Building on soil in Big Sandy: Regenerative organic farming in rural Montana
montanafreepress.org
Building on soil in Big Sandy: Regenerative organic farming in rural Montana
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Re: Building on soil in Big Sandy: Regenerative organic farming in rural Montana
#2Hey HN! This is Part 2 of my regenerative/organic agriculture series, Common Ground. You all had such an interesting, in-depth conversation about Part 1 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27809279), that I wanted to see what you think about the next installment. It's a combo of solutions journalism and a profile (always trying to break things over here), in which I explored the 40-year career of pioneering organic farmer and entrepreneur Bob Quinn, who also has a PhD in plant biochemistry.
Quinn encounters a lot of failures, and I kept thinking how unlike a place like Silicon Valley, failure isn't necessarily celebrated in rural farming culture, where during the homestead era, failure might have meant death. Nonetheless, Quinn told me, he's seeing a potential sea change in food and farming:
“I’m not pushing uphill quite as hard against so much tradition that says there’s no reason to change anything. Thirty years ago, fewer people had already gone broke. Everything was really rosy with industrial ag.”
Re: Building on soil in Big Sandy: Regenerative organic farming in rural Montana
#3Slightly off topic, but where is the best place to get a decent feed of regenerative-ag, rewilding, reforestation, conservation, land trust, indigenous land-rights, creative-land-use news?
(HN for the pragmatic eco-conscious futurists.)
Great post by teh way
Re: Building on soil in Big Sandy: Regenerative organic farming in rural Montana
#4So how much more effectively could you regeneratively farm without being chained to the limits of organic farming? Just as a baseline, crops engineered towards this end instead of toward pure profit would likely be much better at it than anything organic.
Re: Building on soil in Big Sandy: Regenerative organic farming in rural Montana
#5So how much more effectively could you regeneratively farm without being chained to the limits of organic farming? Just as a baseline, crops engineered towards this end instead of toward pure profit would likely be much better at it than anything organic.
Complex systems are bigger. If you were building a factory, you’d want the shortest supply chain you can manage because inventory is a liability. From the standpoint of avoiding the worst of climate change, you want the most complicated “supply chain” you can manage. This also works for nitrogen cycles as well. Nitrogen that spends time as protein in insects or microbes is better than metabolizing back into the air.
Petrochemical agriculture is not very sophisticated. It can solve simple problems with few moving parts. Genetic engineering has started to ask more complex questions but at the end of the day we are still just getting past surface concerns.
Where science and technology might help is with telemetry, but only if everyone prints out Goodhart’s Law and puts it over the door, on the fridge, the microwave, the coffee machine, etc.
Data filtration is another thing. We think if invasiveness as a sort of score for a plant, but that’s an average of overall behavior. They are both harder and easier to deal with than we make it sound. Each plant is vulnerable during some part of its lifecycle, and or in certain biomes. It’s much easier to “take them out” during this window. But they’re patient. If you miss the window then you have a bigger problem next year. As a human my ability to juggle all of these concerns is somewhat limited, and a little detection and scheduling would go a long way toward helping me keep these problems small.
Re: Building on soil in Big Sandy: Regenerative organic farming in rural Montana
#6So how much more effectively could you regeneratively farm without being chained to the limits of organic farming? Just as a baseline, crops engineered towards this end instead of toward pure profit would likely be much better at it than anything organic.
Complex systems are bigger. If you were building a factory, you’d want the shortest supply chain you can manage because inventory is a liability. From the standpoint of avoiding the worst of climate change, you want the most complicated “supply chain” you can manage. This also works for nitrogen cycles as well. Nitrogen that spends time as protein in insects or microbes is better than metabolizing back into the air.…
To the petrochemical comment: for example look at Paul Stamets. Among the many irons he has in the fire, he knows that certain fungal pathogen species have competitors that are in some cases benign. But fungicides are broad spectrum. They kill off many fungi that would be no problem (and the occasional human liver). The worst weeds and the worst pathogens can often spread faster than their competitors. Only by maintaining a complex ecosystem can you achieve an armistice.
Re: Building on soil in Big Sandy: Regenerative organic farming in rural Montana
#7Hey HN! This is Part 2 of my regenerative/organic agriculture series, Common Ground. You all had such an interesting, in-depth conversation about Part 1 ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27809279 ), that I wanted to see what you think about the next installment. It's a combo of solutions journalism and a profile (always trying to break things over here), in which I explored the 40-year career of pioneering organ…
Great reporting and great work! I'm really interested in some of the "less-cultivated" plants mentioned in the article (like Kernza). It seems so weird that of all the plants that exist, we grow like 10. Seems like there's a lot of room for that "fail-fast" mindset to locate new plants we could grow that suit a particular need (or are really delicious and we had no idea!).
Re: Building on soil in Big Sandy: Regenerative organic farming in rural Montana
#8So how much more effectively could you regeneratively farm without being chained to the limits of organic farming? Just as a baseline, crops engineered towards this end instead of toward pure profit would likely be much better at it than anything organic.
While I skimmed, I didn’t see anything about “regenerative” besides a casual mention of cover crops which you wouldn’t do anything in particular to already (no pesticides or fertilizer or genetic engineering). The other bit was about being very local about picking where and how to grow nontraditional crops (think farmers market faire) in difficult locations that would otherwise grow nothing.
Transgenic watermelons aren’t a thing and the markets for these like organic.
Basically a bunch of progressive kinds of people are moving to Montana to grow fancy food and like to get pieces written to show off their virtue. They’re not entirely wrong but also… eh it’s all a little overdone.
Re: Building on soil in Big Sandy: Regenerative organic farming in rural Montana
#9Hey HN! This is Part 2 of my regenerative/organic agriculture series, Common Ground. You all had such an interesting, in-depth conversation about Part 1 ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27809279 ), that I wanted to see what you think about the next installment. It's a combo of solutions journalism and a profile (always trying to break things over here), in which I explored the 40-year career of pioneering organ…
While it's great this guy has the money to run his own research farm it's a bit unusual. In the Midwest where I live it's far more common for universities to do this task. Coupled with cooperative extension agents to spread adoption at a county level when they find something that works. Universities do basic science very well.
When something's brand new like no-till was in the eighties and precision ag in the nineties farmers often get out ahead of the ag schools. No-till isn't exactly new but perhaps some of the Montana variations happen to be?
Re: Building on soil in Big Sandy: Regenerative organic farming in rural Montana
#10Hey HN! This is Part 2 of my regenerative/organic agriculture series, Common Ground. You all had such an interesting, in-depth conversation about Part 1 ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27809279 ), that I wanted to see what you think about the next installment. It's a combo of solutions journalism and a profile (always trying to break things over here), in which I explored the 40-year career of pioneering organ…
While it's great this guy has the money to run his own research farm it's a bit unusual. In the Midwest where I live it's far more common for universities to do this task. Coupled with cooperative extension agents to spread adoption at a county level when they find something that works. Universities do basic science very well. When something's brand new like no-till was in the eighties and precision ag in the ninetie…
So, this is just a pilot project, and he's actually trying to fund the research center. I'm pretty sure that's why he was willing to spend so much time with me on this project.
The big thing is that each farmer or region needs to be experimenting to see what works there, since every place is different (climate, land management history, culture, resources, etc), and things are always changing.
The universities mostly do the commodity crop research. You're definitely right that Quinn is ahead of that system. It seems like we need other structures to support more forward-thinking work like his, whether it's private equity, nonprofit or something else.