<story><title>No-till no-herbicide farming system in trial since 1981</title><url>https://rodaleinstitute.org/science/farming-systems-trial/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bregma</author><text>&amp;gt; They&amp;#x27;re running 72 experiments on 12 acres.&lt;p&gt;I live on a 54 acre property: I can picture 12 acres as about a quarter of my property. If I further divide that into 72 plots, I end up with a bunch of little gardens.&lt;p&gt;What works in a small garden plot is usually totally unscalable at crop production volumes. My experience (over decades) is I couldn&amp;#x27;t sustain my family for a year on a 1-acre garden plot even if I had the time to work it intensively and used nothing but recycled organic byproduct (compost and, uh, other stuff) as fertilizer. Even if we tried to reproduce the great Kampuchean agricultural experiment of the mid-1970s and put everyone to work in the fields full time we could not feed the world this way.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t have a problem with folks idly dallying in this kind of research, and I think useful practices could possibly be revealed, but scale and practicality need to be taken into account when interpreting results.</text></item><item><author>estsauver</author><text>They&amp;#x27;re running 72 experiments on 12 acres. That&amp;#x27;s mostly interesting to me because that&amp;#x27;s an incredibly small area of land. US corn agriculture is on about 83 million acres of land. Subsaharan African Agriculture also plants about 83 million acres of maize. They see yields that are 1&amp;#x2F;3 to 1&amp;#x2F;4 of US agricultural yields. These yield gaps dramatically close when you start using fertilizer and modern agricultural practices. (The One Acre Fund puts out some pretty good data on this, the Burke and Lobell lab at Stanford have a few good papers on this as well.)&lt;p&gt;In short, I would just ask people to remember that there are quite a few farmers who would &lt;i&gt;love&lt;/i&gt; to stop paying for fertilizer if it didn&amp;#x27;t impact their yields: all of them in fact. It&amp;#x27;s one of their biggest costs generally. When an organization says &amp;quot;The Farming Systems Trial was started by Bob Rodale, who wanted scientific backing for the recommendations being made to the newly forming National Organic Program in the 1980s&amp;quot; they&amp;#x27;ve incorporated confirmation bias into their heart.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m certainly biased, I&amp;#x27;m the CTO of a company that&amp;#x27;s trying to improve agricultural inputs by financing access to smallholders in subsaharan Africa (Apollo Agriculture, we&amp;#x27;re actually a YC F1 company also,) but it&amp;#x27;s worth noting that this is research that&amp;#x27;s quite a bit outside the normal recommendations that ag scientists believe. I also worked at The Climate Corporation before, to put all my potential biases out on the table.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>durkie</author><text>&amp;gt; My experience (over decades) is I couldn&amp;#x27;t sustain my family for a year on a 1-acre garden plot even if I had the time to work it intensively and used nothing but recycled organic byproduct (compost and, uh, other stuff) as fertilizer.&lt;p&gt;I find this surprising. I help run an Atlanta-area non-profit that has a ~1 acre organic farm that donates everything it produces. For the year 2020 we have already donated 3120 lb &amp;#x2F; 1415 kg of food.&lt;p&gt;We&amp;#x27;re not trying to produce a nutritionally complete output on the farm, but that&amp;#x27;s still ~70 lb &amp;#x2F; 31.7 kg of food a week on average.</text></comment>
<story><title>No-till no-herbicide farming system in trial since 1981</title><url>https://rodaleinstitute.org/science/farming-systems-trial/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bregma</author><text>&amp;gt; They&amp;#x27;re running 72 experiments on 12 acres.&lt;p&gt;I live on a 54 acre property: I can picture 12 acres as about a quarter of my property. If I further divide that into 72 plots, I end up with a bunch of little gardens.&lt;p&gt;What works in a small garden plot is usually totally unscalable at crop production volumes. My experience (over decades) is I couldn&amp;#x27;t sustain my family for a year on a 1-acre garden plot even if I had the time to work it intensively and used nothing but recycled organic byproduct (compost and, uh, other stuff) as fertilizer. Even if we tried to reproduce the great Kampuchean agricultural experiment of the mid-1970s and put everyone to work in the fields full time we could not feed the world this way.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t have a problem with folks idly dallying in this kind of research, and I think useful practices could possibly be revealed, but scale and practicality need to be taken into account when interpreting results.</text></item><item><author>estsauver</author><text>They&amp;#x27;re running 72 experiments on 12 acres. That&amp;#x27;s mostly interesting to me because that&amp;#x27;s an incredibly small area of land. US corn agriculture is on about 83 million acres of land. Subsaharan African Agriculture also plants about 83 million acres of maize. They see yields that are 1&amp;#x2F;3 to 1&amp;#x2F;4 of US agricultural yields. These yield gaps dramatically close when you start using fertilizer and modern agricultural practices. (The One Acre Fund puts out some pretty good data on this, the Burke and Lobell lab at Stanford have a few good papers on this as well.)&lt;p&gt;In short, I would just ask people to remember that there are quite a few farmers who would &lt;i&gt;love&lt;/i&gt; to stop paying for fertilizer if it didn&amp;#x27;t impact their yields: all of them in fact. It&amp;#x27;s one of their biggest costs generally. When an organization says &amp;quot;The Farming Systems Trial was started by Bob Rodale, who wanted scientific backing for the recommendations being made to the newly forming National Organic Program in the 1980s&amp;quot; they&amp;#x27;ve incorporated confirmation bias into their heart.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m certainly biased, I&amp;#x27;m the CTO of a company that&amp;#x27;s trying to improve agricultural inputs by financing access to smallholders in subsaharan Africa (Apollo Agriculture, we&amp;#x27;re actually a YC F1 company also,) but it&amp;#x27;s worth noting that this is research that&amp;#x27;s quite a bit outside the normal recommendations that ag scientists believe. I also worked at The Climate Corporation before, to put all my potential biases out on the table.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>voisin</author><text>&amp;gt; I couldn&amp;#x27;t sustain my family for a year on a 1-acre garden plot even if I had the time to work it intensively and used nothing but recycled organic byproduct&lt;p&gt;Check out “The Market Gardener”[0] if you need help learning how to do far, far better than this. We need more, smaller farms. Biointensive farming and permaculture can save our planet.&lt;p&gt;[0] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.goodreads.com&amp;#x2F;book&amp;#x2F;show&amp;#x2F;18406251&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.goodreads.com&amp;#x2F;book&amp;#x2F;show&amp;#x2F;18406251&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>