The future of arable cropping

[SilliamWhale]

Here's a thing.

Life is better for more people globally than ever ever has been. I think that broad trajectory will continue for a bit yet.

Thankyou and Amen

 

[Kiwi Pete]

The lack of Nitrogen was a very real thing. Read The Alchemy of Air - the story predated any big corporation.

There is a phrase "standing on the shoulders of giants", you are able to criticise the motorcar, fat people, bad quality food etc over the net because you like all of us are standing on the shoulders of giants. Not every step humankind makes is a progressive or better one, but not every step is a worse one either. There are less people starving than their ever were (proportionally), we have less wars, we are richer etc. I'm not a doomsday man myself.

Me neither, but I am a realist.
Hence 95% or so of what we eat, grows right here on our property, so we can control what we make our blood from.

"We" - as in farmers globally, have facilitated several monsters to bloom simultaneously - eg the utter dependence on cereal and oil cropping for manufactured foodstuffs and renewable energy which has enabled our species to become far too numerous and absorbed in "pursuits" rather than working together to solve bigger problems - such as clothing, and feeding ourselves.
Selfish stuff, instead of community stuff.

We've enabled public health decline, we've enabled wealth inequality, in short everything we complain about would be less of an issue if farmers didn't take the bait of "growing more, to feed an increasing population"
Hence our relative wealth and standing has been greatly diminished, our health/wellbeing in many cases has gone with it.

The real success of a species is how well they can adapt to their environment, not how much they can alter their environment or how easily they do it.

We've made food artificially cheap, eg consumers can devote minutes of their day to filling their bellies, what they don't want goes to landfill and their turds go into the sea.

But the real cost to everyone alive is what this arrogance has done to soil, I think it is simply a matter of shifting baseline syndrome?
Our "good fertile soils" simply aren't as good and healthy as they should be, because of the way their processes are misunderstood.

Reading a report today from 'a leading soil scientist' and the word "fungi" never once appeared, because the scientist is really a fertiliser salesperson that whole branch is too tricky to even mention!

Because plants don't need fungi, they need more nutrients applied; that's the era we're in with our food production system - that of continuous early-succession annuals, which favour bacterial soil biomes. These favour large expenditure for not enough return.

I just can't see how this system has a future, because as much as we limit and manage erosion, it happens.. bacterial soils don't have the ability to build themselves as quickly as fungal soils, or reform aggregates after being damaged, or turn those plant residues into humus - nearly all the important roles in our soils aren't being catered for with the way in which we grow crops, because our methods are damaging, limiting, or plain destroying the fungi

I do believe that both our countries would be a lot more secure if we grew more food trees, instead of the hungry rapes and cereals over so much of the landscape; our landscapes were built for trees in areas that are now conveniently not growing trees/shrubs but grass-type plants instead.

I don't need to explain how complex it all is, but the solution is pretty simple - stop harming the planet for "food's sake" alone.
The only people who really care about food supply aren't your customers.

 

[Cowcorn]

Easily, but tweaks to agriculture alone won't ever get us there.
This "food" and land use dilemma, it's a two-way thing, and at the moment our excrement is too laden with toxins to be of any use to our soil biome, we may as well use salts in the meantime.

But our great success was the ability to learn, to adapt, and to forage - as unpleasant as this will sound to the professional 25 stone pizza pilots, the future of food (and the growing of it) probably bears little resemblance to the current decadent, wasteful, convenient one.

Hopefully the strain will be too much for many, because in any herd you want to keep the efficient and effective ones alive!
Sorry if you need a C-section or healthcare, because the doctors and nurses will be needing to gather their own food, I expect there will be huge loss of life to come.

They chem boys love the sb about "nitrogen fertiliser stopped a billion people from starving", shame about that because it facilitated a food model that could starve all of us, in time

Basically everything about "civilisation" is built around arrogance, convenience, and bloody motor-cars, so there is a lot to be done.
Whether people see the need to change, or whether they just deny it, I cannot predict at all.

Looking over this thread, I think denial will win, it's the new human nature to ignore our own basic flaws, to justify what we do instead of being considerate of soil - we are made of the soil, and she will swallow us soon enough.

PETE i love ye man, but youre as cracked as a brush !!!!

 

[Kiwi Pete]

PETE i love ye man, but youre as cracked as a brush !!!!

I know. But I HAVE to say something, if everyone is just gonna sit around, then I have to say it more

When you look at all the guys with 4,5,600 acres who are really, really digging deep just to pay their bills, but proudly fly the "farming is the solution" banner; it is REALLY hard to be that other guy, that dream-smasher who says it isn't.
Sorry, but that's not the best way to do things.

Communal gardening efforts, composting refuse, cooperation - these things work; farming is just like this except for pretty much every nuance, every chemical and every lorry-load in and out the gate.

We have people not working because "no jobs around here" and farms are working out how to control their weeds and get crops off wet land - it isn't a huge leap in technology we need, but testes

I feel we're ignoring what actually got us to where we are, and missing the really vital clues as to how we can effect changes.
It's easy to miss the clues if we are scared of poverty, primitive man carried few liabilities and overheads, so we're scared to look at primitive "us"

Stop laughing at the "good-lifers" with their fantastic productive, profitable gardens, the growing homesteader movement in the states; IMO they are far far closer to "the solution" than this capitalist/socialist horror we defend so vigourously today.

I bet this all makes me Mr Popular but I don't make that my business!

 

[Farmer Roy]

its a broken model

 

[Kiwi Pete]

its a broken model

That's why it's referred to as "a break-even business" I guess?

Gardeners generally aren't losing much money because of low overheads, depreciation, variable costs, expectations, entitlement - it's just labour + love and both are sustainable

IMO the UK is possibly the absolute best place in the world to re-adopt this model, or more to the point I can't think of anywhere more suitable off the cuff

 

[Farmer Roy]

Hahaha - good luck trying to convince THEM of that . . .

 

[Farmer Roy]

“unfair advantages”

 

[Oscar]

Sorry if this is slightly off thread but I have often wondered when I read on here and have seen first hand in the states but how do they get away with growing soya beans so often (double cropped) and so close in rotation. There must be problems with soil borne disease but they seem to carry on doing so? I was a field bean grower and it was real risky growing any closer than 1 in 5 years so how do they get round it ? Watching Millennium Farmer on U tube and he seems to only grow maize (corn) and soya not even wheat , not sure how they get away with it ?

 

[Farmer Roy]

Large areas of the US have a continuous corn / soybean rotation
I would assume they must use a lot of pesticides & fungicides to keep it going . . .

 

[SilliamWhale]

Large areas of the US have a continuous corn / soybean rotation
I would assume they must use a lot of pesticides & fungicides to keep it going . . .

Probably not as much as you might think. Dry are = less fungus a/ roundup ready etc.

 

[martian]

I know. But I HAVE to say something, if everyone is just gonna sit around, then I have to say it more

When you look at all the guys with 4,5,600 acres who are really, really digging deep just to pay their bills, but proudly fly the "farming is the solution" banner; it is REALLY hard to be that other guy, that dream-smasher who says it isn't.
Sorry, but that's not the best way to do things.

Communal gardening efforts, composting refuse, cooperation - these things work; farming is just like this except for pretty much every nuance, every chemical and every lorry-load in and out the gate.

We have people not working because "no jobs around here" and farms are working out how to control their weeds and get crops off wet land - it isn't a huge leap in technology we need, but testes

I feel we're ignoring what actually got us to where we are, and missing the really vital clues as to how we can effect changes.
It's easy to miss the clues if we are scared of poverty, primitive man carried few liabilities and overheads, so we're scared to look at primitive "us"

Stop laughing at the "good-lifers" with their fantastic productive, profitable gardens, the growing homesteader movement in the states; IMO they are far far closer to "the solution" than this capitalist/socialist horror we defend so vigourously today.

I bet this all makes me Mr Popular but I don't make that my business!

Spot on as ever, KP.
I remember being told how inefficient the huge collective farms were in the old USSR, how the allotment sized gardens of the workers vastly out-yielded (in terms of food produced/acre) the massive fields growing wheat etc

We cut a corner of a field off next to the village and created 30 or so allotments a few years back. Every time I go past it now I marvel at how productive that corner is, probably feeding 30 families with the bulk of their veggies. We're not that much better than the collective farms really. It would help if we were growing crops that people actually ate, instead about half the cereals we produce end up in factories or factory farms. Takes the fun out of the job a bit

 

[Marius]

Spot on as ever, KP.
I remember being told how inefficient the huge collective farms were in the old USSR, how the allotment sized gardens of the workers vastly out-yielded (in terms of food produced/acre) the massive fields growing wheat etc

We cut a corner of a field off next to the village and created 30 or so allotments a few years back. Every time I go past it now I marvel at how productive that corner is, probably feeding 30 families with the bulk of their veggies. We're not that much better than the collective farms really. It would help if we were growing crops that people actually ate, instead about half the cereals we produce end up in factories or factory farms. Takes the fun out of the job a bit

You can not compare collective farm of the USSR to farm of the farmer in the free world.
Collective farms had no owner (state owned) so basically everything what was possible was stolen. Where private farmer would not steal from himself.

 

[ajd132]

Spot on as ever, KP.
I remember being told how inefficient the huge collective farms were in the old USSR, how the allotment sized gardens of the workers vastly out-yielded (in terms of food produced/acre) the massive fields growing wheat etc

We cut a corner of a field off next to the village and created 30 or so allotments a few years back. Every time I go past it now I marvel at how productive that corner is, probably feeding 30 families with the bulk of their veggies. We're not that much better than the collective farms really. It would help if we were growing crops that people actually ate, instead about half the cereals we produce end up in factories or factory farms. Takes the fun out of the job a bit

I don’t think we are as bad at farming as the communist Soviet Union John!

 

[Kiwi Pete]

Private land ownership is merely a little bit of fun the banks are having with private land owners.

When humans make themselves extinct, the land will still not be owned, but it will still be there.

Trees will grow through the concrete

 

[Marius]

Private land ownership is merely a little bit of fun the banks are having with private land owners.

When humans make themselves extinct, the land will still not be owned, but it will still be there.

Trees will grow through the concrete

But just by owning you are not going to make income you have to farm it or do something else with the land to generate income.

 

[Kiwi Pete]

But just by owning you are not going to make income you have to farm it or do something else with the land to generate income.

Yep - to the next illusion:
"I work for myself" - ties in well with the "I own the land" one, and the "we need to feed the world" one

Just as cropping will never be sustainable while it relies on synthetic inputs, growing food will never be sustainable with the cost of land tacked to the price. Future growth is limited by our paradigms.

The conversation needs to shift "that much"

 

[Marius]

Yep - to the next illusion:
"I work for myself" - ties in well with the "I own the land" one, and the "we need to feed the world" one

Just as cropping will never be sustainable while it relies on synthetic inputs, growing food will never be sustainable with the cost of land tacked to the price. Future growth is limited by our paradigms.

The conversation needs to shift "that much"

Well, I think everyone has to set his own priorities and try to live by them if possible. And be critical about the agenda presented by politicians, commercial companies like your suppliers even scientists.
In fact, I am thankful to the Internet and particular The Farming Forum for broadening my views and opening my eyes to a lot of issues. Just have to remember to be critical.

 

[Kiwi Pete]

I think a lot of really, really good farmers are feeling pretty underwhelmed by it all, but it's really easy to lose yourself in work, lose the ability to step right outside of it and critically assess your weaknesses.

Probably one of farming's main weaknesses is lack of unity, using the example of allotments and commune type arrangements it relies on unity to work better - and all the corporations, scientists and politicians stand together also.

But in the middle, it's "every man for himself" in direct competition with the neighbours, squabbling over who fixes the boundary fence, and is my drill better than your plough - bread and circuses

 

[Kiwi Pete]

People have been trained to be scared of communism, why?