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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

#211

Post by cwkoss »

tastyfreeze wrote: post #150
nradov wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Higher quality food should cost more - it costs more to produce.

I'm envious of Japan's 'designer produce' tied to their gift culture. America doesn't really have much "This fruit is so much better, people are willing to pay 10x+ for it". I think our food system would be much better if we had $20 versions of all produce to get people to stop treating produce as fungible commodities.

Re: Organic and regenerative agriculture are revitalizing rural Montana economies

#212

Post by yepthatsreality »

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!

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.

Re: Organic and regenerative agriculture are revitalizing rural Montana economies

#213

Post by bordercases »

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…

I echo this take, particularly the latter sentiments.

Re: Organic and regenerative agriculture are revitalizing rural Montana economies

#214

Post by worldsayshi »

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!

I think this as much about technology as anything. It's a difference in how to do things that isn't obvious and that can carry a significant impact.

Re: Organic and regenerative agriculture are revitalizing rural Montana economies

#215

Post by ambrose2 »

lucas24 wrote: post #201
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 + acc…

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!

Re: Organic and regenerative agriculture are revitalizing rural Montana economies

#216

Post by andscoop »

knuthsat wrote: post #171
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…

There's really not that much meat in regenerative agriculture. Given the current per capita consumption of meat in kg, a regenerative ag operation could never accomplish that. Reducing to 4-30kg of meat per capita per year seems impossible. No one can even accomplish that with ruminants. That's why there's so much chicken everywhere, because accomplishing that with ruminants is near impossible, so chicken is advertis…

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/

Re: Organic and regenerative agriculture are revitalizing rural Montana economies

#217

Post by markdown »

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.

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.

Re: Organic and regenerative agriculture are revitalizing rural Montana economies

#218

Post by joshuahaglund »

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!

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.

Re: Organic and regenerative agriculture are revitalizing rural Montana economies

#219

Post by andscoop »

kbenson wrote: post #207
neuromancer2701 wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 repo…

I think these numbers are from the more traditional way of farming.

At least one practitioner of regenerative agriculture, Gabe Brown, uses super dense grazing and frequent movement of the cattle to actually restore his soil health.

http://brownsranch.us/grazing/

If this sort of stuff interest you, I highly suggest his book, Dirt To Soil. It’s a light read with a lot of great information on regen ag.

Re: Organic and regenerative agriculture are revitalizing rural Montana economies

#220

Post by eightysixfour »

evtothedev wrote: post #115

If you're a UI/UX designer, and this area excites you, please drop me a line. We're tackling this exact problem at Yard Stick ( https://www.useyardstick.com/ ) - developing a new way to measure soil carbon that is fast, accurate and affordable, with backing by ARPA-E and in collaboration with the Soil Health Institute. Later this week, I'm going to post a contract-to-hire position. In the meantime, email me at evan@u…

I work for a design consultancy with a heavy emphasis on user research. Are you only open to working with individuals or would you be open to working with a consultancy? This sounds like an awesome design problem.
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