Treating the Farm as an Ecosystem with Gabe Brown Part 1, The 5 Tenets of Soil Health

This happened due to extermination of soil life through modern farming practices of heavy tilling, fertilizing and monoculture crops. Dead soil is more susceptible to erosion and requires ever increasing amounts of synthetic fertilizer to grow anything. More soil has been lost from the US than the amount of food that has been produced. Soil fertility can be returned to historical levels by changing farming practices to make living soil. The benefits of treating the soil as a living organism include increased fertility, water infiltration, moisture retention, and nutrient availability as well as decreasing or eliminating synthetic fertilizer requirements. [LINK] This is a long video but it has completely changed my home gardening practices. [VIDEO]

Gabe Brown mentioned it in this lecture on regenerative agriculture. Sorry, but I don't have a timestamp, it's been a few weeks since I watched it. [VIDEO] I'm not an expert in farming, but I do know a little bit of plant biology. My understanding of what he said was that the combination of atmospheric CO2 and fertilizer increases the growth rate of the plant, but the plant doesn't uptake a proportionately larger amount of other micro nutrients, either because it is biologically rate limited or doesn't have access. Other Googling suggests that it could be a result of selective breeding picking crops that grow faster but are less nutritious, but that would seem to be a correlated problem. Those crops tend to be selected for their ability to grow with synthetic fertilizer and *-cides, with the lack of nutritional value being an unintended consequence.

I found this video series about soil really interesting: [VIDEO] It's long, and I was sure I would click away, but the presenter has a great tone and the content is heka cool.

> So who are you planning to put to work as agricultural stoop-labor peasants? Are you volunteering? I mean, we used to harvest all our crops that way. The people who did it were generally...not volunteers. I find it strange how we have cell phones and solar power and other these other wonders, and yet arguments always goes straight to slavery anytime the specter of higher labor costs comes up. One would think innovation, especially on this forum. The obvious, immediate way would be to fix the immigration laws and enforcement to allow in as much guest labor as needed. If the economics are an issue, then selective use of farm subsidies are appropriate given the positive value being added to the land in terms of increased productivity and soil quality. Eventually innovation will bring the costs down. > As far as higher yields go, I don't believe you. Another silly comparison to the past - agricultural science has advanced multiple times in the last 80 years. No one would argue that modern, chemistry-based farming isn't productive, simply that it's less productive (and far, FAR more detrimental to the soil) than what modern science around restorative agriculture can produce. Restorative Ag 101: [VIDEO] For what it's worth, I also think Corn yields are probably impacted by how heavily subsidized it is. That's a policy that started with the New Deal in 1933, so it makes sense that the graphic would start to increase there.

Not sure if you've come come across it but Gabe Brown has done some interesting stuff in farm scale low input farming. [VIDEO] That said, I think there is a lot of interesting stuff in permaculture design. But in a lot of cases it is a bit of a pyramid scheme / agile consultancy feel going on.

Gabe Brown has been doing regenerative agriculture for over two decades on Brown's Ranch, over 2000 acres, in Bismarck, North Dakota successfully. Food crops plus cover crops plus livestock, all integrated. Lot of good results compared to neighboring farmers doing the traditional synthetic fertilizer / pesticide / tilling / monoculture approach. There are others like him too. And he's been invited to and giving a lot of talks about it at many confs for years: Watch "Treating the Farm as an Ecosystem with Gabe Brown Part 1, The 5 Tenets of Soil Health" [VIDEO]

I had an experience with mycelium that changed my way of looking at the world: [LINK] I am coming around to the POV that soil should be thought of as a kind of organism. Check out e.g.: "Treating the Farm as an Ecosystem with Gabe Brown Part 1, The 5 Tenets of Soil Health" [VIDEO] He talks about fungus starting around 1:20 (80 minutes in) [VIDEO] Fungal to bacterial ratios...

Experiments on soil compaction show the rolling to be better, the roll needs not to be that heavy, only to kill the vegetable. Also, you don't do a separate pass on the ground, you just roll it at sow time, so no extra gas. Also, the vegetable cover absorbs CO2 and later fix it to the ground. Here is a thorough comparison of soils and methods [VIDEO]

YouTube soil health videos has all you need. Gabe Brown and Ray Archuleta presentations are easy to consume. Dr. Elaine Ingham focuses more on the soil life in greater detail than most care about but she does provide some important to understand details on rhizosphere interactions. Living Web Farms has quite a lot of lectures about regenerative practices. There are also a myriad of academic papers on soil health as well. This video, [VIDEO] , by Gabe Brown set me on the regenerative path. If you dont want to consume hours of information here is the gist. The soil is alive. Plants use microbes and fungus as an external stomach. Direct sun and disruption/tilling kill the soil life. Without life in the soil you eventually have a desert as the organics are sifted out of the sand by weathering.

For those who are interested in the topic of soil reconstruction and balance in nature, some more sources: Documentary on the Loess plateau in China: [LINK] Talk on the Caledonian Forest: [LINK] Talk on using the "herd effect" in Africa: [LINK] A talk presenting a realistic view on soil reconstruction, what IMO is the best argument to convince farmers: [VIDEO]

Gabe Brown's talk is my favorite introduction to regenerative ag: [VIDEO] He did a book on it: [LINK] I also like Geoff Lawton's work on food forests: [LINK] [LINK]

In this talk from 2017, around 1h30m in, he says that he hasn't yet found a way to make no-till organic work in terms of weed prevention. But, he said he was close to figuring it out. [VIDEO] Has any progress been made since? Is this an area where technology could help (eg robotic precision weeding machines)? Disclaimer that I have yet to read your article so it may already be covered.

"One teaspoon of healthy soil contains more bacteria, fungi and other microbes than there are humans on Earth. Those hungry organisms can make soil a difficult place to store carbon over long periods of time." The natural respiration of soil microbes is small compared to how much carbon can be naturally sequestered in healthy soil due to sustainable agricultural practices. Healthy soil is well-known to hold substantial amounts of carbon, right along side such organisms. The development of unsustainable agricultural practices (monocultures, single-planting seasons, letting fields lie fallow, tilling, chemical sprays, essentially Monsanto's entire business model) has destroyed soil biodiversity and health. Healthy soil can absorb an inch of rain every few minutes. Fields flood (and crops are subsequently lost) because the ground is hard and crusty, preventing soil absorption. If more cropland soil had the healthy consistency of cottage cheese, flooding wouldn't be an issue. Yes, forced carbon sequestration might not work in the presence of healthy soil. However, fixing the deficient soils created across the world from unsustainable industrial agriculture practices will naturally sequester carbon. I would love to know exactly how much carbon no longer is trapped in our soils that once was due to the last 100+ years of unsustainable industrialized agriculture. [VIDEO] [LINK]

I don't know if you've come across this video on HN before, but I discovered it here and it was an eye-opener for me. It's a guy called Gabe Brown who transformed his farm into one that needed no fertilizer by using no-till and rotation. One of the most compelling things is that he's no tree-hugger (he even has an uncomplimentary comparison with the soil from an organic farm) - his focus is squarely on profit, which goes up when you're not forking out huge amounts of money on chemicals. I thought I'd give it five minutes, then 2.5 hours later I realised I'd watched the whole thing. [VIDEO]

More than borderline, there are many many examples these days of people practicing forms of ecologically-informed agriculture that match or exceed the yields of destructive systems and methods. When I first heard about Permaculture in the late 80's it was still pretty obscure, and regenerative agriculture in general was "hippie-dippy". Nowadays there are thousand of projects with videos on the youtube, and people are practicing ecologically harmonious farming all over the world. See especially Gabe Brown's talk linked below, he's not replacing current agriculture, just updating it with scientifically-grounded techniques that improve the volume and vitality of his topsoil while being more profitable. Quoting from some notes I've been keeping: There's the "Grow Biointensive" method which is designed to provide a complete diet in a small space while also building soil and fertility. They have been dialing it in for forty years and now have a turn-key system that is implemented and functioning all over the world. => [LINK] Grow Biointensive (These folks are also selling their system, but they also have e.g. manuals you can download for free. I find their site curiously hard to use.) ## Permaculture Permaculture could be called "applied ecology" (with a kind of hippie spin.) and a similar school (or parallel evolution) called "Syntropic" Agriculture. Both of these systems aim to mimic natural ecosystems to create "food forests" that produce crops year-round without inputs (no fert

I don't know what scams you are looking at but regenerative agriculture is incredibly complicated and time consuming but not physically labor intensive because it is compatible with mechanization. Conventional argiculture is the simple and lazy version where instead of trying to understand your local ecosystem you just douse everything in fertilizer, pesticide, etc so you don't have to care what is happening in your soil. [VIDEO]

Would you rather grow cover crops or have soil depletion? Also cover crops don't result in a 50% increase in land usage. Here is a video that might interest you: [VIDEO]

As a complete outsider, I found this fascinating series of talks a few years ago that go into great detail on soil for farmers: [VIDEO]

Watch "Treating the Farm as an Ecosystem with Gabe Brown Part 1, The 5 Tenets of Soil Health" on YouTube [VIDEO]

>If they could increase production by 60% with any additive at all, it would immediately see widespread use. 1. No, that's not true at all 2. It's astounding how everywhere I go online there is someone spouting off nonsense which is then repeated and perpetuated. 3. Go listen to Gabe Brown, he saves thousands and thousands by not not paying for synthetic fertilizers. "Above every surface acre on earth there's approximately 32,000 tons of atmospheric nitrogen, why would any farmer want to write a check for nitrogen?, I just can't figure that one out" -- Gabe Brown [VIDEO]