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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

#231

Post by nradov »

TaylorAlexander wrote: post #183
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…

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…

Are you sure that plants don't go through pain? How do you feel about the small animals that cows eat when they graze? I'm sure those little birds and insects feel some pain when the cows chew them up.

Re: Organic and regenerative agriculture are revitalizing rural Montana economies

#232

Post by andscoop »

Jeff_Brown wrote: post #227
andscoop wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have sources for this? I used to think similarly, but now I’m not so sure. Gabe Brown, the author of Dirt to Soil, changed my outlook on animals place in a healthy ecosystem. On his farmland he puts about 700k lbs of cattle on 1acre of land at a time, rotating those cattle frequently across 40 acres. He claims this practice has been an integral part of his regenerative ag method. http://brownsranch.us/grazing/

I don't think that math works out. That works out to around 6 square meters per cow. Google says cows eat about 160 pounds of grass per day.

Brown has bred his cattle for efficiency.

> A large-framed cow is one that requires a higher intake level for maintenance alone

https://brownsranch.us/livestock/

My math came out similarly to yours but I don’t think it’s unreasonable for there to be 150lbs of waste high cover crop biomass in a 6 square meter area.

Again he is rotating these cattle daily and never depleting the crops of any one area, giving them a chance to grow back by the time the cattle are rotated back through.

Another term you can search for to find visuals of what this sort of density looks like is mobgrazing.

Re: Organic and regenerative agriculture are revitalizing rural Montana economies

#233

Post by stonogo »

kickout wrote: post #168
thehappypm wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Those costs are known, and outside of California and Nebraska, almost no crops are irrigated. As far as transporting crops to markets? That's actually a success story. Rail hauls most of the crops from Montana to the PNW (if exporting to China). Rail is dirt cheap and efficient, as any true HN reader will know. :)

For context, the "almost no crops" that are irrigated comprises about fifty-five million acres, a little over 7% of cropland & pastures. Removing pastures from this data is difficult, but since we're only looking at three hundred million acres primary cropland in the US, we can confidently approximate between a tenth and a sixth of primary crops are irrigated.

1 - https://www.nass.usda.gov/Publications/Todays_Reports/report...

Re: Organic and regenerative agriculture are revitalizing rural Montana economies

#234

Post by saalweachter »

Floegipoky wrote: post #208
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 clo…

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.

Agriculture and its future are like candy.

Re: Organic and regenerative agriculture are revitalizing rural Montana economies

#235

Post by SlapperKoala »

jeffreyrogers wrote: post #57

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?

More labor intensive. Often requires large upfront capital investment and adopting of new skills to implement. Benefits are difficult to quantify.

Re: Organic and regenerative agriculture are revitalizing rural Montana economies

#236

Post by refurb »

songzme wrote: post #177
refurb wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Food that cures cancer. And what is the scientific basis of that?

There's no scientific conclusion that says cancer cannot be cured through natural means. I'm not against someone trying and I hope he succeeds.

Steve Jobs though he could cure his cancer through diet.

Re: Organic and regenerative agriculture are revitalizing rural Montana economies

#237

Post by Animats »

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…

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.

[1] https://www.dla.mil/TroopSupport/Subsistence/Operational-rat...

Re: Organic and regenerative agriculture are revitalizing rural Montana economies

#238

Post by pbronez »

emilywolfe wrote: post #226
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!

ok great. Makes sense. And people have definitely moved to Montana during the pandemic! Another q: What new markets in this space are interesting to you?

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.

Re: Organic and regenerative agriculture are revitalizing rural Montana economies

#239

Post by thehappypm »

stonogo wrote: post #233
kickout wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those costs are known, and outside of California and Nebraska, almost no crops are irrigated. As far as transporting crops to markets? That's actually a success story. Rail hauls most of the crops from Montana to the PNW (if exporting to China). Rail is dirt cheap and efficient, as any true HN reader will know. :)

For context, the "almost no crops" that are irrigated comprises about fifty-five million acres, a little over 7% of cropland & pastures. Removing pastures from this data is difficult, but since we're only looking at three hundred million acres primary cropland in the US, we can confidently approximate between a tenth and a sixth of primary crops are irrigated. 1 - https://www.nass.usda.gov/Publications/Todays_Reports…

Do you know if things like sprinklers count as irrigation? I grew up spending a lot of time in Delaware which is tons of farmland, and I remember seeing lots of weird watering devices and sprinklers.

Re: Organic and regenerative agriculture are revitalizing rural Montana economies

#240

Post by dsaavy »

amanaplanacanal wrote: post #112
dsaavy wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very cool seeing someone else on HN take on restoring their backyard soil. I've been at it for two years in my quarter acre plot and the results are starting to show, so keep at it! Very interested in your bootcamp link so thanks for posting that. Personal tangent: The property I have was a typical Roundup maintained monoculture lawn without any insect diversity, bees, etc. Now it's teeming with all types of insects…

Just bought a house surrounded by mostly lawn. I’m starting by sheet mulching my lawn with cardboard covered by a thick layer of wood chips. Hopefully the underlayer will be ready for planting next spring. Going to fill in between the food plants with clover, sweet peas, and lupine for nitrogen fixing. I’m looking forward to the transformation.

That sounds awesome. Best of luck.

You might have heard of this already, but for anyone else who might come across this comment, there's a site called https://getchipdrop.com/ where you can sign up to get a free truckload of wood chips from arborists that just did work nearby. Just beware that you can get a TON of chips dropped off so be ready to move all that matter lol.

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