Treating the Farm as an Ecosystem with Gabe Brown Part 1, The 5 Tenets of Soil Health

I don't know if you've come across this video on HN before, but I discovered it here and it was an eye-opener for me. It's a guy called Gabe Brown who transformed his farm into one that needed no fertilizer by using no-till and rotation. One of the most compelling things is that he's no tree-hugger (he even has an uncomplimentary comparison with the soil from an organic farm) - his focus is squarely on profit, which goes up when you're not forking out huge amounts of money on chemicals. I thought I'd give it five minutes, then 2.5 hours later I realised I'd watched the whole thing. ▶ this video

Gabe Brown's talk is my favorite introduction to regenerative ag: ▶ this video He did a book on it: link I also like Geoff Lawton's work on food forests: link link

YouTube soil health videos has all you need. Gabe Brown and Ray Archuleta presentations are easy to consume. Dr. Elaine Ingham focuses more on the soil life in greater detail than most care about but she does provide some important to understand details on rhizosphere interactions. Living Web Farms has quite a lot of lectures about regenerative practices. There are also a myriad of academic papers on soil health as well. This video, ▶ this video , by Gabe Brown set me on the regenerative path. If you dont want to consume hours of information here is the gist. The soil is alive. Plants use microbes and fungus as an external stomach. Direct sun and disruption/tilling kill the soil life. Without life in the soil you eventually have a desert as the organics are sifted out of the sand by weathering.

This happened due to extermination of soil life through modern farming practices of heavy tilling, fertilizing and monoculture crops. Dead soil is more susceptible to erosion and requires ever increasing amounts of synthetic fertilizer to grow anything. More soil has been lost from the US than the amount of food that has been produced. Soil fertility can be returned to historical levels by changing farming practices to make living soil. The benefits of treating the soil as a living organism include increased fertility, water infiltration, moisture retention, and nutrient availability as well as decreasing or eliminating synthetic fertilizer requirements. link This is a long video but it has completely changed my home gardening practices. ▶ this video

>If they could increase production by 60% with any additive at all, it would immediately see widespread use. 1. No, that's not true at all 2. It's astounding how everywhere I go online there is someone spouting off nonsense which is then repeated and perpetuated. 3. Go listen to Gabe Brown, he saves thousands and thousands by not not paying for synthetic fertilizers. "Above every surface acre on earth there's approximately 32,000 tons of atmospheric nitrogen, why would any farmer want to write a check for nitrogen?, I just can't figure that one out" -- Gabe Brown ▶ this video

As a complete outsider, I found this fascinating series of talks a few years ago that go into great detail on soil for farmers: ▶ this video

Watch "Treating the Farm as an Ecosystem with Gabe Brown Part 1, The 5 Tenets of Soil Health" on YouTube ▶ this video

Would you rather grow cover crops or have soil depletion? Also cover crops don't result in a 50% increase in land usage. Here is a video that might interest you: ▶ this video

More than borderline, there are many many examples these days of people practicing forms of ecologically-informed agriculture that match or exceed the yields of destructive systems and methods. When I first heard about Permaculture in the late 80's it was still pretty obscure, and regenerative agriculture in general was "hippie-dippy". Nowadays there are thousand of projects with videos on the youtube, and people are practicing ecologically harmonious farming all over the world. See especially Gabe Brown's talk linked below, he's not replacing current agriculture, just updating it with scientifically-grounded techniques that improve the volume and vitality of his topsoil while being more profitable. Quoting from some notes I've been keeping: There's the "Grow Biointensive" method which is designed to provide a complete diet in a small space while also building soil and fertility. They have been dialing it in for forty years and now have a turn-key system that is implemented and functioning all over the world. => link Grow Biointensive (These folks are also selling their system, but they also have e.g. manuals you can download for free. I find their site curiously hard to use.) ## Permaculture Permaculture could be called "applied ecology" (with a kind of hippie spin.) and a similar school (or parallel evolution) called "Syntropic" Agriculture. Both of these systems aim to mimic natural ecosystems to create "food forests" that produce crops year-round without inputs (no fert

For those who are interested in the topic of soil reconstruction and balance in nature, some more sources: Documentary on the Loess plateau in China: link Talk on the Caledonian Forest: link Talk on using the "herd effect" in Africa: link A talk presenting a realistic view on soil reconstruction, what IMO is the best argument to convince farmers: ▶ this video

I had an experience with mycelium that changed my way of looking at the world: link I am coming around to the POV that soil should be thought of as a kind of organism. Check out e.g.: "Treating the Farm as an Ecosystem with Gabe Brown Part 1, The 5 Tenets of Soil Health" ▶ this video He talks about fungus starting around 1:20 (80 minutes in) ▶ this video Fungal to bacterial ratios...

Gabe Brown has been doing regenerative agriculture for over two decades on Brown's Ranch, over 2000 acres, in Bismarck, North Dakota successfully. Food crops plus cover crops plus livestock, all integrated. Lot of good results compared to neighboring farmers doing the traditional synthetic fertilizer / pesticide / tilling / monoculture approach. There are others like him too. And he's been invited to and giving a lot of talks about it at many confs for years: Watch "Treating the Farm as an Ecosystem with Gabe Brown Part 1, The 5 Tenets of Soil Health" ▶ this video