emilywolfe

thank you! and thank you for reading part 1, as well.

It is. I use the definition that most farmers in the state use in the article--working on soil health through a suite of techniques, while also still spraying in a limited capacity when needed.

There are a million ways to define regenerative agriculture. That's one of the main issues right now, and it's something I covered in part 1 of this series. It's covered in incredible depth here: https://thecounter.org/regenerative-agriculture-racial-equit...

That article also leads to the same point I was trying to make in the above comment. If agriculture is going to be truly regenerative, it needs to support communities. I did not get into that explicitly in the story, but it informs the entire framing of it.

You're right, this one was focused largely on the work of one organic farmer, although I would argue that much of what he does is actually regenerative in the sense of regenerating local commerce and economies. And he was one of the first to grow his own soil nutrients by planting dryland alfalfa as a cover crop, and rotating his cover crops.

I would also say that while you're right about progressives moving to Montana, this is not one of them. Bob is a third-generation Big Sandy farmer. In the book Liz Carlisle co-authored with him, she said he was a republican.

My idea was to show how through organic, he'd added value to his own farm, to many others, and to rural communities. And that meant creating infrastructure and new markets. Regenerative, now 40 years later, can learn from that as IT aims to create new markets.

There's some good stuff on the regenerative ag Subreddit https://www.reddit.com/r/RegenerativeAg/. Land Core is a leader in the space, as is the Soil Health Institute.

Thank you! And this is a good idea. My third (and last) installment in the series will be about policy. I'd be interested to see if there are any that encourage that kind of experimentation.

I think no-till became more common in the 80s, because that's when Roundup became more widely available, at least in Montana.

So, this is just a pilot project, and he's actually trying to fund the research center. I'm pretty sure that's why he was willing to spend so much time with me on this project.

The big thing is that each farmer or region needs to be experimenting to see what works there, since every place is different (climate, land management history, culture, resources, etc), and things are always changing.

The universities mostly do the commodity crop research. You're definitely right that Quinn is ahead of that system. It seems like we need other structures to support more forward-thinking work like his, whether it's private equity, nonprofit or something else.

Hey HN! This is Part 2 of my regenerative/organic agriculture series, Common Ground. You all had such an interesting, in-depth conversation about Part 1 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27809279), that I wanted to see what you think about the next installment. It's a combo of solutions journalism and a profile (always trying to break things over here), in which I explored the 40-year career of pioneering organic farmer and entrepreneur Bob Quinn, who also has a PhD in plant biochemistry.

Quinn encounters a lot of failures, and I kept thinking how unlike a place like Silicon Valley, failure isn't necessarily celebrated in rural farming culture, where during the homestead era, failure might have meant death. Nonetheless, Quinn told me, he's seeing a potential sea change in food and farming:

“I’m not pushing uphill quite as hard against so much tradition that says there’s no reason to change anything. Thirty years ago, fewer people had already gone broke. Everything was really rosy with industrial ag.”

These are interesting, and I second a lot of the journalist’s comments in the Lehrer discussion. I see that Blendle is one response to the problem of the lack of funding for journalism, and someone here suggested Substack as another. I’d love to see this group hack how to pay the real cost of in-depth journalism. I spent 450+ hours on that first story. Which is great, and I’ll do it again, but we can’t expect journalists to always shoulder that load.

Now that I see there’s such a hunger for this kind of storytelling, I want to build on what I’ve done in part 1. To do so, I’m seeking to fully fund parts 2 and 3 of this series, so I can continue digging deeply and telling stories of great characters. What ideas do you have for individuals/entities that might be interested? The money would go through the publisher, which is a 501 c3 nonprofit.

Thank you all for such a great conversation here and asking such thought-provoking questions!

These are fantastic questions!!! I am bookmarking them for later.

Whoa Ag Stack is a fascinating idea. I love when two seemingly disparate disciplines come together to create simple solutions to complex problems. Seems like a lot of potential here!

Thank you!

Thanks for these ideas. I think the right to repair is going to get a lot of traction right now with the new executive order—or at least I hope so. The robotics for weeding are definitely interesting too. In terms of reporting on problems or potential solutions, this project is “solutions journalism,” which means rigorous reporting on responses to a problem. The problem part is built in as you look at the how well (or not) the response is working.

ok great. Makes sense. And people have definitely moved to Montana during the pandemic! Another q:

What new markets in this space are interesting to you?

Emily Wolfe here, I’m the person who wrote this story. As I plan the second story in the series, which will be about new markets related to organic and regenerative, I’m curious to know a couple of things:

-isn’t this a tech/VC blog? How is it that so many of you are so interested in and knowledgeable about agriculture?

-what about this story made you want to discuss it here?

Looking forward to learning more!