> Another way in which farmers combat soil compaction is by aeration and tilling.
The problem is that constantly aerating and tilling the soil is destroying microbiomes and fungal networks. It's one of the fundamental principles of regenerative farming. In good industrial fashion, we destroy nature (overfarming) and try solving it (chemical fertilizers) only to destroy it further (mono cultures, no biodiversity, leading to soil degradation, reduced yields), so we try to fix it again (huge machines, more mono cultures), and now these machines are destroying the soil because they are too heavy. It's time to dial back and rethink what we're doing.
Yes, there's an actual no-till movement with organic farmers as well. It's popular for two reasons:
- It's a lot less work (no tilling, less need for getting rid of weeds). Especially for private gardeners, interesting to know probably.
- You can actually get good results with it. Healthy soil means plants have an easier time (less pests and diseases, which are generally signs of plants not doing great).
Simply using nature to work for you instead of trying to against it can be a huge time saver.
IMHO there are a few positive trends in agriculture:
- farmers are starting to like some of the organic farming practices. They work and produce good results. Also the produce is more valuable.
- high tech farming is all about being smarter with resources; including water, soil, labor, energy, fertilizers, pesticides etc. Low tech, intensive farming is mostly about blindly doing things at scale. It works but it isn't necessarily very efficient.
- vertical farming is much more efficient with land and increasingly used for producing high value produce. There might be some future breakthroughs with more nutrient rich things like rice or grains but that seems to be not possible currently.
- synthetic meat grown in a lab gets rid of a lot of CO2 issues associated with cattle.
So, the agriculture sector might look very different in a few decades. Plenty of new and exciting things happening.
Most (by far) farmers practicing no-till aren't using nature to work for them, they are using chemistry... specifically herbicides, like glyphosate.
That's not to say it's wrong; in a lot of cases using herbicides instead of tilling is actually more sustainable... many soil types will degrade very fast with tillage, and while herbicides surely also have damaging effects (in terms of microbial composition, etc), the evidence so far suggests strongly that tillage is worse.
>synthetic meat grown in a lab gets rid of a lot of CO2 issues associated with cattle.
I mean if you isolate for certain things like methane released trough farts sure...
But from what i've heard it's still a process that requires a lot of hard to add up factors which aren't accounted for and is difficult to scale to boot.
In a vacuum it seems like your meat was great and neutral for the environment. The gathering, production processes, logistics, etc of all the chemicals, materials, etc involved might make it all a bit more vague.
I don't think chemical fertiliser is a solution to overfarming; it's a way of increasing yield. Although I guess that could be what you mean by overfarming? The yield per hectare should be whatever is naturally sustained?
The problem is that constantly aerating and tilling the soil is destroying microbiomes and fungal networks. It's one of the fundamental principles of regenerative farming. In good industrial fashion, we destroy nature (overfarming) and try solving it (chemical fertilizers) only to destroy it further (mono cultures, no biodiversity, leading to soil degradation, reduced yields), so we try to fix it again (huge machines, more mono cultures), and now these machines are destroying the soil because they are too heavy. It's time to dial back and rethink what we're doing.