Transcend Productions
5 HN recommenders · recommended in 9 months, 2015–2023
58:53 · 407K views · Dec 8, 2014
Farmer Gabe Brown talks about how he rebuilt the soil on his ranch using no-till farming, cover crops, and grazing animals. The talk was recorded at a sustainable agriculture symposium in Idaho in 2014.
HN readers share it as a persuasive, first-hand account of regenerative agriculture, citing its claims about soil organic matter, yields and reduced fertilizer use.
11 comments from Hacker News
This talk introduced me to the no-till, soil health farming paradigm: this video TL;DR: focus on soil health and diversify your crops. His results are stunning.
I can't criticize your approach, since I'm not a farmer. I respect what you do & the work that it takes to run a farm. I can only point out what I've seen & what inspires me. re: Amonia > A typical modern ammonia-producing plant first converts natural gas (i.e., methane) or LPG (liquefied petroleum gases such as propane and butane) or petroleum naphtha into gaseous hydrogen. [LINK] This requires the importation or local extraction of fossil fuels. Given that the United States is now utilizing fracking to extract natural gas, this causes pollution within the aquifers as well as reducing the integrity of the surface strata. A natural approach of fertilization is animal poop from grazing & polycultures (nitrogen fixing perennial plants, like Black Locust), similar to how the ancient prairies were fertilized. Mark Shepard, who's farm is in Wisconsin, has a large scale example of "Restoration Agriculture". He has a silvopasture that feeds his livestock. The livestock fertilize the fields. He also grows nuts. He also saves money by not having to buy fertilizer or pesticides. He also uses keyline design, swales, & ponds to efficiently use water & reduce runoff. [LINK] [LINK] Here's a great talk by Gabe Brown from Idaho using natural, regenerative methods to rebuild soil. this video My friends at [LINK] in New Jersey have a lush polyculture medicinal herb & food farm that started from rocky spent earth. There was no top soil when they started a few years ago. You can see how it looks ri
Thank you for your anecdotal account. Many petroleum farmers suffer from soil runoff. There is also desertification. Also, there is inefficient usage of water draining the acquirers. Note that California monoculture petrol farmers are largely responsible for using nearly 80% of California's water usage. There's also habitat loss for insects & other organisms. There's also pollution of water from the excess nitrogen. There's also the poisoning of the people who eat chemical agriculture foods. Note the obesity epidemic & it's relation to the disruption of gut bacteria. Herbicides & Fungicides disrupt biological processes in humans. You mention "scare tactics". The problem is temporarily mitigated by mining & importing the nutrients. This is inefficient on fossil fuels because we are trucking in nutrients that are available with natural systems. Here's another account a farmer using natural systems to build soil. this video His yields increased & he is the most profitable farmer in his local area.
Someone posted this link in some other discussion where he came up. I found it fascinating and what you mention as well as much of what your sibling posters do is in there: this video I don't know what kind of crowd that "Sustainable Agriculture's annual symposium" pulls but I found the number of people in the audience quite small unfortunately.
I found this presentation[0] by a farmer talking about growing soil to be super interesting. He touches on promoting beneficial fungi as one part of it. He claims that with all the relatively easy techniques he, and other like minded farmers do, that they get high calories per acre than some conventional farmers. [0] this video