Organic and regenerative agriculture are revitalizing rural Montana economies • Hacker News Board

Re: Organic and regenerative agriculture are revitalizing rural Montana economies

#201

Post by lucas24 » Mon, Jul 12, 2021, 10:05 PM UTC

vicarrion wrote: post #163

At Indigo we're working on incentivizing farmers to adopt regenerative practices and get paid for sequestering carbon. 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

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.

Re: Organic and regenerative agriculture are revitalizing rural Montana economies

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Post by TaylorAlexander » Mon, Jul 12, 2021, 10:16 PM UTC

matmatmatmat wrote: post #184

TaylorAlexander wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do work at a farm and around farms that use regenerative grazing. It works great. However as a vegan my hope is that we eventually let animals graze and simply do not kill and consume them. One could argue “the meat is there” but that meat is beings with a heart and a mind. When I see the grazing animals with their babies in toe, I think about how they will be separated and the pain the mothers will go through. We…

I'm a meat-eater (have been my whole life), but I've always been partial to this argument. This is why I'm looking forward to lab-grown meat and would pay a bit of a premium for it.

Lab grown meat is promising, for sure.

FWIW I am now in year three of veganism and it feels like I have made it past all the "teething" stages to the point where I am absolutely loving my vegan meals. It is rare for me these days to eat a meat or cheese substitute - more like the occasional junk food throwback than a normal meal. Lentils, tofu, potatoes, carrots, broccoli, brown rice, peanut sauce, lettuce, zucchini, and just some of the foods that bring me joy to eat.

Hopefully you're already learning to make vegan meals but if anyone out there is on the fence I highly encourage you to learn how to make delicious vegan food. It's so tasty and you won't feel the guilt of eating meat.

Re: Organic and regenerative agriculture are revitalizing rural Montana economies

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Post by pdonis » Mon, Jul 12, 2021, 10:20 PM UTC

danans wrote: post #120

blueyes wrote: post #24

Montanan here: 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 Pla…

> 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, protei…

Has there been any work on meat substitutes using lentils or chickpeas?

Re: Organic and regenerative agriculture are revitalizing rural Montana economies

#204

Post by naasking » Mon, Jul 12, 2021, 10:29 PM UTC

evv555 wrote: post #196

emilywolfe wrote: post #194

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? Looking forward to learning more!

>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.

> It's a moderated forum of scientists, engineers, and intellectuals.

There sure are a lot of stereotypes about tech enthusiasts. Hackers are interested in hacking nature too! ;-)

Re: Organic and regenerative agriculture are revitalizing rural Montana economies

#205

Post by Floegipoky » Mon, Jul 12, 2021, 10:29 PM UTC

I'm glad to see formerly conventional farmers adopting no-till and other regenerative practices, but it's crazy to me that they're still trying to plant hundreds of hectares in monocrop. Baby steps, I guess. Maybe there's just no other way to make the economics work with so little rainfall?

Re: Organic and regenerative agriculture are revitalizing rural Montana economies

#206

Post by mkoubaa » Mon, Jul 12, 2021, 10:34 PM UTC

emilywolfe wrote: post #194

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? Looking forward to learning more!

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

Re: Organic and regenerative agriculture are revitalizing rural Montana economies

#207

Post by kbenson » Mon, Jul 12, 2021, 10:48 PM UTC

neuromancer2701 wrote: post #169

snark42 wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a material % would go away if we stopped feeding it to cows as well, a la regenerative ag.

make all the corn fields back into grasslands that they were and the cows will help rebuild the soil.

Should we be worried about how many more ruminants this would require, and their impact on the climate? I just saw some estimates of 90 million acres used to grow corn in the U.S., and a cow calf pair needs 1.5-2 acres to feed itself. I know we probably wouldn't maximize cows to the area for the type of growing we're talking about, but that's 45 million cows (with calfs) at the low end if we were, and I'm seeing reports we currently have ~95 million head of cattle in the U.S.

Those are all napkin numbers, or poorly sourced, and worst case, but I would love to see some good numbers on what it means to the climate to have a lot more ruminants in the farming process. (If much of current beef cattle production was moved to be dispersed along these lands, that seems like it might be a good idea for all involved though).

Re: Organic and regenerative agriculture are revitalizing rural Montana economies

#208

Post by Floegipoky » Mon, Jul 12, 2021, 10:49 PM UTC

emilywolfe wrote: post #194

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? Looking forward to learning more!

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.

Re: Organic and regenerative agriculture are revitalizing rural Montana economies

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Post by pacomerh » Mon, Jul 12, 2021, 11:00 PM UTC

EricE wrote: post #160

reedjosh wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the article. > 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…

Yes - people dramatically underestimate the value of ruminants that can process plants that we can't.

I wish more people knew about this. It's amazing how little we know (as a whole) about what we eat

Re: Organic and regenerative agriculture are revitalizing rural Montana economies

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Post by willlma » Mon, Jul 12, 2021, 11:00 PM UTC

kaycebasques wrote: post #2

Has anyone here undergone a soil restoration project (big or small)? Did you happen to blog about the progress? There's so much I don't know, like how you even determine that your soil is degraded, or how you measure progress.

My father is trying to do this on 17 acres of land in Mallorca, Spain. He hasn't been able to find anyone on the island who can do a soil carbon test, but there are ways of visually identifying water retention, insect and fungal life in the soil, etc. Here's his website and instagram if you're interested:

https://www.regencampos.es/

https://www.instagram.com/regencampos/