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Organic and regenerative agriculture are revitalizing rural Montana economies

montanafreepress.org

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Re: Organic and regenerative agriculture are revitalizing rural Montana economies

#141

Post by kickout »

zachware wrote: post #136
kickout wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 produci…

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 da…

Fair comments.

I'm mulling whether we have enough land (at 100% regen practices). I almost think we do.

From a system-level, we're over saturated because of ethanol and other things that realistically could disappear and society would be better off. Just need to recalibrate our acres a bit

Re: Organic and regenerative agriculture are revitalizing rural Montana economies

#142

Post by zachware »

rrrrrrrrrrrryan wrote: post #99
zachware wrote: post #80

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 intelli…

City boy here with no knowledge of farming. When you say "indoor" are you describing large greenhouses? Or growing crops using artificial light?

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.

Re: Organic and regenerative agriculture are revitalizing rural Montana economies

#143

Post by zachware »

kickout wrote: post #113
jasonlaramburu wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What criteria (crop type, geography, etc) are required for the benefits you outline of indoor ag to outweigh the energy cost of artificial lighting?

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)

You are 100% right on the grains.

Re: Organic and regenerative agriculture are revitalizing rural Montana economies

#144

Post by shawn-butler »

whatshisface wrote: post #103
zachware wrote: post #80

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 intelli…

Bad old farming: put plants in sun 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.)

That equation doesn’t balance out.

Re: Organic and regenerative agriculture are revitalizing rural Montana economies

#145

Post by songzme »

pbk1 wrote: post #138
songzme wrote: post #134

If you are still buying groceries from supermarkets, it is in your best interest to change that habit and buy organic only. Food co-ops usually tend to store organic only so they are great places to buy your groceries. Organic ensures that the soil where your food came from had no prohibited substances (most synthetic fertilizers and pesticides) applied for three years. Chances are, if you are buying food from superm…

Setting aside the environmental concerns (which are important, and indirectly health-adjacent), are there material health reasons to eat organic? This Mayo Clinic article [0] points to pretty minor improvements, would love if someone could point me to evidence substantiating OP's claim, or maybe which products in particular are materially healthier if produced organically. [0] https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifes…

> This Mayo Clinic article [0] points to pretty minor improvements

Seems like minor improvement in a meal, it doesn't measure the cumulative effects of these minor differences every meal, over several years.

Re: Organic and regenerative agriculture are revitalizing rural Montana economies

#146

Post by tastyfreeze »

songzme wrote: post #111
soperj wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what are you doing to your backyard soil?

The dirt in my backyard has been so neglected it has turned rocky. first and foremost, I'm covering the bare dirt from direct sunlight by covering it with a layer of cardboard (empty amazon shipment boxes). Next is some aerated compost tea to speed up the microbial activity and loosen the dirt and start the process of turning it into soil. Add some compost along the way I'm documenting the journey on this forum if yo…

I checked out your post on permies. Using a garden fork or broad fork to loosen the compacted soil will speed up your progress. If you see dandelions or other long tap root plants they are trying to do the job of loosening soil. But, they can only go so fast. Forking the ground then covering with compost and watering in will jump you a few years farther in succession.

Re: Organic and regenerative agriculture are revitalizing rural Montana economies

#147

Post by mathgladiator »

kickout wrote: post #82
mathgladiator wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The key criticism is that it yields less, so it doesn't scale. Furthermore, it generally lacks uniformity, so you can't automate either.

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?

I'm probably thinking along the lines of perma-culture and bio-mimicry where things are all mixed up in a more natural way. Essentially, you don't have giant machines since there are too many edge cases.

Re: Organic and regenerative agriculture are revitalizing rural Montana economies

#148

Post by samatman »

kaiju0 wrote: post #97
mathgladiator wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There feels like a deep truth to the constant assault of man-hand compounds in relation to our health. I recently started fasting every other day, and I've noticed odd issues just clearing up on their own. I'd wager the down-votes related to the claims around curing cancer, but there is reason to pursue this. I'm self experimenting on myself and wife since the wife has an auto-immune issue (MS). She was on the anti-g…

I think bodies are not meant to always be processing food. We are designed for downtime to process the backlog. The body would get to nagging issues if given opportunity to do so. I also think this has a lot to do with our cancer rates.

I'd say that a less fraught way of putting this is that we have adapted to feast-and-famine since that was the ancestral condition of the species.

So I agree with you that, at least for me, eating less than I want to (or nothing) much of the time, and eating a lot occasionally, feels better than constantly feeding myself more calories (carbs especially!) than I need.

But most people on this site, myself included, don't think we were 'designed' at all.

Re: Organic and regenerative agriculture are revitalizing rural Montana economies

#149

Post by artificialLimbs »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #28
kickout wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The number is high, but farming in generally is a high risk bet. I often say to people, I need to spend (i.e risk) $100,000 for the chance to make $20,000-$30,000 if everything goes correctly. One major event and you just lost 100K. Scale up or down depending on the size of the farm.

Sustainable farming is a terrible business as long as giant unsustainable factory farms are a thing. If you want to make money farming, you need to either go the vertical integration or agro-tourism route.

I've got several friends and there are a host of others who disagree and whose works completely disprove your point. A search should easily turn up plenty of results so I'm not taking time to look up sources on this one.

Re: Organic and regenerative agriculture are revitalizing rural Montana economies

#150

Post by tastyfreeze »

nradov wrote: post #131
tastyfreeze wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Better quality only helps if customers are willing to pay more. A lot of crops are sold through middlemen as undifferentiated commodities.

If there were a way to differentiate higher quality food in the store it doesn't need to cost more. People will prefer the higher quality produce and the low quality producers will need to adapt or die.
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