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Comment by timcash | Hacker News Reader

Soil needs microbiology, gas exchange and hydrology this is what makes elements available. Nothing needs to be added and all the elements are plentiful. We killed the microbiology, the research is already done. Keep many kinds of plants in the soil year round, stop adding chems, this increases yield 3x and water retention enough to reduce irrigation demand up to 70%. Strange thing is, this is free and removes a bunch of business models + gov subsidies from industrial ag and the universities that support them through "research". Just finished a year talking to farmers and growers of all kinds across the US.

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> We killed the microbiology, the research is already done. Keep many kinds of plants in the soil year round, stop adding chems, this increases yield 3x and water retention enough to reduce irrigation demand up to 70%.

Permaculture, no-till, ... Not sure there are definitive research conclusions on this, especially "3x yield".

IME, the conclusions are not as straight cut, nor as general and imply profound changes, such as mixing crops, cultivating more land, reducing yield, never leaving the soil exposed. Many things that have to be done together, with local optimizations, to get significant improvement.

Just like "electric cars" don't directly solve the "many privately owned petrol cars" problem. A solution being the "electric car tech" + another ownership / sharing model + urbanism changes.

Have you gone out and done some experiments for yourself? or is this from reading about it?

"Applications to a sandy soil of the partially purified surface-active compounds improved soil water retention up to 314.3% compared to untreated soil. Similarly, after 36 h of incubation, the humidity uptake rate of treated sandy soil was up to 607.7% higher than untreated controls." ... "Overall, results revealed that polyextremotolerant bioemulsifiers of bacteria from arid and desert soils represent potential sources to develop new natural soil-wetting agents for improving water retention in arid soils." https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5984429/

Water retention is something but food that isn't as good or yeild that results in not as good food is a even worse problem too though, the specifics about gypsum should be more researched. I suggested transition metals because it's different and it may be safer but even the alternatives associated with fisher are just as scary for food growth too.

Wow, can you point me to research and books on this? I happen to have a bachelor degree in the field and am always eager to find non traditional ways to grow especially pasture for dairy cows, but anything harvestable will be interesting just for the soil science alone.

Hi Tim, can you provide some resources + links?

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