Upward Farms throws in towel ten years after founding vertical-farming business

> Agriculture is engineering an unnatural surplus for human consumption, and keeping everything else from eating that surplus.

If that is the case (and there were no other alternatives) the dominant form of agriculture (industrialized monoculture) is more or less tailor made to be attractive to pests and an enormous amount of energy and labour has to be employed to keep them out, much more than in the regenerative systems I've highlighted.

> I'm skeptical those have compatible productivity to typical commercial farming techniques

Way to be skeptical without even bothering to do a Google search. Mark Shepard claims (and has 20 years of data to back it up) that his system is of a comparable productivity in terms of human-usable calories to an industrialized corn operation. Syntropic agriculture was developed on a plot of land that was degraded by conventional agricultural methods to the point that it was given up and it now provides the basis for a commercially successful farm. Plenty of other examples around as well.

> […] or it requires far more labor input than is practical for modern society.

"Modern" societies employ between 0.5 and 3% of their workforce in agriculture [1]. If we'd tripple the share of agricultural workforce but in return drastically reduce the energy use and make farming a net carbon sink instead of a substantial contributor to global warming, I think it would be very much "practical". As things stand, we could pull the required labour simply from people doing tele-marketing and nothing of value would be lost ;-)

[1] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.AGR.EMPL.ZS?location...

> the dominant form of agriculture (industrialized monoculture) is more or less tailor made to be attractive to pests and an enormous amount of energy and labour has to be employed to keep them out, much more than in the regenerative systems I've highlighted.

agreed

> Mark Shepard claims (and has 20 years of data to back it up) that his system is of a comparable productivity in terms of human-usable calories to an industrialized corn operation. Syntropic agriculture was developed on a plot of land that was degraded by conventional agricultural methods to the point that it was given up and it now provides the basis for a commercially successful farm.

Yes, I've read about Mark Shepard with a lot of interest. However that's just one farm. It's yet to be seen if his methods will work elsewhere, if his claims for productivity can be substantiated, if his productivity can be duplicated, and so on. In short his work is, currently, at best a prototype.

If you're going to claim that regenerative can be as productive as conventional then you need to point to systems that are widely used and whose productivity figures are reliably gathered.

> "Modern" societies employ between 0.5 and 3% of their workforce in agriculture [1]. If we'd tripple the share of agricultural workforce but in return drastically reduce the energy use and make farming a net carbon sink instead of a substantial contributor to global warming, I think it would be very much "practical". As things stand, we could pull the required labour simply from people doing tele-marketing and nothing of value would be lost ;-)

You miss the point. It's not about the availability of labour. It's about the price of labour. It's more economically efficient to reduce labour as much as possible. I'm not claiming this is a good thing. It's the reality of farming in a free-market society.

It is dump enough that it is now actively discouraged by German ag-extension services, if an alternative soil preparation/seeding method is available.

>Care to elaborate what you mean?

My non-American interpretation of the use of fascism in this sense is relating to:

- taking away rights (e.g. abortion, and please don't argue technicalities)

- banning medical intervention which provably increases quality of life and decreases likelihood of self-harm

- suppressing dissident literature (e.g. recent "temporary" bans of books on Rosa Parks)

- lowering the threshold of the death penalty

- trying to introduce the death penalty for more things, especially what they call "grooming"

- associating entire groups of minorities with this idea of "grooming"

- aggressively suppressing and trying to exclude dissident politicians (e.g. the "Tennessee Three" or currently Zooey Zephyr)

- attempting to overthrow an election by both casting doubt in bad faith and literally working out plans on how to use a coup to take over power

> Why out-perform? Wouldn't it be reasonable to have similarly or slightly worse performing system in exchange for using drastically less energy and degrading natural resources less?

Sorry, you mentioned regenerative systems as out-performing conventional.

I'm not aware of a widespread regenerative system that even has similar or slightly worse yield. For operations at any kind of scale I've generally heard 30%-40% less yield from regenerative. In a low-margin high competition business like farming that's the difference between profit and bankruptcy.

Again, if you've links to highly productive _widely deployed_ regenerative systems please post them.

As I've said in another comment Mark Shepard's work is very interesting, but it's an isolated case, a prototype. The trick is replicating it widely - it remains to be seen if that can be done.