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.
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.
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.
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.”
Great reporting and great work! I'm really interested in some of the "less-cultivated" plants mentioned in the article (like Kernza). It seems so weird that of all the plants that exist, we grow like 10. Seems like there's a lot of room for that "fail-fast" mindset to locate new plants we could grow that suit a particular need (or are really delicious and we had no idea!).
There was a picture going around o reddit of 50 totally different varieties of potatoes grown in Peru. How many varieties do we grow that are significantly distinct? This is probably caused by the optimization of industrial farming selecting for best yield (kg) with very little regard for looks, taste, or even nutricion. It's also harder to stock supermarkets with 50 different types of potatoes, carrots, lettuces, and dozens of other vegetables. Maybe a solution could be that not all supermarkets sell everything, instead of all of them selling exactly the same selection of products. But this would be too inconvenient and would never be tolerated.
Exactly. But with like 40%ish of food completely wasted/thrown away on the consumer side "total Kg" is not the only thing to optimize for any more. It feels like there's an opportunity there to optimize for things like "better taste" and sell them into markets with more disposable income. One of my favorite Youtube channels is "weird fruit explorer" where this guy goes to all these different countries and eats fruit you never see in the U.S.
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.
While it's great this guy has the money to run his own research farm it's a bit unusual. In the Midwest where I live it's far more common for universities to do this task. Coupled with cooperative extension agents to spread adoption at a county level when they find something that works. Universities do basic science very well.
When something's brand new like no-till was in the eighties and precision ag in the nineties farmers often get out ahead of the ag schools. No-till isn't exactly new but perhaps some of the Montana variations happen to be?
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.
My partner is figuring a lot of the same things out through https://farmsproject.org. Farmers are taking huge risks, literally "betting the farm" on their regenerative practices because as you say the universities focus on commodity crop research.
Your note somewhere else in this thread about comparing farmers to silicon valley entrepreneurs was a cool moment of clarity; they don't get several rounds of VC financing to try their ideas, just regular loans and a lot of paperwork tied to crop insurance.
Down in eastern Colorado/western Nebraska & Kansas farmers are having a harder time being regenerative _and_ organic but a part of that is because they're also dryland farmers.
Anyway it's exciting to see your stories hit hacker news! The innovation and work of the farmers you're covering are going to have a huge positive impact on US agriculture.
"The study of diffusion of innovations took off in the subfield of rural sociology in the midwestern United States in the 1920s and 1930s. Agriculture technology was advancing rapidly, and researchers started to examine how independent farmers were adopting hybrid seeds, equipment, and techniques. A study of the adoption of hybrid corn seed in Iowa by Ryan and Gross (1943) solidified the prior work on diffusion into a distinct paradigm that would be cited consistently in the future. Since its start in rural sociology, Diffusion of Innovations has been applied to numerous contexts..."
My introduction to "innovation" was Geoffrey Moore's pop biz book Crossing the Chasm. Derivative work that doesn't even cite Rogers' work. Moore spins "just so" stories. Rogers explains the research, concrete and actionable.
Imagine my chagrin when I stumbled onto Rogers. If it's not obvious, I'm still grumpy about Moore's omission. I don't mind that he profited from popularizing important ideas. Not acknowledging the precedents is something like theft.
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!
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?
Speaking in generalities but hackers love hard problems, and implementing a 21st century food system is the intersection of most of the biggest problems of our time- climate change, population growth, sustainable energy. The fact that the best solutions seem to involve decentralization, taking a big chunk out of the market cap of destructive megacorporations, and transferring power down the class hierarchy aligns closely with the hacker ethos as well.
Also speaking in generalities, engineers love to come up with glib solutions to complicated problems in domains they've heard about but don't have a deep understanding of.
I actually come here more for these kind of stories than the tech news. From the hacker news guidlines:
What to Submit
On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
It's not a blog, it's a user-submitted news story aggregator.
And we the users are nerds, and while most of us work in software engineering, we're interested in everything and anything deep and tech/science related.
I think hackers like understanding complex systems and problem solving within them (or at least trying). The environment and modern agriculture is a complex system and food scarcity is a problem to be solved. And ADHD.
I work with technology but I'm skeptical that we understand some of the complex systems we claim to understand (or just as likely, something about the bottom line for a big corporation means it's hard to get the full story). 20th century agriculture was focused on short term gains, often resulting in profits for a few big businesses, that eventually resulted in big "unforeseen" problems. Like soil depletion, cancers among farm workers, runoff and polluted waterways. Technology caused those problems, so I guess sometimes it's good to be reminded that sometimes older methods can be better than new.
We run astrobiology experiments aboard the ISS for students around the world. In addition to making life better here on Earth, regenerative Ag is critical for off-world sustainability.
Health and climate mitigation. Trace elements of Glyphosate in food supply. Intensive grazing to reverse desertification (as per Alan Savory) and carbon sequestration.
A 2015 USDA study shows organic corn fetching 3X conventional. But, higher variable costs. What if lowering costs with new techniques changes the roughly equal profit margins to a 2X? That's the sort of questions I and folks like me like to ask.
Aside from that, my housemate sold a cattle ranch in Montana and his family is one of the largest wild rice growers in California before the drought. Now, converting some of that parched land to Solar. Seems like a terrible waste. What if you could do both?
The whole “right to repair” thing gets a lot of traction with this crowd. One of the worst offenders is John Deere, which won’t let you repair your own tractor. Vehicles are mostly software now so tinkering with them is basically criminalized under the CFAA.
This sucks and echoes the repairability problems with modern laptops and phones. Apple and the other major consumer tech companies make more money by selling stuff that can’t be fixed, or that only they can fix. That gets consumers slightly thinner, less expensive stuff, but it’s terrible for e waste and weakens the secondary market for tech, making tech more expensive overall while boosting corporate profits.
So, to answer your question, you could probably get traction by talking about people who are building tools that aren’t encumbered by repairablility and IP problems. Let’s see some open/source crop cycles. Let’s see bootleg tractor repair. Let’s see weird local regulations that force people to play fair.
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.
...and "solutions journalism" itself sounds like an interesting topic. There are lots of posts on HN discussing journalism in general, challenges faced by "serious" news orgs, and fresh takes. Searching for "journalism" (search box is at bottom of the main page) turns up lots, such as [0], [1], [2], [3], and [4].
And now I'm off down the "Blendle" rabbit hole...
[edit] Arggh. Homepage blendle.com, subhead "To our Beta users": "Today Blendle starts its beta in the United States..." -- undated, and "... Continue reading on medium.com"
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.
More than the new markets, it would be great to get "boots on the ground" information of real honest no bullshit understanding of the pain points of farmers, agricultural industry in general. Sometimes markets are not well defined or don't exist but taking a fundamental look at problems is fascinating. This information is hard to come by and people like yourself can help.
The major pain point is a simple one: we have a cheap-food-policy in place in the US to keep revolution at bay. I have many friends dumping hundreds of gallons of raw milk daily because that's all the state will allow them to do with it. It would be fantastic if farmers could once again post a profit by charging consumers true cost of production.
What I want to know is what steps can be taken to re-engineer incentives so that the major players in agriculture are pushing for regenerative agriculture and organic farming in their financial and political strategies.
I'm interested in small-scale robot farms that take the drudgery out of distributed food growing, particularly in suburbia. Robotic pest control is the most exciting because it would be a nice application of computer vision and chemical free pest control. Gardens in general are good uses of food waste and recycled water; so if you could lower the barrier to entry and operational costs, they might become more common.
In this talk from 2017, around 1h30m in, he says that he hasn't yet found a way to make no-till organic work in terms of weed prevention. But, he said he was close to figuring it out. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uUmIdq0D6-A
Has any progress been made since? Is this an area where technology could help (eg robotic precision weeding machines)?
Disclaimer that I have yet to read your article so it may already be covered.
Personally, I’m fascinated by the system aspect of regenerative (etc.) ag. A lot of what I do as a tech CTO is systems based, but realistically we’re just mere amateurs compared to nature. Plus screens are boring.
>isn’t this a tech/VC blog? How is it that so many of you are so interested in and knowledgeable about agriculture?
It's a moderated forum of scientists, engineers, and intellectuals. ycombinator was one of the original VC funders of reddit and decided to use the same idea for its VC community.
By the broadest definition this is in fact technology. I'm personally very interested in sustainable agriculture both from a technological standpoint and a community impact standpoint
I live in Switzerland and we often vote (referendum) on agriculture. I actively took part to the last political campain (ban on synthetic pesticides, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/13/world/swiss-pesticide-ref...) which forced me to get interested in (and research) the topic.
Agriculture is the next frontier of big tech. The last several decades decades have seen continuous improvements in labor effectiveness with automated equipment. Ag is big business, big data and in the next decade (IMHO) will be big tech.
I believe ycombinator even invested in a few ag tech startups.
Hi Emily. It would be amazing if more farmers would look into participating in the Open-Source Digital Infrastructure for the Agriculture Ecosystem: AgStack https://agstack.org/ by Linux Foundation
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!
One of the nice things about software is that it impacts everything, it's relevant everywhere, and the best software and technology is created when you understand both software and the domain where it is applied. "Software is eating the world".
Many readers here came from a farming family, but pursued careers in technology. They might still be actively involved in farming, and some ultimately return to either take over the farm or manage the land.
Some of us have also founded or worked at AgTech companies.
I am not from the US but on the lookout for agriculture related stories since all generations in my family up until my grandfather have only done farming. My uncles still do it full-time.
Emily there will be a lot of reasons here but I bet if you were able to dig deeper you’d find a handful of people here moved to Montana during the pandemic.
tech/VC aren't solely about the quick buck, but about expressing the desires of the technologist or VC in how they engage in the world.
As many of us neo2k hackers are getting to ages where we think about future generations and even legacy, the stranglehold of corporatism on agriculture R&D and production is very worrying - and your blog is quite informative.
I'm a software engineer with a passion for botany and growing vegetables. I mostly attribute this interest to growing up with a gardening mother, but I think the mixture of engineering systems, working with equipment, and trying to balance complex trade-offs all lend themselves to the kind of person who likes to create virtual worlds in their mind. Writing software is like creating a little ecosystem of moving parts and interlocking components, and taming complexity is the eternal battle as systems grow. Many of us are probably drawn to analogous systems and problem spaces. Hacker News is basically a place where we share links, nerd out on ideas, and make snarky comments.
I think part of what is exciting and intriguing in your article is that it paints a picture of what agriculture could look like. Instead of just feeling a sense of dread about how our society is ruining everything, many of us are technological optimists with a core belief that science and engineering can help light a way to a better future. Who doesn't like reading articles that reinforce their existing beliefs? ;-)
I've scoured YouTube and other sources for regenerative ag content over the last few years, and what I crave are more specifics and details of business models, scientific analysis, etc. It would be fascinating to actually see the books for a couple of different farms, conventional vs organic vs regenerative. How much money is spent on chemicals vs labor vs seed, etc.? What does insurance cost, and how much risk is there? Does regenerative ag with higher soil carbon lower this risk? (Maybe there is a smart regenerative only insurance play here?) Many of us would probably love to work on autonomous tractors, computer vision to spot problems, etc., etc., so learning about the key levers and problems underlying this industry would be incredibly thought provoking. While reading your article my head went to: why can't those electric fences both monitor the cattle and move themselves around? Could you attach water or compost to the cows themselves to have them help distribute useful inputs? There is an incredible amount of food waste, yard trimming waste, and other carbon rich waste streams generated by society. Why aren't we spreading that on these farms? Instead of tilling the top inch or two, couldn't we be planting the seeds in a new layer of added material? I guess this would require moving a lot of mass, but maybe if it's an autonomous supply chain it could be constantly bringing beneficial waste streams to farmers? It seems like each crop is likely to take some nutrients and provide others. Could you not auto-sample a farm and then automically determine the optimal crop mix which will most benefit the soil? If you have market data you could also connect this with current market prices. Last, if all you did was grow optimal cover crops for a few years could you dramatically improve a farm? Should we pay farmers to give the land a break and only grow beneficial crops so they can come back in N years as an organic, regenerative operation?
My wife and I have started trying to order all of our meats (fish, pork, beef, chicken) from sustainable operations, and it's actually quite hard to know who to go to. When we do finally find one that seems compelling, they are often sold out. Is anyone creating a centralized marketplace for the output from regenerative farms? I have a feeling we aren't the only ones who want to support these operations.
