waste. What if you could do both?
What new markets in this space are interesting to you?
This sucks and echoes the repairability problems with modern laptops and phones. Apple and the other major consumer tech companies make more money by selling stuff that can’t be fixed, or that only they can fix. That gets consumers slightly thinner, less expensive stuff, but it’s terrible for e waste and weakens the secondary market for tech, making tech more expensive overall while boosting corporate profits.
So, to answer your question, you could probably get traction by talking about people who are building tools that aren’t encumbered by repairablility and IP problems. Let’s see some open/source crop cycles. Let’s see bootleg tractor repair. Let’s see weird local regulations that force people to play fair.
Has any progress been made since? Is this an area where technology could help (eg robotic precision weeding machines)?
Disclaimer that I have yet to read your article so it may already be covered.
It's a moderated forum of scientists, engineers, and intellectuals. ycombinator was one of the original VC funders of reddit and decided to use the same idea for its VC community.
There sure are a lot of stereotypes about tech enthusiasts. Hackers are interested in hacking nature too! ;-)
A lot of people in tech have diversified jobs and the community has a lot of valuable insights on a wide range of subjects.
An couple of examples:
- SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy successfully launches ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16319505 )
- Is that ship still stuck? ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26585282 )
And many more...
In this case, I'd say that soil depletion is a known problem here and the article discussed that.
I watched a few hours of the videos linked to here in the comments, and I will never look at those photos of "drought" the same way again.
They always feature dry parched bare earth, and now I understand that of course that land is dry, there's no cover crop on it!
I hope that regenerative agriculture takes off soon enough to keep our food supply stable during the next few decades of climate shift.
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I believe ycombinator even invested in a few ag tech startups.
Personally, I have an interest in biology and nature - everything is so complex and interconnected!
I would say that many people here have an interest in learning "how things work" that isn't limited to just computers.
Some of us have also founded or worked at AgTech companies.
As many of us neo2k hackers are getting to ages where we think about future generations and even legacy, the stranglehold of corporatism on agriculture R&D and production is very worrying - and your blog is quite informative.
I think part of what is exciting and intriguing in your article is that it paints a picture of what agriculture could look like. Instead of just feeling a sense of dread about how our society is ruining everything, many of us are technological optimists with a core belief that science and engineering can help light a way to a better future. Who doesn't like reading articles that reinforce their existing beliefs? ;-)
I've scoured YouTube and other sources for regenerative ag content over the last few years, and what I crave are more specifics and details of business models, scientific analysis, etc. It would be fascinating to actually see the books for a couple of different farms, conventional vs organic vs regenerative. How much money is spent on chemicals vs labor vs seed, etc.? What does insurance cost, and how much risk is there? Does regenerative ag with higher soil carbon lower this risk? (Maybe there is a smart regenerative only insurance play here?) Many of us would probably love to work on autonomous tractors, computer vision to spot problems, etc., etc., so learning about the key levers and problems underlying this industry would be incredibly thought provoking. While reading your article my head went to: why can't those electric fences both monitor the cattle and move themselves around? Could you attach water or compost to the cows themselves to have them help distribute useful inputs? There is an incredible amount of food waste, yard trimming waste, and other carbon rich waste streams generated by society. Why aren't we spreading that on these farms? Instead of tilling the top inch or two, couldn't we be planting the seeds in a new layer of added material? I guess this would require moving a lot of mass, but maybe if it's an autonomous supply chain it could be constantly bringing beneficial waste streams to farmers? It seems like each crop is likely to take some nutrients and provide others. Could you not auto-sample a farm and then automically determine the optimal crop mix which will most benefit the soil? If you have market data you could also connect this with current market prices. Last, if all you did was grow optimal cover crops for a few years could you dramatically improve a farm? Should we pay farmers to give the land a break and only grow beneficial crops so they can come back in N years as an organic, regenerative operation?
My wife and I have started trying to order all of our meats (fish, pork, beef, chicken) from sustainable operations, and it's actually quite hard to know who to go to. When we do finally find one that seems compelling, they are often sold out. Is anyone creating a centralized marketplace for the output from regenerative farms? I have a feeling we aren't the only ones who want to support these operations.
Thanks for a thought provoking article!
This is true. One of the regenerative crop types are pulses (lentils, chick peas), and MT produces a lot.
https://www.ndsu.edu/pubweb/pulse-info/resources-pdf/Growing...
The state often appears in stories about agriculture in precarious environments (See Jared Diamond's "Collapse" for one example.)
Montana is largely a semi-arid desert, especially over the 2/3's of the state that are northern Great Plains. East of the continental divide, it gets about 10" of rain per year, which is about a quarter of the US average.
And with climate change, it is more precarious. Temperatures have been unusually high this summer, and it's fire season now. Weather has become more volatile. (Cherry crops on the Flathead have been destroyed two of the last three years.)
> Lentils in the United States are primarily grown for export.
Growing lentils is a great idea, but the developed and developing worlds' palates also need to also change course toward consuming less climate-damaging foods like meat and more lentils, chickpeas, and other pulses.
Already today, pea protein is a major constituent of the newer more realistic meat-substitutes, which is a good trend, but if most lentils just end up being exported and used as some sort of livestock feed, it will make little differences to the climate and environmental issues we are experiencing.
> They also lease land to neighboring ranchers, whose grazing cattle aerate the soil with their hooves and add organic matter and nutrients via manure.
Meat can and should be a part of regenerative ag.
I recently visited a family friend's place/farm. A year ago, the soil was the typical cracked dry light tan clay ground that I have in my yard. It's quite typical in Oregon.
This time, the soil was a dark color with tons of organic material and great water retention. This was entirely due to the grazing. They have goats and an alpaca. Ruminants are excellent for soil health, and the meat they produce is also great for human health.
If you like lentis, you too can experience the joys of the US Humanitarian Daily Ration, NSN 8970-01-375-0516 [1]. It's vegetarian. It's kosher. It's halal. It's cheap to manufacture. It can survive being air-dropped without a parachute. It's heavy on lentils.The US military gives it out to starving people.
[1] https://www.dla.mil/TroopSupport/Subsistence/Operational-rat...
Forget about the developing world. This is all about the developed world. You are to blame. Most of the pollution is by the US and Europe, regardless of whether it happens at home or as pollution outsourced to China.
Very sad. I grew up in Bozeman, and I loved Flathead cherry season.
https://dailyinterlake.com/news/2021/jul/03/growers-expect-e...
https://flatheadbeacon.com/?s=cherry
Interesting! I always sorta thought those were warm-weather crops.
Documentary on the Loess plateau in China: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjLV_aVRUmQ
Talk on the Caledonian Forest: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nAGHUkby2Is
Talk on using the "herd effect" in Africa: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7pI7IYaJLI
A talk presenting a realistic view on soil reconstruction, what IMO is the best argument to convince farmers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUmIdq0D6-A
That said it is not necessarily better to produce all crops in low density, high volatility, season dependent environments. Some material % of crops can move to more intelligent indoor settings where yields are higher, weather isn't a factor, and production yields can be scheduled without risk of weather impact. I'm actually a partner in one of these high volume operations in Montana (randomly). Uses less water, has zero soil impact, requires little to no chemical agents and is predictable.
What I hope will continue is crops that are capable of producing profitable and predictable yields in indoor environments will move more and more in that direction. This could serve to reduce soil stress and leave soil for crops that need more space (e.g. tubers) and livestock to aid in improving soil longevity.
Note this is not a plug for vertical farming. That's an entirely different mirage of financial engineering.
Sun == free, rain == free
How does indoor ag plan on scaling up for anything other than super high margin vegetables and spices when their competitor (outdoor ag) has no cost associated with sun or rain? Not even to mention soil.
edit: I like indoor/vertical ag a lot (when applied correctly) When people try to propose producing things that have no chance of succeeding in our current Kardashev scale, it makes me think they are arguing in bad faith or with a fundamental lack of understanding of the problems faced in food production.
Vertical as it is today is an excellent nursery solution to feed growable plants into float ponds with little to no loss. As an independent production method, vertical isn't mathematically sustainable.
40% of fresh food is lost before it makes it to the end user (USDA data). The loss comes from a combo of unpredictable weather, timing issues where market prices dip below production costs at harvest time, and supply chain issues.
So it's a complicated math problem but it's important to consider in the suite of food security tools we look to.
Absent regen, we're likely to decimate soils over generations. If we flip totally to regen, we won't have enough land.
So a host of solutions is required.
Imagine all the kick in the mid 2000s for "vertical living walls" as all the rage in large scale office complexes.
Imagine that if instead they put vertical gardens in every high-rise and the farming of the veggies was a part of the HOA and the veggies were just included in the cost of the living in the home - and you could opt-out and give the veggies to the homeless/shelters/churches/etc...
Now imagine if the US was like Singapore, where the setbacks in dense urban environs is massive enough to manage handling a ton of eatable growth between all buildings.
There are three things that should be required for every single building going up (aside from structural sound-ness)
1. Parking underground for 3 levels
2. Vertical EATABLE gardens
3. A network of 'non=potable' water supplies (water you can get from a grey-water system run through the entire building to feed the plants in the vertical gardens.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey_water
Indoor farming sure does require an input of energy and a high up-front cost, but you can get extremely high yields reliably, and you can dramatically reduce transportation and chemical costs, plus reduced water costs often.
And that's not even taking into consideration the higher density you can get indoors vs outdoors - the amount of land that is cleared for ag around the globe is staggering. Getting an order of magnitude more output from the same amount of land, but having to pay for water and light, is likely to make business sense and be better overall for the environment.
Do the actual economics work out right this second? Maybe not. Will they in the not so distant future? I'd bet on it.
Good new farming: put solar panels in sun, connect lightbulbs to solar panels, put plants under lights.
(Although it's not totally as daft as I make it sound, because it's theoretically possible to do frequency conversion in a way that makes all the energy of sunlight available to plants instead of everything but green.)
When you say "indoor" are you describing large greenhouses? Or growing crops using artificial light?
So that when you hit the float pond for a 12-16 grow cycle, there's marginal loss.
Massive amounts of government regulation that inflates the price.
I.e. just weed so far.
Generally tomatoes and maybe peppers have enough margin and volume to be justify indoor settings.
Things like nuts are a no-go or any sort of wheat/cotton/maize/soybean operation (even specialty applications like edamame have severe uphill battles to profitability)
WTF - I hope ZERO of this happens... Don't attempt to think that youre smarter than ~5BILLION years of earths bio/eco balance until we were weaponized by fungi...
We dont need "higher yields" -- we need more efficient consumption and distribution...
I found it an interesting listen. Of course it's a fairly shallow entry into the topic, but that's what they are about after all; get you interested, give you pointers for more if you feel like it.
Just too bad they'll go spotify-only and thus seize to be a podcast... I'll have to stop recommending (and listening...)
Yes, that bums me out too. It must make economic sense (for both parties; presumably the data in the app and exclusive content is a win for Spotify), but it's a real bummer that they are moving from a format that lets me, the listener, control how I want to listen, to a format that requires me to download an app. Not gonna happen, but companies will always try to build walled gardens.
The worst part of it is that Spotify's android app is buggy. Actually, that's an understatement: it's garbage. I shouldn't have it hang waiting for network connection just to navigate the offline portions of the app (e.g. downloaded podcasts). Anyone who writes a simple "music player" android app in a weekend or two could handle that case far better.
Thank you all for such a great conversation here and asking such thought-provoking questions!
https://substack.com/
My biggest concern about it is that half its advocates say crazy things. For instance, down-thread we got the line:
"[Paul Wheaton] believes that in a decade the soil will be so rich in organic matter with healthy microbial activity (with no chemical history) could produce food that cures cancer. I believe that in an environment where human body is not weakened by the constant bombardment of chemical compounds, it could heal itself from cancer."
I do my best to keep an open mind because, hey, a lot of bits and pieces sound plausible, but whenever I get to lines about cancer-curing food, I begin to doubt the truth, validity or factual nature of anything else that was said on the topic.
Aside from that, the biggest question is always going to be "Does it scale to growing sufficient food for 10 billion people?" Maybe it does, maybe it doesn't, but whenever food comes up keep in mind that end game. If a particular agricultural system could produce food at lower energy costs, more sustainably, "better", but could only feed a billion people applied globally, it's only an acceptable solution in very particular moral frameworks.
It's even possible to combine these things, although that's a dangerous game to play. Biodynamic agriculture is a great example of this, Rudolph Steiner's model of how agriculture (and scientific matters in general) is... heterodox... but biodynamic farms regularly produce good crops of quality food, and the practices cultivate healthy soil by any objective measure you would care for.
I wouldn't go casually trying this with medicine, where practitioners are more likely to do the wrong thing for the wrong reasons, rather than the right thing for the wrong reasons.
He bans anyone from the permaculture subreddit who disagrees with him, which is why there are multiple off-shoot subreddits, including one specifically dedicated to his malfeasance which broaches into criminality.
I think going deep into crazy is natural, and the hard question is trying to balance that out with a deeper truth. At core, I think there is a deeper value in being the control group outside of the modern world.
So, can food cure cancer? I don't know, but it may be worth looking into. Amish, for instance, have 40% less cancer. Is it the food? the air? the bacteria? the hard work? No Idea!
Myself, I'm getting firmly on the fasting train. I eat every other day, and I feel great.
People don't like to admit it, but yields under current intense monoculture, fertilizer happy are best-case scenario. This is obvious and intended, we're squeezing as much yield as possible without care for long-term consequences. Those yields might not be achievable under regenerative practices (but they might be in certain farms). For some reason, we have this mindset where we can't give up any yield, but in reality, if the economic models and government subsidies were redesigned, we absolutely could.
https://www.csuchico.edu/regenerativeagriculture/demos/gabe-...
It's not a blocker, but financing the capital equipment takes some investment and risk. Farms are fairly dialed into their operations already, and getting people to change (especially when they need to pay money to do it) is a slow process.
Yield for some crops is actually more after the ~3 year transition period. However, for all crops quality is greatly improved. Better quality means you need to eat less to be satiated.
They might not be farming at a scale big ag run at, but it’s no small operation.
The below link says “The midpoint acreage for U.S. cropland nearly doubled between 1982 and 2007, from 589 acres to 1,105.”
https://www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/publications/45108/39359_er...
It is crazy that everyone hasn't switched. It is more profitable but it is a leap of faith to switch and most ag extensions are still recommending high chem use. There are some hang ups with crop subsidies making it difficult to change also.
But, the tide has changed as evidenced by this article. General Mills is pushing for 1 million regenerative farmed acres by 2030. The transition is happening but as with any paradigm shift it takes time to convince everybody that there is a better way.
https://www.generalmills.com/en/Responsibility/Sustainabilit...
Regenerative ag will not make you very rich either, so you have not much money to invest in lobbying activities, to go against the flow.
How do you figure? Regenerative ag is still relatively new, and it’s practices are being honed. Idk what you define as rich but I’d venture to guess that Joel Salatin and Gabe Brown are extremely wealthy.
There's a number of open positions, most with the option to be remote!
https://www.indigoag.com/carbon
https://www.indigoag.com/join-us
I ask because I've been researching regen ag for smallholder farms -- a few programs exist, primarily through microfinance, but I've yet to see any quality + accessible programs to accomplish this proactive approach tightly knit with carbon credit markets.
An obvious difficulty with this approach is verifying the transition actually occurs and more carbon is sequestered, but it does seem to be an essential component if we want to move more farms to regenerative ag. Curious if you have any further thoughts on this space, I'd love to speak more about this.
FWIW, I've been following Indigo and the regenerative ag space for a while and IA is doing some great work, so I don't mean to undermine the impact these programs already have.