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Comment by oceanplexian | Hacker News Reader

The difference is between hobbyist agriculture and commercial agriculture. In the latter, consistency, pests and disease become more complex issues to deal with. IMHO there are a lot of analogies to software engineering. Small projects can engage in practices that don't scale, like skipping QA, not adequately testing, inconsistent coding standards.

In large farms, seeds are mass produced, engineered, and go through a QA and testing process to prevent certain diseases. There are many good reasons, BTW, why farms don't grow perennials and engage in mono-cropping, or use herbicides and genetically engineered crops instead of no-till. The trade-off in abandoning these practices almost always involves sacrificing yields and the mechanization of labor.

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I have a lot of respect and even awe for modern agriculture. It's incredible what we've done.

> The trade-off in abandoning these practices almost always involves sacrificing yields and the mechanization of labor.

The problem (that cannot be escaped) is longevity. Any system of agriculture that does not increase over time soil fertility and volume/mass is doomed.

Systems of agriculture that deplete [various measures of biological health] over time are akin to mining. Once the underlying resources are exhausted the story ends (the resources in question could be water, or biodiversity, or climate stability, etc...)

Even if we compensate with technology, we are substituting our managed system for a automatic system that has been (meta-)stable for billions of years. We should proceed carefully. The billions of people who owe their lives to the Haber-Bosch process (and other innovations) may come to rue it if we crash due to environmental destruction. By some scientific estimates this is the decade when our biomass and the biomass of our agriculture outweighs naturally occurring biomass. For better or worse the world has become our farm.

That's why Gabe Brown (et. al.) seems so important to me: he is integrating modern practices with new (scientifically-validated) regenerative practices and his farm is both profitable and healthier year after year.

> In the latter, consistency, pests and disease become more complex issues to deal with.

> There are many good reasons, BTW, why farms don't grow perennials and engage in mono-cropping, or use herbicides and genetically engineered crops instead of no-till.

But sometimes the pests and disease are caused by these same practices, right? Like, I'm aware the Cavendish banana we all eat is very susceptible to a fungal disease that is slowly spreading around the world. Because we produce so much of a single variety, where all plants are clones, a single disease can be highly disruptive. If production was evenly distributed over many varieties, and if plantations had banana plants separated by other useful crops, the whole system might be more resilient.

Orchards of fruit/nut trees are both commercial agriculture, and centered around perennials. Are industrial orchards less productive than industrial farms?

Or how about vineyards?

The limit there is likely that no one has figured out how to make an annual fruit or nut tree.

Thinking about the cost per calorie of apples versus oats, to pick an example that works for me, I would say the answer is very much yes. And ultimately, from the plant's perspective productivity should be a question of efficiently storing energy.

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