How are you going to look up Mark Shepard yet? He combines most of the regenerative practices you talk about you can find a video of him by Kirsten Dirksen and/or Justin Rhodes. Also look up Kirsten Dirksen‘s video Nebraska retiree uses earth’s heat to grow oranges
I used to work for the Ministry of Agriculture here in my home province. We have the problem with land prices. There are young people who want to get into farming but can't afford it because the land itself is so expensive. I do not remember the group who made this bumper sticker that came into our offices but it said "If you eat, you are involved in Agriculture". And that is something we all have to remember.
Same problem here in the states. Want to be a farmer? Well you better hope your parents or grandparents gave you some land in their will. And after that you better hope no one finds oil on your land or else you run the risk of having salt water spilled in your field because the oil company wants to buy the land and make it useless.
There are certain organizations which are buying up land and putting up a perpetual "agriculture" stamp on it so it lowers the price, since development isn't allowed on it. It's worth looking into it, I know they do this in the USA, possibly in Canada and other places as well. There are also a LOT of generation switch about to happen in the next 10 years, so it's worth keeping an eye out.
Yep here in YEG i miss the country and long for the farms of just one generation ago and thus if I could a afford even a quarter would totdlly till n sow. Less John deere, R2R.
I wanted to start farming after university back in 2005. Farms started at 1.5 million$ with none or a minimal amount of equipment. After doing the math, i calculated that i would own the farm and turn a profit in 2045 if everything went well. So i joined the military and ill be retired in 2030 with full pension and ill probably get a hobby farm then...
I’m currently 21 and I am a 7th generation farmer. I’m going to college to learn better practices. My family normally does conventional till but we are slowly incorporating no-till methods into our system. At some point I would like no-till to be our primarily farming technique.
@@Bennie32831 No fruit trees where we are, not without irrigation. A big idea of no-till is that it reduces erosion, whether it be wind or water. And we have terraces to slow water movement so it won’t cut through our fields. We have to be mindful of how much moisture we get year-to-year and plant accordingly.
Most of the intensive grazer farmers agree, "If I had done this when I was young I would have more Kids and hobbies". Turns out a couple hours moving cows each day is easier than growing feed crops. I used to have to till field, plant field, fertilize field, swath field, bail field and finally move bails off field, which is months of 12 hour days even on a fairly small farm. To be fair, there were a couple months of no work assuming tractors didn't need rebuilding but they always did because tractors are expensive. Edit: tbc I'm no longer farming. Grandpa was unwilling to let anyone take over or make any decisions so everyone left and got jobs that actually pay.
Grass grows from the bottom as it were it developed along side the bovine herbivores and their fertilization. the grass cover crop held the soil there and managed like many plants deal with low and high water times
I have been farming my entire life in multiple different systems every thing you said is spot on farmers are on the brink every day thanks for this one Joe.
Did you manage to watch Clarksons Farm on amazon? If so what did you think? It was a documentary on the realities of farming and damn it was eye opening. Just brutally hard. I found it really eye opening
👏 One thing though; there are plenty of (young) people, who really do want to start some small scale crop-op. Next 10 years or so, could in deed become interesting
I worked at a fertilizer company for a decade, some farmers would have us mix cover crop in with their fall fertilizer, which effectively made planting free for them
@@gibbyrockerhunter gas for the tractor only has to be paid once. The gas is the biggest expense for planting besides the actual seeds. So you're right, not free, but half the gas.
I work for a magazine called Small Farmer's Journal that has been championing sustainability, biodynamics and regenerative agriculture for over 45 years. I have learned a lot about where our food comes from and it has definitely changed my habits. A lot of this video was spot on, but I don't think the limiting factor for small farms is the lack of farmers, or people willing to farm. It is more the lack of access to land, mostly due to expense. There are efforts being made to put retiring farmers together with upcoming farmers intended to help get around some of these issues. Also, yes, it is hard work, but compared to a cubicle I would definitely not characterize it as "grueling." Thanks for the video, Joe, it is an important topic that gets overlooked.
I grew up on a farm, and my dad has been talking my ear off for years about rotational grazing, silvopasturing, and soil organic carbon. I was really interested in this topic (I even toyed with the idea of quitting my job and going back to the family farm), but I always wondered what the catch was. Thanks for talking about the hitch in our git-along, and ways we could maybe deal with it. I think my dad would get a real kick out of this video.
Your father isn't wrong. There is a great deal of potential in everything Joe mentioned here. Not one of these will be a silver bullet. Silver bullets kill werewolves but climate change and soil degeneration are not werewolves. There are alternatives to doing the right thing, of course. Lots of alternatives. Before WWI most people lived on farms. When the Depression struck, those people did pretty well for themselves. They had crops, fishing, hunting, wild-crafting and trade with neighbors to sustain them quite well. They also had less stress. In short, I'd recommend you take on learning about your father's farm. Make it thrive. Good for you and your children and the world.
I grew up on a small but successful farm fifty years ago and many of the practices you describe were common in our area. Many of these are not things we are discovering but things we have forgotten. You never mention the biggest obstacle which is massive agribusiness corporations whose goal is to squeeze out every possible penny of profit regardless of the costs to the earth or society. This is also done at the expense of the family farms which cannot compete with those giants and are being bought up or squeezed out.
The garden my roommate has produced zucchinis the size of our cats!… we have Maine Coons We may try to plant strawberries this year, or actually focus on the eggplant and tomatoes
@@icarusbinns3156 According to school books this year: *"Remember! You can use several vegetables as sэх toу, too!* *But don't forget to use a сопdом to spare you of infections!"* _
Have kids? Have a garden too. My parents kept a small garden, and I remember being stunned (maybe 8 years old) when we dug up the potatoes we'd planted in spring.
I'm currently getting back into mushroom farming, oyster mushrooms grow on cellulose. I've effectively made a zero paper waste situation in my home and if everything goes well I can start a paper recycling route to supplement, spent blocks go back into compost. As a side note I can use grass clipping and leaves too, it may turn into a landscaping business someday.
I'd love to see something on the oldest cities like you hinted at. I took an anthropology class recently and was fascinated when reading about ohalo II. I'm sure we'll find more when we finally stop saying, "we're the best humans ever, and everyone who lived before us were just knuckle-dragging idiots."
Never gonna happen. :) Not with this attitude and not with any attitude. Because it's not about attitude or knowledge. It's about what mankind DOES. And at that, we suck. Biblically so.
@@jaakkopontinen I am still hopeful that one day we'll look back and say 'holy crap, our ancestors were pretty freaking smart.' Not willing to hold my breath, but it would be nice.
Im always dumbfounded that people grow grass instead of growing food. You have the land to grow food and save a lot of money, and you choose to buy food... I have a garden and it feeds my family. I only have to buy meats. I save $300 a month in food costs!
I dream of having a food forest in my yard, with only a little grass. Grass is awful. I live in Florida and it's all St Augustine grass, itchy sharp harsh grass that requires tons of water and constant fertilization. It sucks. At least in the US, a boring green landscape of grass to mow with only a few trees (so the grass gets plenty of sun) is a stupid prideful status symbol that most Americans still want.
15:15 "We would have to completely change our standard of living to one where we have less food variety." Wonderful video so glad you dove in to regen farming. This one statement was confusing to me, though, and didn't seem to be based on any other claim or citation in the video. Regen practices can absolutely support the same or greater diversity of food that we have today. Economically speaking, industrial farming is more incentivized to reduce crop diversity.
Hi Joe! I've been a SPIN farmer in SE BC for over a decade. I farm about 2/3 of an acre on a dozen plots in my neighbours yards right in town. Sell at farmers markets and to local restaurants. We use regenerative practices, and one super important point I wish you'd highlighted is the carbon capture of regenerative AG. You hit the great point of water retention -and I can vouch for that 1st hand. But you missed the point that the same water holding organic mater is also a carbon sink. If farmers were subsidized for carbon sequestration (like big oil) thru carbon pricing this would help offset the initial costs of regenerative farming. I've read a few studies that figure we could increase the AG soils to %4 organic mater (their average natural state) and effectively solve our GHG overburden. Gardening tip: in your yard plant Candy Roaster squash. Just dig a hole 18" wide 8" deep, overfill with compost, mulch and add a drip line on a timer. Zero effort: they are hilarious and will take over your whole yard. Best pumpkin pie you ever had.
More plants will reduce CO2, but not CO from burning oil based fuels & anything else, CO & SO2 from burning coal & erupting volcanoes, which also emit large volumes of ash, or CH4 from rotting matter & flatulence, all of which pollute the air & are poisonous in large quantities to all animals & plants. Volcanic ash & CO2 in the atmosphere can cool the earth. Large volumes of ash reduce solar radiation & light while CO2 gets cold in the upper atmosphere, causing the refrigerator effect. Unfortunately the ash has bad repercussions as lack of light reduces plant growth & when it finally falls, can suffocate & possibly kill the plants. On the bright side, any seeds which germinate will have ample nutrients & CO2 to have lush growth if there is also ample rainfall. CO, SO2, CH4 & H2O all warm the earth as they all hold in the solar radiated heat, the latter 2 also being highly reflective, reflecting heat back down, thus the greenhouse effect.
Much love from Nebraska! My family have been farmers for 5 generations in Colorado and Nebraska. I'm working not to repeat the mistakes of my father. Regenerative agriculture is the only path forward. All other paths lead to more debt and further degradation of your land.
Good deal. I farmed in Ohio, later supporting climate smart agriculture in developing countries. Now in Puerto Rico and looking to apply it here on the island.
Hey, I'm from Nebraska. Had a lot of Farmer friends, I was always jealous of all the money they had. They always said they weren't wealthy, but constantly had new vehicles, clothes, technology, etc... Maybe they weren't wealthy on paper, but in real life they got all the best stuff.
@@ElectronFieldPulse I think it depends where you're from, but I had the same experience. Where I grew up in Ireland, all the wealthiest people I knew were farmers. But there's still a stereotype in some countries that farmers are poor or not well off, I guess it just depends where you're from. I associate farming with big flashy cars, private tutors and ski trips 4 times a year for the kids, because that's what I grew up seeing.
You mentioned the amount of food that gets thrown away here in the US. When you have a backyard garden, all of a sudden every vegetable or fruit you produce all by yourself is "gold". I've had tomatoes, spinach, lettuce, broccoli, and eggs from our 3 chickens. All of it is treated as this rare precious food. I suppose when you put your own time and energy into it, it completely changes your mindset. I'm not a wasteful person by nature, and I do feel a bit guilty when I have to toss out produce that went bad because it was forgotten about. But let me drop one of our chicken's eggs and you'll see this girl cry. Love your videos!
The amount of love and care that vegetables and fruits (and eggs) must receive to be produced makes one realize how precious they really are. Very interesting your point of view
Get a bokashi bucket system - then you don't have to throw away ANY food scraps ever. Anything that was once alive (apart from large bones - which I just bury straight in the soil) can become compost again.
Yay I am very excited about regenerative farming. Joe did a great summary but I suggest checking out videos to see it in action. A point that wasn’t mentioned was it’s impact on biodiversity, which is hugely important for human survival.
Rather than saying only 20% use no-till farming, I find it amazing its that high. It really is on the way to capturing the market as current machinery wears out.
I also find that number hard to believe, and I hope it does become more popular, but heck, we started no-tilling when I was a kid, 30+ years ago. This is nothing new, but today it almost seems less common than it was then, at least in our area. Maybe fuel prices will start to influence thinking, but I dunno...
When my mom grew up on a farm, she said they were given ‘government acres’, which meant they were paid by the government to leave their land fallow or plant cover crops. They’d let the cows come in and eat what was left, and then the soil was ready for a new round of corn. Sounds like the solutions used to be there during the New Deal, but then corporate agriculture bought up all the small farms. Shame.
We still have something like that. It's called the Conservation Reserve Program, CRP. We have a few acres of CRP land and it really helped with flood control in that area. We turned it into a pollinator plot (planted pollinator friendly plants). Alot of these programs exist already but need expanded so more farmers can participate or the incentives increased so more farmers are willing to participate.
There are conservation programs still. Especially for buffer strips - band of cover crop without pesticides to protect waterways. I know a few folks that have them (the switch-grass strips also helps greatly with wildlife). What I hunt on today used to be conservation acres that the farmer left wild after the contract ended. Most of farming is still family owned (see razor thin margins Joe mentioned and "97 percent of all U.S. farms are family-owned." -2012 Census of Agriculture Farm Typology report). It's just fewer families, with some operating on orders of magnitude beyond other farmers.
What do you do for a living?.. "Well, I don't grow corn. Yep.. I get up around the crack of noon, go outside.. make sure there's no corn growing. I used to not grow tomatoes, but there's more money in not growing corn." Brian Regan
@@wadevarner4247 I remember a program called Acres for Wildlife when I grew up in Ohio....farmers were paid to leave buffer strips along fence rows...could always find rabbits and quail there.
I’m doing most of this already. Rotations, zero till and cover crops And yes using trees as wind breaks and they catch a ton of snow in the off season. No one answer is the answer for every field it’s a combination. It’s about what will work in the area.
Loved this! As a gardener, the state of your raised borders made me scream, and you rolling that composter made me laugh so much! When you listed all the plants you planned to grow, I must admit I pulled a frown. One of the things that puts off so many well-meaning first time growers for good is trying to grow plants that require experience. Always go for easy crops first - potatoes are a must in one of those raised borders; in the 2nd box plant something more permanent like red raspberries, black currants or white currants. They're easy to look after, just a bit of watering. Mulch with dead leaves or chipped bark or scatter some low growing green crop underneath (I like American or Land Cress). I do hope you give growing-your-own another try, Joe. The difference in flavour is amazing. I'm glad you're giving regenerative gardening some air time. People really should look into doing this if they're already growing some of their own fruits and veggies, and those that don't or can't might want to look to getting into allotments or joining a city farm group. I'm currently planting my own food forest both at home and in a damaged woodland nearby. In fact, a few decades ago, I lived next to a woodland that was about 60 acres of abandoned private homes that had been abandoned, all their gardens going back to nature, everywhere full of wonderful wild flowers and fruit/nut trees. You never went hungry walking through there, and we would fill buckets with fruit in the Autumn as kids. That's what I'm trying to recreate now, but on a much smaller scale - since I don't have anything like 60 acres! I've also made great efforts to introduce many different species of fungi to the garden. They do make a difference to the way plants grow. Not all of them are edible by any means, because the emphasis is helping the plants, not harvesting the living daylights out of the garden. Anyway, thanks for this.
Raspberries? For a first time grower??? I'm sure there are varieties that are thornless and dont spread like bamboo, but the majority of raspberries have thorns and do spread like bamboo if you don't stay on top of them. It is also very confusing as to which type of canes fruit. Some first year, some second. Beans...that is a good crop for first time growers. Peas are good too, and are much better than the ones you buy. I would eat them raw once I picked them and they are easy to grow especially if your growing season is short.
Having recently watched Clarksons Farm on amazon, I was amazed at just how brutally hard and punishing it is, with success or failure determined by many factors outside your control. Very eye opening and well recommended
Regenerative Agriculture is something I've been watching different videos on and I love the idea of it. It also fills me with equal parts hope and dread, hope because we can do something, dread, because I don't know if it'll happen.
Just a quick note on transgenic crops and drought resistance: here (in africa's southern tropics), variability of local soils and climates is so high that while transgenic crops do better on average than any one variety planted throughout the region, a lot of farmers would do better retaining their local landrace/heritage varieties that are adapted to local conditions - unfortunately, well-meaning government initiatives have pushed F1 varieties and wiped out landraces in most of the country, which... doesn't help with food insecurity.
Transgenic crops helps fund Big Agro though, at the expense of small farmers. I don't have fears of health risks. I thing it's a bit silly to see "no GMOs" in supermarkets for individual health reasons. For agriculture in general and small farmers in particular though...
@@squirlmy Also, GMO seed stock is controlled by patent law and usually the farmers cannot legally propagate or hybridize plant types owned by the companies that developed them. Farmers are locked into buying the GMO seed from the big agro corporations or risk being out-competed by their neighbors.
@@thomasdeas1941 Can't I just compost them? Oily food gives me indigestion... (Obviously, youtube, I am not composting anyone nor advocating that anyone be composted against their will. Just humour.)
We have a small family farm that employs regenerative practices so this one is close to home. Thanks for sharing the potential and challenges it faces. While we primary farm to raise our own food we do a small business selling goods in our local community. It can be a sustainable business if done wisely. Like you said though, there aren’t a ton of folks wanting to dive into farming no matter how rewarding it can be.
I have watched videos over the last 5 years showing Permaculture, where extremely large areas in Australia, Africa, China and India have been taken from dead, barren land to lifegiving e3cosystems. For example, in India there was a river that had completely disappeared for 60 years. After making deliberate landscaping/farming choices, the river started to flow for 1 month, the year after- 2 months... now it flows year round and crops are able to be grown again. We CAN choose change. There is hope for humanity and the environment.
@@theallseeingeye9388 Regenerative Ag increases the amount of food the farmer grows. At a PROFIT PER ACRE. You are thinking in terms of Yield, while ppa is altogether different.
I find this video very interesting! My dad has been using regenerative farming practices for many years now. One thing that I think is important is many people believe animals are detrimental to the environment which is simply untrue. Animals can graze on marginal land that otherwise would be unproductive and even make cover crops profitable by converting them to meat for food.
My partner and I finally purchased a house last year and I have plenty of room for my own garden - essentially, if it's not native, or I can't eat it, I don't want it. I use all these sustainable/permaculture practices and it just gives me warm fuzzies, seeing how the whole ecology works together, how bugs and birds appear, how plants decompose back into the soil, how all my food scraps are breaking down and becoming new food for me to eat. My mother complains that my yard is a mess, but she's also jealous that I have lots of native bees and she doesn't, because I don't cover their holes with paving or manicured grass.
That garden, yeah I feel that. My state, Oregon, has 30,000 small family owned farms. The state gives tax incentives to grocery stores that sell products made by these farms. I always make it a point to look for the "made in [OR town] or locally grown label.
You forgot to mention, they started planting windbreaks to prevent soil erosion during the dust bowl. Modern corporate farms have been cutting them all down.
Thank You Joe for making this video. I am involved in the organic farming sector in India and we have started implementing regenerative practices and ita a LOT of hard work. Massive respect to all the farmers out there.
Personally, I feel like the answer to food shortages is cultivating a society mindset towards maintaining personal gardens, and supplementing with supermarket goods. It would be a multi-generational process that I honestly don't see happening, globally, for a long time- if ever. I really liked your breakdown of different types of sustainable farming, as I feel in some idyllic future it might be the way people choose which type of personal garden they cultivate. And, yes, I'd be very interested in a video from you about the oldest known settlements! I'm curious about how some of the debated dates and locations may help or hinder our current model of human migration, especially the dates of some ancient civilizations in the Americas.
I don't think it's possible for personal gardens to make a significant dent in global food consumption, especially considering the amount of people who live in cities that have little to know land to grow on. It also takes a lot of time to grow any reasonable amount of food, and there's a reason society advanced as people became less dependent on their own subsistence farming.
@Daniel Jensen I've seen some stuff on societies that put heavy importance on everyone having windowsill gardens, to the point of it being national pride. Those types of societies were able to benefit from personal gardens, even in densely packed areas, while also frequenting markets or fruit stands enough to have a healthy trade economy, while not being dependent. A lot of areas that used to do this, now find personal gardens illegal. Some places are still allowed to cultivate ornamental plants, but not edibles. In my community, we're allowed to grow our own food, but so much as sharing it freely with neighbors must be approved by the USDA (found this out when roommates tried to turn their 1/3 acre into a functional farm). These laws have gone a long way to impede people even trying to cultivate anything of their own, discouraging even the mentality of self sufficiency. I'm not proposing a society where each individual is independently sustainable, so much as individuals are encouraged to grow their own, say, herbs. Do what they can. And yes, plants grow in cycles, but that's not an issue if you plan your crops to rotate, even in a windowsill garden. You can easily find dwarf varieties of most plants you might want to grow, so space shouldn't be too much of an issue, either. I just feel that with everyone producing their own little niche gardens, it's fairly inevitable that many will end up with excess to share with neighbors, though there would still be use of supermarkets, if not heavy reliance, but it would definitely be eased. As I mentioned in my original comment, I don't expect this to be a true reality, but I do feel it would work, in theory, given many generations to perfect some level of personal pride into small scale gardening.
was kind expecting the Dutch Agri University Wageningen to be named somewhere in this video as the leading institute in cutting edge futuristic farming. Dutch Agriculture has so much to teach
I am Dutch, but Wageningen University also has so much to learn when it comes to sustainable forms of farming. BigAG has a huge influence on that University
@@willybillyshow Yes, large companies have their influence, but it doesn't mean that the WUR or the agricultural sector don't know what to do. The knowledge is out there, it's mostly the culture that needs to be broken and proper governance has to be put forward.
I was digging a hole a few months back and I was really intrigued in how layers of soil are deposited. So off I went to Wikipedia the learn about how the difent layers of soil have varying amounts of nutrients and microbes and salts. Then I learned top soil is not a easily renewed resource and we are basically already screwed.
Joe, would be interested in going into detail about the reasons farmers don’t typically own their own land and how foreign acquisition plays a role in this?
I'll tell you my personal story, and it extends to many other families as well. I grew up on a ninety acre farm in Texas. When my grandfather passed away it was split two ways between the kids. I was offered it to farm, but I was halfway through college, on a different career path. That path didn't work out, and I'm now into regenerative farming. The farm, however, is leased to a big contract cotton farming company, and due to the land being split up, even when the land becomes half mine, it will very likely stay split and in cotton with the current company. So much farmland is fractionally owned, or bought out by investors that the prices are driven up to the point where getting much more than a hobby farm going for a Regen farmer is prohibitively expensive. It takes time for the soil itself to build the organic matter and ecosystem necessary for many of these practices to be practical. Spending $3000 an acre and not seeing a payoff for five years simply makes the financing impossible.
Thank you for covering this. I've been talking about permaculture and food security on my channel for the past year but don't have much reach. Restoration Agriculture and Gias Garden are two fantastic books. I like to call our current situation the petroleum revolution. We've gotten lazy from all the cheap energy and fertilizers it produces.
I do regenerative organic farming research for a living. It's an important field and where the production of most of our bulk calories needs to go. That said, I am increasingly convinced that the future of a lot of vegetable production (especially leafy greens) is in hydroponics and/or vertical farming.
I wonder where lab meat and aquaphonics fit into that future as well. Because as far as I can see meat production uses more than 20 times as much water/land, etc. for the same amount of energy for the human body. I've been wondering how efficient would mass production of insects be ?
@@autohmae I don't know enough about lab grown meat to make a meaningful judgment but as a lay person it does seem very power intensive. Raising cattle on pasture is the opposite, it requires very little power. The impact of meat production can take into account the efficiency of the animals ability to convert feed into harvestable mass and the impact of producing the feed. Chickens and fish are very efficient at converting feed into mass, usually hovering around a 1:1 ratio. Cows on the other hand are pretty inefficient. That said, the advantage of cows is that their feed can be very low quality compared to chickens and fish. Chickens and fish are omnivores that need a balance of greens, grain and protein; and producing the latter two have a lot of environmental problems associated with them. Cows have historically been raised on pasture. With proper management, pasture is very easy to grow, with very little input required as far as fertility, water and energy are concerned. Now, however, 90% of cows spend their last months on feedlots, being fed grain because it gets them to to market weight twice as fast. This is where most of the impacts of animal agriculture comes from--growing grain to feed cows instead of letting them forage on well maintained pastures. As joe said in the video, managing a lot of cows on pasture is a lot of work, which cannot be appreciably mechanized or automated (yet!) whereas we figured out how to massively mechanize grain production shortly after WW1. But grain production is terrible for the environment. Fun fact: before grain production was massively mechanized, chicken meat was more expensive than and more of a luxury product compared to beef. This is why herbert hoover promised a chicken in every pot instead of a steak on every table in his political ads during the late 20s. Regarding insects: there's a ton of potential there, but I don't know what their feed conversion rates are. I do believe that insects will be a significant protein source in the future, as will algae/kelp. Lastly, regarding aquaponics: aquaponics primary problem is that the system is insanely complicated. I had a friend that was obsessed with aquaponics, did it for 5+ years. When he switched to hydroponics, his little backyard operation finally started making money because it was so much simpler. In a nutshell, the problem is that the vegetables you're growing, the fish you're growing and the microbes that convert the fish waste into nutrients for the vegetables all have different optimum temperatures. This means that aquaponics requires an incredible amount of temperature control and a lot of different staging and mixing tanks for your fluids in different stages. That said, one way aquaponics is much more practical. What I mean by this is a system where fish are kept in a tank and effluent from that pond is siphoned off to irrigate a field while being replaced with new fresh water on a regular schedule as a way to dispose of the excess fish manure.
Lol i nearly choked when Joe said ill save you some time....." Get to the point, jackass." I love it. Joe i know its not Monday yet but that remark and your reaction made my week. Youre the best.
Great video! So I’m not a full time farmer but I have and still do work on multiple smaller farms in the Negev Desert here in Israel, so this video is a really cool thing to see. Most of the stuff we do out here is organic and sustainable, simply because of the smaller scale of the farms. Many of the farms in the Negev are Kibbutzim and farming villages, which generally are more sustainable than industrial level agriculture. I’ve also worked at the מו״פ, which is a research farm that works to develop irrigation technology and strains of crops best suited for the desert climate, and it’s been working. The Negev desert is actually shrinking due to Israeli agriculture, which is incredibly rare, especially in the Middle East. Anyway, this video is really cool to see, and yes, I am one of the few people who actually does enjoy farming. I’m in favor of organic farming practices for the simple reason that it’s more enjoyable: the use of industrial machines will never be the same as actually working the land with your own hands. Great video!
Another interesting topic is agrovoltaics - combining the concept of protecting the crop from harsh sunlight as in agroforestry, but using solar panels. The reduced sunlight reduces water usage and the water that evaporates from the plants can condense on the solar cells and cool them through evaporation, increasing efficiency. It has its draws, some argue that it is inefficient land use and obviously navigating machinery amongst the panels is more difficult. But as an agricultural engineering major, I find it interesting.
Yes the rows need to be designed and positioned at the outset for ease of machinery access where required. Successful trials in Australia have showed how well solar farms can integrate with sheep farming. The sheep love sitting in the shade of the panels, the panels cause moisture retention in the soil and the right grasses or feed crops happily grow in the partial shade. The frames holding the panels need to be designed so sheep have no way of harming the panels or themselves, so pretty sturdy, and at a certain height. Haven't heard about co-locating solar panels with cattle - maybe a big roof structure would work better for them as they are so strong and could more easily damage the panels and their supporting frames.
You know that thing where someone talks on a subject you actually work with, and then you find out if they really know what they talk about? This is that video for me. I work on a farm that is implementing all of these practices. You're spot on with every point you made here. Great work on the research, man!
I tried it once in my parents' garden. Tomatoes were a real challenge. Getting the plants to grow in reasonable shapes whilst dealing with hot days and wet days. The easy stuff were lettuce, dry herbs, things that needed little to no attention except for watering. I enjoyed it and the results were much more flavourful than storebought.
"Half of all produced food is being thrown away." "We need to produce way more food." "But half of all food is being thrown away right now." "The human population is continuing to grow so we need to produce way more food to feed all the people." "But HALF of all food is being thrown away." "There are millions of people who are still suffering from hunger all around the world, we really gotta ramp up food production." "WE ARE THROWING AWAY HALF OF ALL THE FOOD WE PRODUCE!!!"
We are actually at the point in time that starvation around the world is nearly erased. I think the last time I saw a study on it in 2010 the worlds starving populations went from 1 billion to under 100 million. And now it's 2022 and you really don't hear about starving people anymore. And that's wonderful news. There is always gonna be some here or there but world wide starvation is nearly gone.
@@Barthaneous34 yeah you might be kinda right. Look up a book like Alex de Waal - Mass Starvation. It argues that all mass starvations / famines in the present are because of political or ethnical repression.
@@Barthaneous34 Yemen. Although much of that is deliberate military blockage of humanitarian aid. And perhaps in the past we've underestimated how much starvation has been used as a tactic against certain populations, rather than just the cruel whims of nature. I mean, certainly insects could provide much of the worlds protein, but how many of us eat insects on a regular basis? Food is a FUNDAMENTALLY IRRATIONAL ISSUE. Another issue is we should all be giving up meat, particularly beef. But, how many people in the world are doing that? Beef consumption is way up in places like China and worldwide. Perhaps we are just self-destructive species. I'm beginning to think the global thermonuclear war that would have destroyed "Western Civilization" 80s-2000 might have been merciful compared to the long drawn-out collapse we might be facing instead. Humanity is like a deathly sick dog. Do you know we've barely made a dent in the rate of GROWTH of fossil fuel burning? Thank goodness I don't have children!
The need more food number stems from a projected decline in food production due to climate change. Basically 10 years ago we produced more food than the global population could consume before spoiling. By 2030 we're projected to have far more mouths to feed than calories to feed them. And the situation based on regional projections is going to be really, really bad. Like world war bad, if we don't figure things out before then.
Joe, do a video about the Land Institute and their development of perennial polycultures. A mix of crops that you plant once, they grow together and help each other, and they don't need irrigation, pesticides, herbicides, or any inputs at all, and then you just harvest them every year. They fit right in with the regenerative ag theme.
My wife and I are about to move out of the city and buy a piece of land to farm ( I am self-employed online, so why not breathe clean air and do something good).
15:10 "We would have to change our lifestyle to having less food variety" Yeah you know, one of the issues we already have today. Where our entire supply chain has only a couple strains of a crop vs how about a hundred years ago we used many strains of all crops. It's why there's serious worry a blight could kill off an entire crop.
Good point. But there's also strong economic incentives not to change. New England farming was basically destroyed by monoculture farming in the Mid-West and West. They now import even apples, (and many varieties of cider and cooking apples grown there are now extinct). I've also been hearing about this predicament with bananas in Latin America for decades and it's seemingly unchanged all this time.
@@squirlmy yeah the main issue though is that expanding in the buisness is easier by using more of the same resources. So it's cheaper to get say seeds from one apple type than as many as we can get. Bigger purchases still cost more yes, but due to buying in bulk it's actually cheaper heavily dis-advising the idea of branching out. It's also easier for the say single farmer to plant and tend one crop vs 10 or 20 so we get in the rut we're in now. But it would take a lot of effort to turn it around. Not to mention again that farming is a rather unpopular lifestyle so having many farms of different crops isn't a perfect solution.
You missed Gabe Brown's lecture on living web farm. The man runs 3000 acres of grain, cattle, and sheep with 3 and a half people. The half is his neighbor combining. In his lecture he talks about an industrial farmer that grows on 14000 acres that switched to cover crops and never looked back. Gabe consults with farmers and increases there profitability every time.
I am currently at an organic regenerative no-till conference in Omaha NE. We are figuring out how to do this at scale with the best minds in this field. It is pretty exciting and humbling working on the front lines of this!
Thanks for another great video Joe. In some regions such as my part of Canada, yard clippings are not picked up any more and recycling is encouraged, mulching mowers work really well for leaves also. Sometimes I use my electric mower just to mulch fallen leaves. I would love to see a video about ancient cities, along with lost areas such as Atlantis, Pompeii and Alexander's library
@@jodivandyk3649 I'm in the GTA Jodi, and I believe we've had grass recycling for more than 10 years now, I can't remember the last time we put grass clippings out for pickup
I've heard one of the issues was a mini-ice age 10,000 years ago which at least in places, wiped out all traces of human habitation before it. Now, I first heard of this from Graham Hancock, who might not be the most reliable source for such history... shrug
I recently got hooked on gardening and have been going down the regenerative agriculture rabbit hole myself. Personally I'm totally hooked on no-till organic living soil and learning how to make my own nutritional amendments for the garden. I am totally chemical free and feeling good about it. It could be just a midlife crisis but I'm thinking about starting a small organic farm, which is funny because I've spent my whole life living in big cities.
I love this channel. up until about 4 years ago, I was completely tech ignorant. Then I suffered a life changing injury that left me seriously paralyzed and bedridden. i eventually got use of my hands back, then I got a tablet computer and started exploring you tube and such...this channel and a few others helped me thru some really dark times, and my experience is not unique. Thanks for all the Tubers out there who bring a certain light to us folks who need it.
I so appreciate that you did this vid for your viewers. Regen ag is so important! saves money, time, it's healthier and it's so much better for the soil! If your soil is not healthy, neither is the food grown there. Great vid!
I worked for years at an agricultural cooperative spreading chemical fertilizers and pesticides. I loved my job, but hated what I did. Everything I worked with was a poison or acid. And I am spreading this across my state. The worst was when farmers would tell me to go ahead and spray or spread right over a drainage, illegal of course. And then have me spray glyphosphate over their entire property to try and kill the "weeds". I come back later to side dress because the crop isn't doing so well. I wonder why now that I can sit and watch the dusty topsoil blow from your field... I didn't get the chance to quit for my conscience. I acquired a very rare autoimmune disorder and couldn't work any longer. I wonder what I could have been exposed to?
Man, my woman is with cancer... I really wish you get better. Have you ever tried small scale gardening, growing some mushrooms? Hope you can at least get a bit involved in some contact with nature and doing something to help it, it will at least easy your pain. Get better!
Sorry to hear of your problems, their are definitely proofs out there of people getting these kinds of problems based on what people were spraying. It obviously takes time to be proven, possibly decades. Very scary stuff. I think the EU does better don't allow stuff unless it has been proven to be some what OK. But really hard to still proof the really long term stuff. I prefer the cleaner methods of something like vertical farming which, in theory, needs a lot less junk.
@@AdlerMow Thank you for the sympathy, however this wasn't my goal. I only wanted to point out another problem created by how we do business today. And I hope yours get well too. Cancer is much worse. I was relieved to discover I had an autoimmune disorder rather than the cancer they thought I had.
"Farmers only make up 2% of the voting population." This really blew my mind as somebody thats from the center of Kentucky, seemed like half the population was farmers for most of my life lmao
Urbanism or the large migration of people from rural areas to cities has been a dominant global trend for at least two centuries. The rise of the cities.
Thank you! Just yesterday something came up and I could not, for the life of me, remember the name of the Haber-Bosch process. It was on the tip of my tongue and drove me nuts. I love how often I'm thinking of something obscure and the very next day (or same day) a video mentions it for me. Excellent work Joe, please continue to magically come to my rescue when I can't quite remember something! +1
I enjoyed this episode but I feel you glossed over one big issues and that is "Big Ag" which is as bad as the Big Pharm, or the Military Industrial Complex. Half of my family were ranchers and farmers until NAFTA cut them off at the knees and and they all quit farming because they couldn't make a living any more. Ranchers no longer auction their beef they are told by the packers what they are paying. Like making computers in China, it's cheaper to make beef in other countries that do not have our government regulations. Finally, you mentioned genetically (something) crops, aka Frankenfood. Yes, the crop is self fertilizing, and pet resistant but it's sterile and can't grow seed, so the farmer can't save some money and let some acres go to seed to re-plant the next year. They are at the mercy of companies like Monsanto to sell them seed every year. I do love all of your ideas but like all great ideas to safe the planet, there is always one major, weak link in the chain... the Human Factor.
really good points, but I get discouraged to see "health" scares as being the main driver against GMOs. There's so many more realistic concerns to fear about them.
@@squirlmy The health issues are something I can get behind. I have a VERY unsubstantiated theory about food. [this is a hint to Joe for a future topic] If you change the genetic makeup of a food, does the body "know" it's food? Which is better for you, butter or margarine? Granted, the foods we eat today are not close to it's original source but it was done through plant selection, not genetic engineering which brings us back full circle to the point of the video.
My concern is there’s not enough nutrients in the soil to give food the nutrients we need. They’ve been having to add synthetic nutrients to practically everything you buy at the grocers.
Oh man. ok. I'm Living in East Texas right now, at 62yrs old, I have seen Alot of gardens like this before. It's not where you grow, it's in what you grow in. Dig down to 2ft below the ground. Next, dig it around an inch or two inchs down. Now place in about an 1in. of Bat or cow shit. Add Black Gold® potting mix. I get mine from "Home Depot®". The best you can find, just make it Black in color. There in Texas, It's sandy ground is feets deep. About 100ft. So put in 2ft of Black Gold® plus up to top of above-ground gardern, maybe, 10 to 12ins tall. Mines up to 20ins tall. To let the Roots more freely and have more room to grow. The Bigger the Roots, the Bigger the Plants. Just keep the top of the potting mix below One to two inchs for the water fill only to the top. Water early in the day and late in the day. Well, that should get you started. Now you can grow anything from peppers, corn, great pot, etc.... Anything. But each year, mix up the plants. By moving the pot to the corn area, peppers to the pots spot and corn to the peppers spot. Add you should know, put in some more Shit each place before mix. The more shit, the better. Bat gongo, bat shit, is the best. For Real... Ok man. Good growing. Later. Rob62....
love this! thank you so much for covering it. With the unfeasibility of intensive rotational grazing at industrial scale, all you have to do is divide your fields into paddocks using hedgerows. admittedly it ties you into a fairly specific stocking density but so does the productivity of the land itself so not really a big issue.
Joe, Very well done. Our mainstream Ag publications have glorified Big agriculture. Check out my TH-cam and Facebook page, I've found a way to feed cattle in a regenerative way. You're right on the point of most farmers farm someone elses land. I'm lucky to have got a chance to own land early in my life. I've taken advantage of that to aggressively try new things.
Your right, to switch to regenerative agriculture would take the same herculean century long effort that the government put into destroying the small and medium sized farms in favor of the huge industrial monstrosities we have today. I'm sure Monsanto and ADM would fight that tooth and nail so as to preserve their profits until the bitter end.
This might be a silly question, but is it really necessary to destroy big farms to popularize regenerative agriculture? I'm not in love with big farming operations, but it kinda seems like you could just have a big field plant cover crops and stuff instead of a bunch of small foods.
@@seionne85 Well if you subtract the number of people that has died due to exposure to their chemicals (a number we will never know) or the fact that they patent the seeds they develop whether they really developed them or not, or the fact they have a near monopoly on said seeds. Oh, and if you farm next one that uses these seeds...no seed retention for you because your plants could be cross pollinated and that's our IP! The road to hell is paved with good intentions (and I think they ceased being good a long time ago)
@@scpatl4now would you change your opinion if you found out that the number of people who died from exposure was comparable to any other field of work? Do you understand how recuperating costs from the research and development of said seeds works? Because if you somehow keep companies from recuperating those costs then what you wind up with is no new drought resistant/insect resistant etc. strains. Like I said, irrational hatred.. do you hate Apple for selling their new phones for 1k dollars plus also? Same logic, they spent the money developing them so that they could make money later
@@seionne85 I understand that much research is government funded in the US via grants from DoA, yet as with drug companies privatize profits, socialize loss. Monsanto was well aware of the fact that they were peddling cancer causing chemicals that were not safe yet chose to do so anyway, and funded biased research. There is always someone who wants to defend this company, I guess today it is you.
Joe! So much more to dig into than a comment could do justice. Scale really isn't a technical problem (though, it is an education and possibly a financial problem.) I remember seeing a presentation by a farmer that was employing regenerative practices on 45,000+ acres. There are farmers growing corn at scale who have completely eliminated fertilizer applications by growing soybeans in the interrow... the soybeans aren't harvested, they just literally benefit the corn so much that it's more economical to plant the soybeans than apply synthetic fertilizer. There's an Australian vineyard that got 70% of their usually yield in a drought year while other vineyards in the area lost their entire crop, all through regenerative practices. And so much great work has been done on soil health and soil biology, especially in the past decade. There's a whole world in the soil that we're just beginning to understand and a complex web of communication between plants and microbes. In a microbially diverse soil, plants can recruit microbes to help them deal with environmental factors, for example. In the case of a drought, plants might recruit bacteria to "infect" them and cause a thickening of the cell wall, which reduces water loss to transpiration. It's also fairly widely known now that fungal mycelium mediates the transport of nutrients between plants, or directly between fungus and plants. Also lots of great work in the Jena Experiment that shows that increasing the diversity of plant species and plant types increases the amount of carbon sequestered in a given area, increases the microbial diversity and thus the variety of microbes that plants are able to recruit to handle environmental stresses, and so much more. The most interesting finding from the Jena Experiment came when the field flooded for several weeks; the plots with the most diversity of plant species kept on trucking as if they'd never been flooded, but the plots with the fewest species suffered serious losses. Might be a bit dense for someone that doesn't really nerd out on the science of food production, but recent lectures by Dr. Christine Jones and Dr. James White cover a wide swath of the research that's been done in the past decade or so. Once you go down the rabbit hole, there are also lots of case studies from farms of all sizes, and one of the biggest reasons that farmers cite for making the switch is cost; because they reduce or eliminate their need for all manner of sprays and the amount of labor required to apply them, but yields remain comparable, overall profits go up. And even if it ultimately is better suited so smaller farms of a few hundred acres, Organic Valley is an example of a successful farmer cooperative where small farms banded together to maintain the buying, selling, and distribution power enjoyed by much larger farms. There are ways for small farms to meet the demand when they work collaboratively to solve the problem of scale.
Great video man. Yup my dad was a farmer, he had to be the accountant, machanic, driver, scientists, HR everything that you can imagine. And let me tell you it's hart breaking to see all that hard work go down the drain in one season because of drought, flooding or frost. Damn hardest job in the world
Great topic, Joe. Part of my "vision for a sustainable future" includes multi-level, climate controlled fields, for crops that don't work in vertical farms (and excludes tree-based food). As stated in this video several times, this also requires a massive shift in infrastructure (which we need for MANY reasons) but has many benefits: Water conservation through recycling evaporation and run-off, reuse/recycling of fertiliser so also pure water is released into waterways, fully electric, overhead machinery, controlled lighting, humidity and watering tuned per crop, physical exclusion of wildlife to prevent culling, killings and crop loss, significant reduction in land-area requirements (significance limited initially by material science) and closer proximity to population areas to massively reduce transport costs. Or ... we could pat ourselves on the back for using paper, rather than plastic straws and say we've done our bit for sustainable living.
We are far too lazy and greedy to do the right thing or to help with global warming. All I see these days are big trucks , big cars, big house, to much waist !!! All folks do is talk. They dont actually do and those few that actually do they can barley afford it. We need to be kind to those that are going forward and working twards a better , healthier life. These politicians talk but when they get into iffice they stop and they dont do. Yes we are defenatly heading twards another dust bowl. Its really simple really. Stop tilling the dirt!!! There is a really good documentary on netflix about it. Sorry but I cant remember the name off hand.
I really like watching your videos, you have a lot of very interresting content. This one is kinda special to me since I actually am a farmer. You got most of the stuff right, but no till farming (or zero till by some) does indeed have the advantage of lower risk of erosion, but usually comes at the cost of an increase in the use of pesticides and there are also several different ways to till. the classic plow, expensive but very effective against weeds, but also the worst in compacting the ground. cultivator, quite cheap and the most used method, but the least effective against weeds. and then there is the disccultivator wich is somewhat inbetween... now the transgenetic stuff (or gmo crops) have a huge potential but can also be quite dangerous. I'm swiss and here in Switzerland GMO is banned, but I've been working on very large farms in canada for about 2 years (6000 acres and more). and ive seen the absolute devistation gmo can have on farmland. just an example, there is a type of crop wich is called roundupready (all kinds like wheat, canola,barley etc.) wich is resistant to glyphosate, so after you plant this you can then just use glyphosate to kill everything else. well, the year after when youd like to plant something else you need a way to get rid of last years offshoot from the harvest, but monsato got you covered there and its called libertyready. you can now imagine what happens in subsequent years and how you have to increase the use of more and more toxic chemicals to keep farming. but there are also other studies that have shown a gmo rice plant that has close to the same photosynthetic efficiency than corn, wich means it only takes less than a third the amount of water to grow as it usually would. I am a strong advocate to people farming there own food. even though in the long run that might be bad for business but i think if more people have a garden outside (or inside for whose without enough space) and learn to appreciate growing things that will give them health and lower the cost of living by just a bit. Its regional and the satisfaction of tasting something straight from soil (wich is sooooo much bettter then all this overprocessed stuff that is sprayed with chemicals to censerve it longer) is not just good for your physical health, but also mentally. sorry for my long text but i wanted to take the opportunety to contribute knowlege.
With respect to what came before, I think the next great agricultural revolution will be indoor and controlled environment farming. Hydroponics/Aquaponics. Currently has start-up cost issues but I'm optimistic these can be optimized.
I’m a fifth generation Nebraska farmer. Everything you said was spot on, this might be the best explanation of the current catch 22 situation agribusiness is in. Thank you
As someone who grew up on a farm and currently lives on (though does not farm) the family farm, let me tell you it is not that there aren't people who WANT to farm; there are plenty. It's that it is simply economically unfeasible to get into farming without either being left a significant piece of farmland or a whole lot of money, at least here in the fertile black soils of Northern IL. Farms are like everything else in our economy - they're now heavily consolidated as the big, wealthy farmers and business interests/investors buy out the family farms, and land that once would have supported ten or twenty middle class farming families is now being farmed by one family or business concern. Land prices/rents have skyrocketed, as has equipment, fuel, fertilizer, pesticides, etc..., and there is just no way for a normal person, let alone a young person, to get into farming without being born into a landed dynasty or being independently wealthy. Like everything else today, it's big business and big money and you've either got it or you don't. For frame of reference, our family farm here is 160 acres with maybe 145 tillable, the balance being timber/pasture and the house and barnyard. In the old days, when my grandpa farmed it, it used to be farmed largely "regeneratively" with row crop/hay/livestock rotation (or what used to just be called "farming"). Today however, it is rented out since you can't make a living on 160 acres, and it's just corn and beans. You VERY rarely see livestock on row crop farms anymore, at least around here. And for frame of reference regarding cost of admittance, that 160 acres that is not nearly enough to live on is worth probably $2 million at today's local land prices. This is in an area where you can buy a pretty nice house for $150,000 and the average working guy with a decent job probably makes $45~50K/year. I would LOVE to get into regenerative agriculture, and with a farm this size, it would be fairly easy to manage but it takes a whole lot more than just the desire, and at the end of the day, you still have to be able to make a living at it...
Cover crops absolutely don't need to be supported by gov't incentives. If you look at New Zealand, they have virtually no farm subsidies and cover crops are standard practice there. Actors under capitalist systems have a natural incentive to produce as much as they feasibly can for the longest time they can, and farmers are no different. The real reason why American farmers don't plant cover crops is because they have crop insurance guaranteed by the government, and so don't actually have to bear the full financial costs of crop failures. That's not to say that New Zealand is perfect; they've been extremely slow to adopt other sustainable practices like No-Till Farming. Other than that, great video chap -- I really like seeing ppl cover lesser-talked about but extremely important environmental problems.
subsidizing corn is one of the chief methods the U.S. used to undercut Soviet food prices, and consider how much goes into cattle feed as well as "high fructose corn syrup". Many American farms have based their economic models on subsidized corn, it's unlikely to change easily or anytime soon.
@@squirlmy That and ethanol for fuel. Reforming the US's agricultural system is a really difficult task, but we have a strong incentive to do it in terms of human health, environmental stability, food security, and even immigration. One thing that's almost always overlooked in discussions of Mexico -> US illegal immigration is the fact that it was supercharged by heavily subsidized US farms outcompeting less subsidized Mexican farms. As Mexican farms lost market share, farmhands had virtually no choice but to surge northward to find work in their field. Pun intended.
I have a few points I find might help future agriculture: Movable scaffolding(on wheels or rails) with Solar Panels to provide dual use for the land (agriphotovoltaics) and one could attach robotic arms to the scaffolding that can plant/harvest stuff automatically. Plant more beans and other legumes to get more nitrogen back into the soil. Use composting instead of too much artificial fertilizer and manure. Yes, Covercrops (that can then be turned into compost)! Yes, combine crops that help each other! Stop using animals, especially cows have a very bad Climate-Output. Animals always make agriculture less efficient. They use more land and water per calorie produced. Of course, in order for these things to work we need to massively overhaul how land is owned and how food is priced. The government should provide financing for investments in ecologically better methods. Ideally land would be community owned by those that source the food from there. If we invest more in automation, then nobody has to be a farmer anymore. Yeah, supporting the green new deal would be a step in the right direction.
Again, we see fundamental conflict of interests when standard investor-driven, profit-based business practices skew essential human services. Well researched presentation...AND done in an easy-to-watch format.
My wife and I owned and operated a small farm. We focused on fresh veggies for our local markets. Since this was a retirement project for us we had the luxury of being able to experiment with differing approaches to "growing our greens." We began by following the commonly used plow, fertilize, plant approach to farming. The soil was bereft of organics and quickly reverted to brick-like solidarity after being plowed. except for becoming a temporary mud bath following rains. We avidly studied permaculture and other similar farming techniques. It became evident that despite the appeal of these sustainable practices, they could not scale up to large commercial farms. We experimented by putting in a 32 x 80 foot high tunnel greenhouse. Which we completely filled with compost purchased by the ton from a recycle center. Planting in compost yielded amazing results. One caveat, compost consumes nitrogen until it has finished. You may need to add nitrogen until the breakdown is complete. We found that crops continued to improve as the compost aged. When planting in compost. The friable (crumbly) texture of compost allows plants to develop much larger root systems. We added raised plant beds ( 4' wide, 12" deep ) outside the greenhouse with similar success. I should mention there is a source of free compost if you put in some work. Many tree companies would be happy to have a place to dump wood chips. You can speed up composting of the chips by adding nitrogen. Sustainable farming is labor intensive and is practical only for premium priced products like fresh locally grown vegetables. It is labor of love and not a lucrative profit center. . Raised plant beds are easy to build and maintain (you can even use plastic totes filled with compost). For what it is worth, the "green new deal" contains many ill conceived economy killing schemes that should be shunned
I love the discussion about regenerative Agriculture, as for scaling up right now I am working on a project to make regenerative gardens happen in people's backyards, my solution isn't to maim the system of everyone's inputs, what my solution is, is everyone becoming more involved in their own food. Up here in northern michigan I can have a strawberry patch a full acre in size with no weeds just by using woodchips about an inch overtop of them in the fall every year, Not needing to apply every year but every other year once the area's soil has developed well with all the fungi, plus woodchips are free so essentially it costs me nothing and it's drought resistant i don't water any of them and they can go months without rain because of the water holding capacity of the soil. This method can be brought over and mimicked anywhere else almost because it mimics what the forest does. I make food forests so basically i plant underneath my fruit trees, it staggers my crop yield time so a lot of times i can get something like broccoli for a whole season, I get all kinds of root crops and delicious treats, life truly is better. I also command a small worm farm and a growing number of rabbits to boot, they feed eachother, growing crops from rabbit poop thats gone through a worm gut and put outside as my compost layer, small scale but it scales up when more people get involved and can make money too from other people's land. My model is if i grow enough food for whoever is there and then some, which is easy to do than i can make profit off of other peoples land and they can eat too! It just keeps building and increasing check my youtube videos for my gardens!
Joe, while I appreciate your research, following the same path we have over the last hundred years will get us nowhere. We risk turning our farmlands into deserts for all practical purposes. While it's true the current agriculture environment is not attractive to most, there have been a lot of recent interests in farms from the young and old. It's true, who wants to work on a megafarm 24/7? These farms would have to be cut down where they're at the appropriate size to be sustainable. I disagree that the mega farms produced variety. They produce sameness and substandard nutrition. For variety you pay a higher cost value and that is produced in smaller quantities by smaller farmers. For the future there will have to be a variety of solutions not just one. The Netherlands, a small country by European size, produces a massive amount of food for its neighbors using greenhouses. Urban gardens, smaller regenerative farms, greenhouse farms, every imaginable variation will play a part in our future food source. As we have seen during this pandemic, widening our scope of where we source our food is imperative.
Solar/wind farms powering hermetically sealed large scale vertical farms. Can be placed closer to population centers, meaning less carbon for transport and processing. The latter can be done mostly on site. Way less waste. Water collection built into the structure. Much less water waste. No pesticides, herbicides, or other complex chemicals necessary. Jobs for higher population zones. Can be located literally anywhere humans live. Allow rural land to rewild and develop small scale businesses less dependent on global economy. People in rural zones don't want to interact with the masses or government oversight, anyway. Monocrops would still exist in the bread belt. Will it happen? Hell no.
This is my fave channel. I’m currently in biosystems engineering. I squealed when I saw with video. I joined the major specifically to work with soil conservation.
You should cover Run off from farms. In my local area, farmers drain their fields into the local rivers. Polluting the rivers and filling them with harmful chemicals.
I's like to see a video on pros and cons with GMO and organic farming. I have many friends who only buy GMO, but hey, isn't like everything we eat kind of bread through thousands of years to get us the best version? Isn't actually everything GMO in a way?
Sorta. Kurzgesagt does a video titled; Are GMOs Good or Bad? Genetic Engineering & Our Food. It explains the topic quite well. I found it very interesting and learned a few things I didn't know about GMO's
Silvopasture is amazing! What people don't realize is that livestock NEED shade and windbreak. Trees also provide protection from aerial predators and some cover during rain and storms. The shade provided by trees keeps the temps down and actually helps livestock to be more productive (it helps them bred and birth more easily and with less stress, and helps them to produce more and better milk & wool). And running chickens or guinea fowl along with larger livestock, and rotating livestock between multiple silvopasture paddocks or fields helps to reduce parasite load for everybody. That means naturally healthier animals, fewer vet visits and lower vet bills, and fewer to no chemicals needed for regular dewormings, few to no pesticides used etc. Soil, crops and animals are all healthier and more productive. Rolling fields of nothing but grass may make for beautiful pastoral scenes, but they're costly (financially, ecologically and physically) to maintain and livestock that are grazed or foraged on them aren't quite as productive as livestock grazed or foraged among the trees. I think what eventually needs to happen is that we as humans need to go back to depending on LOCAL farms and seasonal foods that are regionally native. Maybe we like avocados, but if they can't be grown locally and have to be imported from other countries, we end up doing a LOT of damage just for the benefit of that 1 fruit. We need to be willing to return to times when, if something was out of season, you just don't eat it until its season comes back around. It would take so much for the average person in western civilization to be willing to give up the conveniences that industrial agriculture offers, though, that I don't see us committing to these very necessary changes anytime soon.
Grew up on a small farm (100 owned 100 rented) in Illinois. My dad did the four-year crop rotation. He also made sure he farmed on the contours to reduce erosion during rains and snow melt. He had about 20 head of Black Angus beef cows and in the Fall he would turn them out on the harvested corn fields to eat stalks and the corn the corn picker missed. Only time we had to feed hay to the cows was in the depth of winter and early spring. By summer they were out grazing on grass again. Farming is really hard for the farm wife. My poor mom fought dirt and mud her whole life. In later years my dad sold off his livestock, only raised corn and soybeans and could sit in the house during the winter. My mom never got to "retire".
The pandemic came and taught everyone the importance of having multiple stream of income, unfortunately having a nice paying job doesn't mean you are financial secured anymore. So we all need to put in an etra-income earning chance, like investment.
I agree with you and I believe that the secret to financial stability is having the right investment ideas to enable your earn more money, I don't know who agrees with me but either way I recommend either real estate or crypto and stocks.
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Mechanic on organic farm in south jersey for 4 years...today. happy 2-22-22. Ok our tomato tunnels produce huge amounts. No less than half end up on the ground. Maybe half that goes to market, ends up in the compost pile. The last 2 year have broken the farm. We had to buy a fleet of delivery vehicles and drivers to deliver to 2,000+ people that couldnt come to market. Now im fixing everything that was broken by first time drivers so he can sell it all to make up for it. The sweet potatoes came up too thin, so the entire crop was a waste. He outsourced from lancaster for a large amount of what we sold. The soil cant take the heat thats only been increasing. All the diesel fuel is one thing, but there is SOOOO MUCH Grease. Grease by the case. A $100 oil filter is cheap. $15k to repair a $30k bobcat. Some seeds cost $.05-$.10 each and there are 1000 needed for that 1 variety. I make $30k alone, which is highly underpaid for keeping a farm moving. Its rough, but i dont hate it, ive learned a lot, i just bought a mortgage and i get to be outside a lot. Tons of percs. The kicker is no white people can last more than a couple months. The same mexican workers come, legally, and work 10+ hours a day, 6 days a week, for lower( legally untaxed) pay. They work for 8 months and go home. They break everything they touch though. High repair costs.
Thanks for this one Joe! I left Texas to help my family's farm in Michigan 6 years ago, and it's equal parts spiritually nourishing and thankless hard work. I find many consumers don't appreciate that most small farmers aren't getting rich from their labor, so much as they're making as much money as possible to reinvest in their infrastructure. Winds destroy roofs, equipment repair/replacement is constant, input costs and property taxes are steadily increasing, and if you're lucky there's enough left over to actually build your productive capacity rather than simply treading water. The supply shortages of the last few years have driven some supermarket customers to our barns; many are seeing the wisdom of taking beef in bulk from us at $4/lb rather than throwing down a hundred or more for a single steak dinner for four. As our product proved out and demand has increased, we've been inspired to expand our kitchen garden so we can stock a roadside produce stand in our front yard. Everyone can be part of the solution to industrial farming's shortcomings, and I take a great deal of pride from helping to feed my neighbors. Paying us directly for our work is often more economical for the consumer (no small army of intermediaries taking a cut), there is less overall waste (unsold/uneaten food becomes fertilizer), transport is limited to getting it off the field and into your car, and the proceeds mostly stay in the local economy rather than getting spread out among Corporate Persons. Circle of life, indeed.
Edible Acres and Charles Dowding are two fantastic channels that focus on permaculture and no dig agriculture respectively. I'm finding myself somewhat in the middle, attempting to line no-dig gardens on the margins of the permaculture
Hey Joe, I must say that so many topics you present are right on the mark and illuminate vitally important issues, many of which remain as yet to be resolved. Hard times are ahead of us I am convinced, and so much of that hinges on the continuing growth of human population. I'm glad I am old.
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GET TO THE POINT JACKASS!
12 miles south by south west
a bit rude... he was just getting to it.
How are you going to look up Mark Shepard yet? He combines most of the regenerative practices you talk about you can find a video of him by Kirsten Dirksen and/or Justin Rhodes. Also look up Kirsten Dirksen‘s video Nebraska retiree uses earth’s heat to grow oranges
you forgot the comma
Is it bad that I gave this comment a thumbs up? 🤔
Joe! You did it to me this time. [shakes fist air] I've had regenerative agriculture on my list for a while now.
The best rivalry 😂 you two have been going back and forth in video topics for awhile now!
Love you guys for quality content. Thanks a bunch
😂Maby you could beat him to a video on precision farming?
Are either of you covering the unique problems of animal agriculture?
Oh how the turntables
I used to work for the Ministry of Agriculture here in my home province. We have the problem with land prices. There are young people who want to get into farming but can't afford it because the land itself is so expensive. I do not remember the group who made this bumper sticker that came into our offices but it said "If you eat, you are involved in Agriculture". And that is something we all have to remember.
Same problem here in the states. Want to be a farmer? Well you better hope your parents or grandparents gave you some land in their will. And after that you better hope no one finds oil on your land or else you run the risk of having salt water spilled in your field because the oil company wants to buy the land and make it useless.
There are certain organizations which are buying up land and putting up a perpetual "agriculture" stamp on it so it lowers the price, since development isn't allowed on it. It's worth looking into it, I know they do this in the USA, possibly in Canada and other places as well. There are also a LOT of generation switch about to happen in the next 10 years, so it's worth keeping an eye out.
Yep here in YEG i miss the country and long for the farms of just one generation ago and thus if I could a afford even a quarter would totdlly till n sow. Less John deere, R2R.
Same issue in the States. Even just getting a couple acres to start something small is nearly impossible.
I wanted to start farming after university back in 2005. Farms started at 1.5 million$ with none or a minimal amount of equipment. After doing the math, i calculated that i would own the farm and turn a profit in 2045 if everything went well. So i joined the military and ill be retired in 2030 with full pension and ill probably get a hobby farm then...
I’m currently 21 and I am a 7th generation farmer. I’m going to college to learn better practices. My family normally does conventional till but we are slowly incorporating no-till methods into our system. At some point I would like no-till to be our primarily farming technique.
keep me updated bro this is dope as fuck
@@Bennie32831 No fruit trees where we are, not without irrigation. A big idea of no-till is that it reduces erosion, whether it be wind or water. And we have terraces to slow water movement so it won’t cut through our fields. We have to be mindful of how much moisture we get year-to-year and plant accordingly.
people are interested in farming stuff, maybe make vids?
You’re literally saving the world. Thank you.
Thats how ive been growing my weed for years. Definitely makes a noticeable difference.
Most of the intensive grazer farmers agree, "If I had done this when I was young I would have more Kids and hobbies". Turns out a couple hours moving cows each day is easier than growing feed crops. I used to have to till field, plant field, fertilize field, swath field, bail field and finally move bails off field, which is months of 12 hour days even on a fairly small farm. To be fair, there were a couple months of no work assuming tractors didn't need rebuilding but they always did because tractors are expensive.
Edit: tbc I'm no longer farming. Grandpa was unwilling to let anyone take over or make any decisions so everyone left and got jobs that actually pay.
Goddamn old ways die with thier people, should have taken that farm haha
Grass grows from the bottom as it were it developed along side the bovine herbivores and their fertilization.
the grass cover crop held the soil there and managed like many plants deal with low and high water times
I have been farming my entire life in multiple different systems every thing you said is spot on farmers are on the brink every day thanks for this one Joe.
Thank you for keeping us fed.
🤝
Did you manage to watch Clarksons Farm on amazon? If so what did you think? It was a documentary on the realities of farming and damn it was eye opening. Just brutally hard. I found it really eye opening
👏
One thing though;
there are plenty of (young) people, who really do want to start some small scale crop-op.
Next 10 years or so, could in deed become interesting
Thank you for your time and work
I worked at a fertilizer company for a decade, some farmers would have us mix cover crop in with their fall fertilizer, which effectively made planting free for them
Thats a great idea
Pure genius, they should advertise to promote that
Too easy, _can't work, GOTTA GO!_
...that’s not free. Literally the only thing you are saving is a % of the time it takes to drop the seed.
@@gibbyrockerhunter gas for the tractor only has to be paid once. The gas is the biggest expense for planting besides the actual seeds. So you're right, not free, but half the gas.
I work for a magazine called Small Farmer's Journal that has been championing sustainability, biodynamics and regenerative agriculture for over 45 years. I have learned a lot about where our food comes from and it has definitely changed my habits.
A lot of this video was spot on, but I don't think the limiting factor for small farms is the lack of farmers, or people willing to farm. It is more the lack of access to land, mostly due to expense. There are efforts being made to put retiring farmers together with upcoming farmers intended to help get around some of these issues.
Also, yes, it is hard work, but compared to a cubicle I would definitely not characterize it as "grueling."
Thanks for the video, Joe, it is an important topic that gets overlooked.
@_____ enter the drones
As a small small small, homesteader, I couldn’t agree more, if I had the land I would farm to produce for more than my family.
I grew up on a farm, and my dad has been talking my ear off for years about rotational grazing, silvopasturing, and soil organic carbon. I was really interested in this topic (I even toyed with the idea of quitting my job and going back to the family farm), but I always wondered what the catch was. Thanks for talking about the hitch in our git-along, and ways we could maybe deal with it. I think my dad would get a real kick out of this video.
Your dad is a very intelligent man. You should listen to him more often.
Your father isn't wrong. There is a great deal of potential in everything Joe mentioned here. Not one of these will be a silver bullet. Silver bullets kill werewolves but climate change and soil degeneration are not werewolves.
There are alternatives to doing the right thing, of course. Lots of alternatives.
Before WWI most people lived on farms. When the Depression struck, those people did pretty well for themselves. They had crops, fishing, hunting, wild-crafting and trade with neighbors to sustain them quite well. They also had less stress.
In short, I'd recommend you take on learning about your father's farm. Make it thrive. Good for you and your children and the world.
show it to him!! Let's see what he says
@@forestgreen41 I did. He liked it!
I grew up on a small but successful farm fifty years ago and many of the practices you describe were common in our area. Many of these are not things we are discovering but things we have forgotten. You never mention the biggest obstacle which is massive agribusiness corporations whose goal is to squeeze out every possible penny of profit regardless of the costs to the earth or society. This is also done at the expense of the family farms which cannot compete with those giants and are being bought up or squeezed out.
Our home garden growing up was an especially successful project for feeding rabbits and deer. The wildlife rated it 10/10
The garden my roommate has produced zucchinis the size of our cats!… we have Maine Coons
We may try to plant strawberries this year, or actually focus on the eggplant and tomatoes
@@icarusbinns3156 According to school books this year: *"Remember! You can use several vegetables as sэх toу, too!*
*But don't forget to use a сопdом to spare you of infections!"* _
haha my sister had the same problem, she put a little wire shelter thing over hers and that kept some of the wildlife off at least
Have kids? Have a garden too.
My parents kept a small garden, and I remember being stunned (maybe 8 years old) when we dug up the potatoes we'd planted in spring.
I'm currently getting back into mushroom farming, oyster mushrooms grow on cellulose.
I've effectively made a zero paper waste situation in my home and if everything goes well I can start a paper recycling route to supplement, spent blocks go back into compost.
As a side note I can use grass clipping and leaves too, it may turn into a landscaping business someday.
If you drink coffee you can also use the leftover coffee grounds for mushroom growing.
The idea is to supplement with lawn clippings it works amazing with pink oysters yet I hate the finicky nature of tropical species.
I'd love to see something on the oldest cities like you hinted at. I took an anthropology class recently and was fascinated when reading about ohalo II. I'm sure we'll find more when we finally stop saying, "we're the best humans ever, and everyone who lived before us were just knuckle-dragging idiots."
Same!
Me too
Never gonna happen. :) Not with this attitude and not with any attitude. Because it's not about attitude or knowledge. It's about what mankind DOES. And at that, we suck. Biblically so.
@@jaakkopontinen I am still hopeful that one day we'll look back and say 'holy crap, our ancestors were pretty freaking smart.' Not willing to hold my breath, but it would be nice.
Im always dumbfounded that people grow grass instead of growing food. You have the land to grow food and save a lot of money, and you choose to buy food... I have a garden and it feeds my family. I only have to buy meats. I save $300 a month in food costs!
if you grow grass you can buy an expensive lawn mower and then complain about cutting grass tho
@@nymeriagloves3957 An even better reason why Grass Lawns suck. I never have to cut grass because I dont have grass
I dream of having a food forest in my yard, with only a little grass. Grass is awful. I live in Florida and it's all St Augustine grass, itchy sharp harsh grass that requires tons of water and constant fertilization. It sucks. At least in the US, a boring green landscape of grass to mow with only a few trees (so the grass gets plenty of sun) is a stupid prideful status symbol that most Americans still want.
@@jaridkeen123 you could save even more by not buying meats.
many people don't have the time or money for such things.
15:15 "We would have to completely change our standard of living to one where we have less food variety." Wonderful video so glad you dove in to regen farming. This one statement was confusing to me, though, and didn't seem to be based on any other claim or citation in the video. Regen practices can absolutely support the same or greater diversity of food that we have today. Economically speaking, industrial farming is more incentivized to reduce crop diversity.
Hi Joe! I've been a SPIN farmer in SE BC for over a decade. I farm about 2/3 of an acre on a dozen plots in my neighbours yards right in town. Sell at farmers markets and to local restaurants.
We use regenerative practices, and one super important point I wish you'd highlighted is the carbon capture of regenerative AG.
You hit the great point of water retention -and I can vouch for that 1st hand. But you missed the point that the same water holding organic mater is also a carbon sink. If farmers were subsidized for carbon sequestration (like big oil) thru carbon pricing this would help offset the initial costs of regenerative farming.
I've read a few studies that figure we could increase the AG soils to %4 organic mater (their average natural state) and effectively solve our GHG overburden.
Gardening tip: in your yard plant Candy Roaster squash. Just dig a hole 18" wide 8" deep, overfill with compost, mulch and add a drip line on a timer. Zero effort: they are hilarious and will take over your whole yard. Best pumpkin pie you ever had.
More plants will reduce CO2, but not CO from burning oil based fuels & anything else, CO & SO2 from burning coal & erupting volcanoes, which also emit large volumes of ash, or CH4 from rotting matter & flatulence, all of which pollute the air & are poisonous in large quantities to all animals & plants.
Volcanic ash & CO2 in the atmosphere can cool the earth. Large volumes of ash reduce solar radiation & light while CO2 gets cold in the upper atmosphere, causing the refrigerator effect.
Unfortunately the ash has bad repercussions as lack of light reduces plant growth & when it finally falls, can suffocate & possibly kill the plants. On the bright side, any seeds which germinate will have ample nutrients & CO2 to have lush growth if there is also ample rainfall.
CO, SO2, CH4 & H2O all warm the earth as they all hold in the solar radiated heat, the latter 2 also being highly reflective, reflecting heat back down, thus the greenhouse effect.
Much love from Nebraska! My family have been farmers for 5 generations in Colorado and Nebraska. I'm working not to repeat the mistakes of my father. Regenerative agriculture is the only path forward. All other paths lead to more debt and further degradation of your land.
Good deal. I farmed in Ohio, later supporting climate smart agriculture in developing countries. Now in Puerto Rico and looking to apply it here on the island.
Rich fathers, poor sons as they say
Hey, I'm from Nebraska. Had a lot of Farmer friends, I was always jealous of all the money they had. They always said they weren't wealthy, but constantly had new vehicles, clothes, technology, etc... Maybe they weren't wealthy on paper, but in real life they got all the best stuff.
right on, Joe missed the whole point on this topic
@@ElectronFieldPulse I think it depends where you're from, but I had the same experience. Where I grew up in Ireland, all the wealthiest people I knew were farmers. But there's still a stereotype in some countries that farmers are poor or not well off, I guess it just depends where you're from. I associate farming with big flashy cars, private tutors and ski trips 4 times a year for the kids, because that's what I grew up seeing.
You mentioned the amount of food that gets thrown away here in the US. When you have a backyard garden, all of a sudden every vegetable or fruit you produce all by yourself is "gold". I've had tomatoes, spinach, lettuce, broccoli, and eggs from our 3 chickens. All of it is treated as this rare precious food. I suppose when you put your own time and energy into it, it completely changes your mindset. I'm not a wasteful person by nature, and I do feel a bit guilty when I have to toss out produce that went bad because it was forgotten about. But let me drop one of our chicken's eggs and you'll see this girl cry. Love your videos!
And friends and family just love gifts of produce.
@@VanillaMacaron551 Yeah, I just can't wait for the annual excess zucchini drop-off. Man.......I can't stand zucchini!
The amount of love and care that vegetables and fruits (and eggs) must receive to be produced makes one realize how precious they really are. Very interesting your point of view
Get a bokashi bucket system - then you don't have to throw away ANY food scraps ever. Anything that was once alive (apart from large bones - which I just bury straight in the soil) can become compost again.
You don't have a compost pile?
Yay I am very excited about regenerative farming. Joe did a great summary but I suggest checking out videos to see it in action. A point that wasn’t mentioned was it’s impact on biodiversity, which is hugely important for human survival.
Rather than saying only 20% use no-till farming, I find it amazing its that high. It really is on the way to capturing the market as current machinery wears out.
I also find that number hard to believe, and I hope it does become more popular, but heck, we started no-tilling when I was a kid, 30+ years ago. This is nothing new, but today it almost seems less common than it was then, at least in our area. Maybe fuel prices will start to influence thinking, but I dunno...
When my mom grew up on a farm, she said they were given ‘government acres’, which meant they were paid by the government to leave their land fallow or plant cover crops. They’d let the cows come in and eat what was left, and then the soil was ready for a new round of corn. Sounds like the solutions used to be there during the New Deal, but then corporate agriculture bought up all the small farms. Shame.
We still have something like that. It's called the Conservation Reserve Program, CRP. We have a few acres of CRP land and it really helped with flood control in that area. We turned it into a pollinator plot (planted pollinator friendly plants). Alot of these programs exist already but need expanded so more farmers can participate or the incentives increased so more farmers are willing to participate.
There are conservation programs still. Especially for buffer strips - band of cover crop without pesticides to protect waterways. I know a few folks that have them (the switch-grass strips also helps greatly with wildlife). What I hunt on today used to be conservation acres that the farmer left wild after the contract ended. Most of farming is still family owned (see razor thin margins Joe mentioned and "97 percent of all U.S. farms are family-owned." -2012 Census of Agriculture Farm Typology report). It's just fewer families, with some operating on orders of magnitude beyond other farmers.
What do you do for a living?.. "Well, I don't grow corn. Yep.. I get up around the crack of noon, go outside.. make sure there's no corn growing. I used to not grow tomatoes, but there's more money in not growing corn." Brian Regan
@@wadevarner4247 I remember a program called Acres for Wildlife when I grew up in Ohio....farmers were paid to leave buffer strips along fence rows...could always find rabbits and quail there.
EU has such scheme, you get a subside not to use the whole land
I’m doing most of this already. Rotations, zero till and cover crops And yes using trees as wind breaks and they catch a ton of snow in the off season. No one answer is the answer for every field it’s a combination. It’s about what will work in the area.
Loved this! As a gardener, the state of your raised borders made me scream, and you rolling that composter made me laugh so much!
When you listed all the plants you planned to grow, I must admit I pulled a frown.
One of the things that puts off so many well-meaning first time growers for good is trying to grow plants that require experience.
Always go for easy crops first - potatoes are a must in one of those raised borders; in the 2nd box plant something more permanent like red raspberries, black currants or white currants. They're easy to look after, just a bit of watering. Mulch with dead leaves or chipped bark or scatter some low growing green crop underneath (I like American or Land Cress).
I do hope you give growing-your-own another try, Joe. The difference in flavour is amazing.
I'm glad you're giving regenerative gardening some air time. People really should look into doing this if they're already growing some of their own fruits and veggies, and those that don't or can't might want to look to getting into allotments or joining a city farm group.
I'm currently planting my own food forest both at home and in a damaged woodland nearby. In fact, a few decades ago, I lived next to a woodland that was about 60 acres of abandoned private homes that had been abandoned, all their gardens going back to nature, everywhere full of wonderful wild flowers and fruit/nut trees. You never went hungry walking through there, and we would fill buckets with fruit in the Autumn as kids.
That's what I'm trying to recreate now, but on a much smaller scale - since I don't have anything like 60 acres!
I've also made great efforts to introduce many different species of fungi to the garden. They do make a difference to the way plants grow. Not all of them are edible by any means, because the emphasis is helping the plants, not harvesting the living daylights out of the garden.
Anyway, thanks for this.
Yeah, correctly growing food is pretty involved.
A little of it can be easy, but I happily leave the rest to professionals.
Raspberries? For a first time grower??? I'm sure there are varieties that are thornless and dont spread like bamboo, but the majority of raspberries have thorns and do spread like bamboo if you don't stay on top of them. It is also very confusing as to which type of canes fruit. Some first year, some second. Beans...that is a good crop for first time growers. Peas are good too, and are much better than the ones you buy. I would eat them raw once I picked them and they are easy to grow especially if your growing season is short.
@@musaran2 Want some scientific watch-suggests?
Thanks for the advise. I have developed a liking for raspberries, so I am looking forward to trying to grow them, and the potatoes too!
Beautiful! Thank you so much for sharing!
Having recently watched Clarksons Farm on amazon, I was amazed at just how brutally hard and punishing it is, with success or failure determined by many factors outside your control. Very eye opening and well recommended
Regenerative Agriculture is something I've been watching different videos on and I love the idea of it. It also fills me with equal parts hope and dread, hope because we can do something, dread, because I don't know if it'll happen.
Hello, how are you doing today I hope you’re having a good day so far 👋👋God bless you
I am sure that "regenerative farming" is totally sustainable.
Just a quick note on transgenic crops and drought resistance: here (in africa's southern tropics), variability of local soils and climates is so high that while transgenic crops do better on average than any one variety planted throughout the region, a lot of farmers would do better retaining their local landrace/heritage varieties that are adapted to local conditions - unfortunately, well-meaning government initiatives have pushed F1 varieties and wiped out landraces in most of the country, which... doesn't help with food insecurity.
Africa's soil heterogenity is put forward as an important reason why the green revolution never got a hold in Africa.
Transgenic crops helps fund Big Agro though, at the expense of small farmers. I don't have fears of health risks. I thing it's a bit silly to see "no GMOs" in supermarkets for individual health reasons. For agriculture in general and small farmers in particular though...
@@squirlmy Also, GMO seed stock is controlled by patent law and usually the farmers cannot legally propagate or hybridize plant types owned by the companies that developed them. Farmers are locked into buying the GMO seed from the big agro corporations or risk being out-competed by their neighbors.
Capitalism could starve humanity. Eat the rich.
@@thomasdeas1941 Can't I just compost them? Oily food gives me indigestion...
(Obviously, youtube, I am not composting anyone nor advocating that anyone be composted against their will. Just humour.)
We have a small family farm that employs regenerative practices so this one is close to home. Thanks for sharing the potential and challenges it faces. While we primary farm to raise our own food we do a small business selling goods in our local community. It can be a sustainable business if done wisely. Like you said though, there aren’t a ton of folks wanting to dive into farming no matter how rewarding it can be.
I have watched videos over the last 5 years showing Permaculture, where extremely large areas in Australia, Africa, China and India have been taken from dead, barren land to lifegiving e3cosystems. For example, in India there was a river that had completely disappeared for 60 years. After making deliberate landscaping/farming choices, the river started to flow for 1 month, the year after- 2 months... now it flows year round and crops are able to be grown again. We CAN choose change. There is hope for humanity and the environment.
I've also read of Australian farms being bought for coal mining by Chinese companies. Hope, maybe, but not complacency.
Not if the goal is to replace industrial farming and maintain the same output.
@@theallseeingeye9388 Regenerative Ag increases the amount of food the farmer grows. At a PROFIT PER ACRE. You are thinking in terms of Yield, while ppa is altogether different.
I find this video very interesting! My dad has been using regenerative farming practices for many years now. One thing that I think is important is many people believe animals are detrimental to the environment which is simply untrue. Animals can graze on marginal land that otherwise would be unproductive and even make cover crops profitable by converting them to meat for food.
My partner and I finally purchased a house last year and I have plenty of room for my own garden - essentially, if it's not native, or I can't eat it, I don't want it. I use all these sustainable/permaculture practices and it just gives me warm fuzzies, seeing how the whole ecology works together, how bugs and birds appear, how plants decompose back into the soil, how all my food scraps are breaking down and becoming new food for me to eat. My mother complains that my yard is a mess, but she's also jealous that I have lots of native bees and she doesn't, because I don't cover their holes with paving or manicured grass.
That garden, yeah I feel that.
My state, Oregon, has 30,000 small family owned farms. The state gives tax incentives to grocery stores that sell products made by these farms. I always make it a point to look for the "made in [OR town] or locally grown label.
I’d love to see a video about the oldest cities found!
You forgot to mention, they started planting windbreaks to prevent soil erosion during the dust bowl. Modern corporate farms have been cutting them all down.
Want some scientific watch-suggests?
Thank You Joe for making this video. I am involved in the organic farming sector in India and we have started implementing regenerative practices and ita a LOT of hard work. Massive respect to all the farmers out there.
Personally, I feel like the answer to food shortages is cultivating a society mindset towards maintaining personal gardens, and supplementing with supermarket goods. It would be a multi-generational process that I honestly don't see happening, globally, for a long time- if ever.
I really liked your breakdown of different types of sustainable farming, as I feel in some idyllic future it might be the way people choose which type of personal garden they cultivate.
And, yes, I'd be very interested in a video from you about the oldest known settlements! I'm curious about how some of the debated dates and locations may help or hinder our current model of human migration, especially the dates of some ancient civilizations in the Americas.
I don't think it's possible for personal gardens to make a significant dent in global food consumption, especially considering the amount of people who live in cities that have little to know land to grow on. It also takes a lot of time to grow any reasonable amount of food, and there's a reason society advanced as people became less dependent on their own subsistence farming.
@Daniel Jensen I've seen some stuff on societies that put heavy importance on everyone having windowsill gardens, to the point of it being national pride. Those types of societies were able to benefit from personal gardens, even in densely packed areas, while also frequenting markets or fruit stands enough to have a healthy trade economy, while not being dependent.
A lot of areas that used to do this, now find personal gardens illegal. Some places are still allowed to cultivate ornamental plants, but not edibles. In my community, we're allowed to grow our own food, but so much as sharing it freely with neighbors must be approved by the USDA (found this out when roommates tried to turn their 1/3 acre into a functional farm). These laws have gone a long way to impede people even trying to cultivate anything of their own, discouraging even the mentality of self sufficiency.
I'm not proposing a society where each individual is independently sustainable, so much as individuals are encouraged to grow their own, say, herbs. Do what they can. And yes, plants grow in cycles, but that's not an issue if you plan your crops to rotate, even in a windowsill garden. You can easily find dwarf varieties of most plants you might want to grow, so space shouldn't be too much of an issue, either.
I just feel that with everyone producing their own little niche gardens, it's fairly inevitable that many will end up with excess to share with neighbors, though there would still be use of supermarkets, if not heavy reliance, but it would definitely be eased. As I mentioned in my original comment, I don't expect this to be a true reality, but I do feel it would work, in theory, given many generations to perfect some level of personal pride into small scale gardening.
was kind expecting the Dutch Agri University Wageningen to be named somewhere in this video as the leading institute in cutting edge futuristic farming. Dutch Agriculture has so much to teach
I am Dutch, but Wageningen University also has so much to learn when it comes to sustainable forms of farming. BigAG has a huge influence on that University
Yes very disappointed :P. This video is very much focussed on the USA (which I understand) but feels quite outdated to Dutch standards.
@@willybillyshow Yes, large companies have their influence, but it doesn't mean that the WUR or the agricultural sector don't know what to do. The knowledge is out there, it's mostly the culture that needs to be broken and proper governance has to be put forward.
@@StefanvanGestel to european standards in general I‘d say especially when it comes to cover crops and erosion protection
I was digging a hole a few months back and I was really intrigued in how layers of soil are deposited. So off I went to Wikipedia the learn about how the difent layers of soil have varying amounts of nutrients and microbes and salts. Then I learned top soil is not a easily renewed resource and we are basically already screwed.
Composting can help to rebuild the topsoil.
@@peterjf7723 Videos with Dr. Elaine Ingham abound on YT. Top soil biology expert.
@@marlan5470 Thank you.
Joe, would be interested in going into detail about the reasons farmers don’t typically own their own land and how foreign acquisition plays a role in this?
I'll tell you my personal story, and it extends to many other families as well. I grew up on a ninety acre farm in Texas. When my grandfather passed away it was split two ways between the kids. I was offered it to farm, but I was halfway through college, on a different career path. That path didn't work out, and I'm now into regenerative farming. The farm, however, is leased to a big contract cotton farming company, and due to the land being split up, even when the land becomes half mine, it will very likely stay split and in cotton with the current company. So much farmland is fractionally owned, or bought out by investors that the prices are driven up to the point where getting much more than a hobby farm going for a Regen farmer is prohibitively expensive. It takes time for the soil itself to build the organic matter and ecosystem necessary for many of these practices to be practical. Spending $3000 an acre and not seeing a payoff for five years simply makes the financing impossible.
Thank you for covering this. I've been talking about permaculture and food security on my channel for the past year but don't have much reach.
Restoration Agriculture and Gias Garden are two fantastic books.
I like to call our current situation the petroleum revolution. We've gotten lazy from all the cheap energy and fertilizers it produces.
In the past few months I have begun to organically farm our acre of land here in Thailand and I found your video so relevant. Thanks Joe.
I do regenerative organic farming research for a living. It's an important field and where the production of most of our bulk calories needs to go.
That said, I am increasingly convinced that the future of a lot of vegetable production (especially leafy greens) is in hydroponics and/or vertical farming.
I wonder where lab meat and aquaphonics fit into that future as well. Because as far as I can see meat production uses more than 20 times as much water/land, etc. for the same amount of energy for the human body. I've been wondering how efficient would mass production of insects be ?
@@autohmae I don't know enough about lab grown meat to make a meaningful judgment but as a lay person it does seem very power intensive. Raising cattle on pasture is the opposite, it requires very little power.
The impact of meat production can take into account the efficiency of the animals ability to convert feed into harvestable mass and the impact of producing the feed. Chickens and fish are very efficient at converting feed into mass, usually hovering around a 1:1 ratio. Cows on the other hand are pretty inefficient. That said, the advantage of cows is that their feed can be very low quality compared to chickens and fish. Chickens and fish are omnivores that need a balance of greens, grain and protein; and producing the latter two have a lot of environmental problems associated with them.
Cows have historically been raised on pasture. With proper management, pasture is very easy to grow, with very little input required as far as fertility, water and energy are concerned. Now, however, 90% of cows spend their last months on feedlots, being fed grain because it gets them to to market weight twice as fast. This is where most of the impacts of animal agriculture comes from--growing grain to feed cows instead of letting them forage on well maintained pastures. As joe said in the video, managing a lot of cows on pasture is a lot of work, which cannot be appreciably mechanized or automated (yet!) whereas we figured out how to massively mechanize grain production shortly after WW1. But grain production is terrible for the environment.
Fun fact: before grain production was massively mechanized, chicken meat was more expensive than and more of a luxury product compared to beef. This is why herbert hoover promised a chicken in every pot instead of a steak on every table in his political ads during the late 20s.
Regarding insects: there's a ton of potential there, but I don't know what their feed conversion rates are. I do believe that insects will be a significant protein source in the future, as will algae/kelp.
Lastly, regarding aquaponics: aquaponics primary problem is that the system is insanely complicated. I had a friend that was obsessed with aquaponics, did it for 5+ years. When he switched to hydroponics, his little backyard operation finally started making money because it was so much simpler. In a nutshell, the problem is that the vegetables you're growing, the fish you're growing and the microbes that convert the fish waste into nutrients for the vegetables all have different optimum temperatures. This means that aquaponics requires an incredible amount of temperature control and a lot of different staging and mixing tanks for your fluids in different stages.
That said, one way aquaponics is much more practical. What I mean by this is a system where fish are kept in a tank and effluent from that pond is siphoned off to irrigate a field while being replaced with new fresh water on a regular schedule as a way to dispose of the excess fish manure.
Lol i nearly choked when Joe said ill save you some time....." Get to the point, jackass." I love it. Joe i know its not Monday yet but that remark and your reaction made my week. Youre the best.
Well, just decide to use the proper formatting of weeks and you'll find that it was the first day of the week!
it is monday here in finland. just going to the sauna.
@@ChrispyNut I prefer to put the "weekend" at the "end" of the "week". Anything else is just weird. 🤔
@@seanhoude That's fine, I'm weird in many ways so that'll be par for my course!
@@jeremycmsmith Ah, not a multi-tasker, huh?
Some spend Saturday ALSO wishing week B away, just as spending Sunday ALSO recovering from week A. :-D
Great video! So I’m not a full time farmer but I have and still do work on multiple smaller farms in the Negev Desert here in Israel, so this video is a really cool thing to see. Most of the stuff we do out here is organic and sustainable, simply because of the smaller scale of the farms. Many of the farms in the Negev are Kibbutzim and farming villages, which generally are more sustainable than industrial level agriculture. I’ve also worked at the מו״פ, which is a research farm that works to develop irrigation technology and strains of crops best suited for the desert climate, and it’s been working. The Negev desert is actually shrinking due to Israeli agriculture, which is incredibly rare, especially in the Middle East.
Anyway, this video is really cool to see, and yes, I am one of the few people who actually does enjoy farming. I’m in favor of organic farming practices for the simple reason that it’s more enjoyable: the use of industrial machines will never be the same as actually working the land with your own hands. Great video!
Another interesting topic is agrovoltaics - combining the concept of protecting the crop from harsh sunlight as in agroforestry, but using solar panels. The reduced sunlight reduces water usage and the water that evaporates from the plants can condense on the solar cells and cool them through evaporation, increasing efficiency. It has its draws, some argue that it is inefficient land use and obviously navigating machinery amongst the panels is more difficult. But as an agricultural engineering major, I find it interesting.
Yes the rows need to be designed and positioned at the outset for ease of machinery access where required.
Successful trials in Australia have showed how well solar farms can integrate with sheep farming. The sheep love sitting in the shade of the panels, the panels cause moisture retention in the soil and the right grasses or feed crops happily grow in the partial shade. The frames holding the panels need to be designed so sheep have no way of harming the panels or themselves, so pretty sturdy, and at a certain height.
Haven't heard about co-locating solar panels with cattle - maybe a big roof structure would work better for them as they are so strong and could more easily damage the panels and their supporting frames.
You know that thing where someone talks on a subject you actually work with, and then you find out if they really know what they talk about? This is that video for me. I work on a farm that is implementing all of these practices. You're spot on with every point you made here. Great work on the research, man!
Yes! Do a video on the oldest cities found! But totally aim for the really super ancient ones! I love history on fallen civilizations!
Want some scientific watch-suggests?
@@nenmaster5218 yes please! I love hearing about super ancient cities/civs
@@smfreij Hmm... thats a very specific Request, so lemme think about it.
@@smfreij I think 'Adam Something' covered New AND Old Architecture,
so look that up.
...Maaaybe Real Engineering?
@@smfreij th-cam.com/channels/V-yCAXMS-nWrHtORuDfSuQ.html
I tried it once in my parents' garden. Tomatoes were a real challenge. Getting the plants to grow in reasonable shapes whilst dealing with hot days and wet days. The easy stuff were lettuce, dry herbs, things that needed little to no attention except for watering. I enjoyed it and the results were much more flavourful than storebought.
"Half of all produced food is being thrown away."
"We need to produce way more food."
"But half of all food is being thrown away right now."
"The human population is continuing to grow so we need to produce way more food to feed all the people."
"But HALF of all food is being thrown away."
"There are millions of people who are still suffering from hunger all around the world, we really gotta ramp up food production."
"WE ARE THROWING AWAY HALF OF ALL THE FOOD WE PRODUCE!!!"
We are actually at the point in time that starvation around the world is nearly erased. I think the last time I saw a study on it in 2010 the worlds starving populations went from 1 billion to under 100 million. And now it's 2022 and you really don't hear about starving people anymore. And that's wonderful news. There is always gonna be some here or there but world wide starvation is nearly gone.
@@Barthaneous34 Uhm you should check your numbers again...
@@Barthaneous34 yeah you might be kinda right. Look up a book like Alex de Waal - Mass Starvation. It argues that all mass starvations / famines in the present are because of political or ethnical repression.
@@Barthaneous34 Yemen. Although much of that is deliberate military blockage of humanitarian aid. And perhaps in the past we've underestimated how much starvation has been used as a tactic against certain populations, rather than just the cruel whims of nature.
I mean, certainly insects could provide much of the worlds protein, but how many of us eat insects on a regular basis? Food is a FUNDAMENTALLY IRRATIONAL ISSUE. Another issue is we should all be giving up meat, particularly beef. But, how many people in the world are doing that? Beef consumption is way up in places like China and worldwide.
Perhaps we are just self-destructive species. I'm beginning to think the global thermonuclear war that would have destroyed "Western Civilization" 80s-2000 might have been merciful compared to the long drawn-out collapse we might be facing instead. Humanity is like a deathly sick dog. Do you know we've barely made a dent in the rate of GROWTH of fossil fuel burning? Thank goodness I don't have children!
The need more food number stems from a projected decline in food production due to climate change. Basically 10 years ago we produced more food than the global population could consume before spoiling. By 2030 we're projected to have far more mouths to feed than calories to feed them. And the situation based on regional projections is going to be really, really bad. Like world war bad, if we don't figure things out before then.
Joe, do a video about the Land Institute and their development of perennial polycultures. A mix of crops that you plant once, they grow together and help each other, and they don't need irrigation, pesticides, herbicides, or any inputs at all, and then you just harvest them every year. They fit right in with the regenerative ag theme.
As a farmer, I feel like I can say that this is actually a really accurate and informative video. Thanks, Joe.
Love this. This was a surprise to be sure, but a welcome one. Though I would've liked if you'd mentioned swales and other rain-catching mechanisms.
That was actually in the original script but we trimmed it for time.
My wife and I are about to move out of the city and buy a piece of land to farm ( I am self-employed online, so why not breathe clean air and do something good).
15:10 "We would have to change our lifestyle to having less food variety"
Yeah you know, one of the issues we already have today. Where our entire supply chain has only a couple strains of a crop vs how about a hundred years ago we used many strains of all crops. It's why there's serious worry a blight could kill off an entire crop.
Good point. But there's also strong economic incentives not to change. New England farming was basically destroyed by monoculture farming in the Mid-West and West. They now import even apples, (and many varieties of cider and cooking apples grown there are now extinct). I've also been hearing about this predicament with bananas in Latin America for decades and it's seemingly unchanged all this time.
@@squirlmy yeah the main issue though is that expanding in the buisness is easier by using more of the same resources. So it's cheaper to get say seeds from one apple type than as many as we can get. Bigger purchases still cost more yes, but due to buying in bulk it's actually cheaper heavily dis-advising the idea of branching out. It's also easier for the say single farmer to plant and tend one crop vs 10 or 20 so we get in the rut we're in now. But it would take a lot of effort to turn it around. Not to mention again that farming is a rather unpopular lifestyle so having many farms of different crops isn't a perfect solution.
@@squirlmy Want some scientific watch-suggests?
You missed Gabe Brown's lecture on living web farm. The man runs 3000 acres of grain, cattle, and sheep with 3 and a half people. The half is his neighbor combining. In his lecture he talks about an industrial farmer that grows on 14000 acres that switched to cover crops and never looked back. Gabe consults with farmers and increases there profitability every time.
I am currently at an organic regenerative no-till conference in Omaha NE. We are figuring out how to do this at scale with the best minds in this field. It is pretty exciting and humbling working on the front lines of this!
Hello from a Japanese farmer! 🙏🙏
Thanks for another great video Joe. In some regions such as my part of Canada, yard clippings are not picked up any more and recycling is encouraged, mulching mowers work really well for leaves also. Sometimes I use my electric mower just to mulch fallen leaves. I would love to see a video about ancient cities, along with lost areas such as Atlantis, Pompeii and Alexander's library
People are crazy for not mulching their clippings, they contain the fertilizer you put on last time.
I'm in Southwestern Ontario. Ditto.
@@jodivandyk3649 I'm in the GTA Jodi, and I believe we've had grass recycling for more than 10 years now, I can't remember the last time we put grass clippings out for pickup
I would love to see a video on the oldest cities ever found!
Nineveh * is one and in Turkey they found the oldest.
Fun fact Noah and his 3 sons and their wives who repopulated the world came from Ararat Turkey.
That would be an awesome video topic!
I've heard one of the issues was a mini-ice age 10,000 years ago which at least in places, wiped out all traces of human habitation before it. Now, I first heard of this from Graham Hancock, who might not be the most reliable source for such history... shrug
I recently got hooked on gardening and have been going down the regenerative agriculture rabbit hole myself. Personally I'm totally hooked on no-till organic living soil and learning how to make my own nutritional amendments for the garden. I am totally chemical free and feeling good about it. It could be just a midlife crisis but I'm thinking about starting a small organic farm, which is funny because I've spent my whole life living in big cities.
I love this channel. up until about 4 years ago, I was completely tech ignorant. Then I suffered a life changing injury that left me seriously paralyzed and bedridden. i eventually got use of my hands back, then I got a tablet computer and started exploring you tube and such...this channel and a few others helped me thru some really dark times, and my experience is not unique. Thanks for all the Tubers out there who bring a certain light to us folks who need it.
I so appreciate that you did this vid for your viewers. Regen ag is so important! saves money, time, it's healthier and it's so much better for the soil! If your soil is not healthy, neither is the food grown there. Great vid!
I worked for years at an agricultural cooperative spreading chemical fertilizers and pesticides. I loved my job, but hated what I did. Everything I worked with was a poison or acid. And I am spreading this across my state. The worst was when farmers would tell me to go ahead and spray or spread right over a drainage, illegal of course. And then have me spray glyphosphate over their entire property to try and kill the "weeds". I come back later to side dress because the crop isn't doing so well. I wonder why now that I can sit and watch the dusty topsoil blow from your field...
I didn't get the chance to quit for my conscience. I acquired a very rare autoimmune disorder and couldn't work any longer. I wonder what I could have been exposed to?
Man, my woman is with cancer... I really wish you get better. Have you ever tried small scale gardening, growing some mushrooms? Hope you can at least get a bit involved in some contact with nature and doing something to help it, it will at least easy your pain. Get better!
Sorry to hear of your problems, their are definitely proofs out there of people getting these kinds of problems based on what people were spraying.
It obviously takes time to be proven, possibly decades. Very scary stuff. I think the EU does better don't allow stuff unless it has been proven to be some what OK. But really hard to still proof the really long term stuff. I prefer the cleaner methods of something like vertical farming which, in theory, needs a lot less junk.
@@AdlerMow Thank you for the sympathy, however this wasn't my goal. I only wanted to point out another problem created by how we do business today. And I hope yours get well too. Cancer is much worse. I was relieved to discover I had an autoimmune disorder rather than the cancer they thought I had.
"Farmers only make up 2% of the voting population." This really blew my mind as somebody thats from the center of Kentucky, seemed like half the population was farmers for most of my life lmao
Wasn't that long ago it was 20% and a few generations back likely 80%.
Urbanism or the large migration of people from rural areas to cities has been a dominant global trend for at least two centuries. The rise of the cities.
I like "getting to the point". I eat up all the information you have to give with great pleasure! Please keep up the good work. Thank you :)
Thank you! Just yesterday something came up and I could not, for the life of me, remember the name of the Haber-Bosch process. It was on the tip of my tongue and drove me nuts. I love how often I'm thinking of something obscure and the very next day (or same day) a video mentions it for me. Excellent work Joe, please continue to magically come to my rescue when I can't quite remember something! +1
I enjoyed this episode but I feel you glossed over one big issues and that is "Big Ag" which is as bad as the Big Pharm, or the Military Industrial Complex. Half of my family were ranchers and farmers until NAFTA cut them off at the knees and and they all quit farming because they couldn't make a living any more. Ranchers no longer auction their beef they are told by the packers what they are paying. Like making computers in China, it's cheaper to make beef in other countries that do not have our government regulations. Finally, you mentioned genetically (something) crops, aka Frankenfood. Yes, the crop is self fertilizing, and pet resistant but it's sterile and can't grow seed, so the farmer can't save some money and let some acres go to seed to re-plant the next year. They are at the mercy of companies like Monsanto to sell them seed every year. I do love all of your ideas but like all great ideas to safe the planet, there is always one major, weak link in the chain... the Human Factor.
really good points, but I get discouraged to see "health" scares as being the main driver against GMOs. There's so many more realistic concerns to fear about them.
@@squirlmy The health issues are something I can get behind. I have a VERY unsubstantiated theory about food. [this is a hint to Joe for a future topic] If you change the genetic makeup of a food, does the body "know" it's food? Which is better for you, butter or margarine? Granted, the foods we eat today are not close to it's original source but it was done through plant selection, not genetic engineering which brings us back full circle to the point of the video.
My concern is there’s not enough nutrients in the soil to give food the nutrients we need. They’ve been having to add synthetic nutrients to practically everything you buy at the grocers.
I would love to see a video on the oldest cities ever discovered, sounds awesome !
Oh man. ok. I'm Living in East Texas right now, at 62yrs old, I have seen Alot of gardens like this before. It's not where you grow, it's in what you grow in. Dig down to 2ft below the ground. Next, dig it around an inch or two inchs down. Now place in about an 1in. of Bat or cow shit. Add Black Gold® potting mix. I get mine from "Home Depot®". The best you can find, just make it Black in color. There in Texas, It's sandy ground is feets deep. About 100ft. So put in 2ft of Black Gold® plus up to top of above-ground gardern, maybe, 10 to 12ins tall. Mines up to 20ins tall. To let the Roots more freely and have more room to grow. The Bigger the Roots, the Bigger the Plants.
Just keep the top of the potting mix below One to two inchs for the water fill only to the top. Water early in the day and late in the day. Well, that should get you started. Now you can grow anything from peppers, corn, great pot, etc.... Anything. But each year, mix up the plants. By moving the pot to the corn area, peppers to the pots spot and corn to the peppers spot.
Add you should know, put in some more Shit each place before mix.
The more shit, the better. Bat gongo, bat shit, is the best. For Real...
Ok man. Good growing. Later. Rob62....
love this! thank you so much for covering it. With the unfeasibility of intensive rotational grazing at industrial scale, all you have to do is divide your fields into paddocks using hedgerows. admittedly it ties you into a fairly specific stocking density but so does the productivity of the land itself so not really a big issue.
Joe, Very well done. Our mainstream Ag publications have glorified Big agriculture. Check out my TH-cam and Facebook page, I've found a way to feed cattle in a regenerative way. You're right on the point of most farmers farm someone elses land. I'm lucky to have got a chance to own land early in my life. I've taken advantage of that to aggressively try new things.
Your right, to switch to regenerative agriculture would take the same herculean century long effort that the government put into destroying the small and medium sized farms in favor of the huge industrial monstrosities we have today. I'm sure Monsanto and ADM would fight that tooth and nail so as to preserve their profits until the bitter end.
Funny how even 4 years after being sold, the irrational hatred of a company that did more to feed the hungry than anyone else ever still runs so deep
This might be a silly question, but is it really necessary to destroy big farms to popularize regenerative agriculture? I'm not in love with big farming operations, but it kinda seems like you could just have a big field plant cover crops and stuff instead of a bunch of small foods.
@@seionne85 Well if you subtract the number of people that has died due to exposure to their chemicals (a number we will never know) or the fact that they patent the seeds they develop whether they really developed them or not, or the fact they have a near monopoly on said seeds. Oh, and if you farm next one that uses these seeds...no seed retention for you because your plants could be cross pollinated and that's our IP! The road to hell is paved with good intentions (and I think they ceased being good a long time ago)
@@scpatl4now would you change your opinion if you found out that the number of people who died from exposure was comparable to any other field of work? Do you understand how recuperating costs from the research and development of said seeds works? Because if you somehow keep companies from recuperating those costs then what you wind up with is no new drought resistant/insect resistant etc. strains. Like I said, irrational hatred.. do you hate Apple for selling their new phones for 1k dollars plus also? Same logic, they spent the money developing them so that they could make money later
@@seionne85 I understand that much research is government funded in the US via grants from DoA, yet as with drug companies privatize profits, socialize loss. Monsanto was well aware of the fact that they were peddling cancer causing chemicals that were not safe yet chose to do so anyway, and funded biased research. There is always someone who wants to defend this company, I guess today it is you.
Its just me, or someone else also think that he never fails to entertain us with crazy vids??
as opposed to inform.
@@h7opolo cope
a regular dose of existential dread, somehow I get that despite the entertainment value. 😭
We might just be a little tilted ourselves. We keep watching... 😀
infotainment
Joe! So much more to dig into than a comment could do justice. Scale really isn't a technical problem (though, it is an education and possibly a financial problem.) I remember seeing a presentation by a farmer that was employing regenerative practices on 45,000+ acres. There are farmers growing corn at scale who have completely eliminated fertilizer applications by growing soybeans in the interrow... the soybeans aren't harvested, they just literally benefit the corn so much that it's more economical to plant the soybeans than apply synthetic fertilizer. There's an Australian vineyard that got 70% of their usually yield in a drought year while other vineyards in the area lost their entire crop, all through regenerative practices. And so much great work has been done on soil health and soil biology, especially in the past decade. There's a whole world in the soil that we're just beginning to understand and a complex web of communication between plants and microbes. In a microbially diverse soil, plants can recruit microbes to help them deal with environmental factors, for example. In the case of a drought, plants might recruit bacteria to "infect" them and cause a thickening of the cell wall, which reduces water loss to transpiration. It's also fairly widely known now that fungal mycelium mediates the transport of nutrients between plants, or directly between fungus and plants. Also lots of great work in the Jena Experiment that shows that increasing the diversity of plant species and plant types increases the amount of carbon sequestered in a given area, increases the microbial diversity and thus the variety of microbes that plants are able to recruit to handle environmental stresses, and so much more. The most interesting finding from the Jena Experiment came when the field flooded for several weeks; the plots with the most diversity of plant species kept on trucking as if they'd never been flooded, but the plots with the fewest species suffered serious losses. Might be a bit dense for someone that doesn't really nerd out on the science of food production, but recent lectures by Dr. Christine Jones and Dr. James White cover a wide swath of the research that's been done in the past decade or so. Once you go down the rabbit hole, there are also lots of case studies from farms of all sizes, and one of the biggest reasons that farmers cite for making the switch is cost; because they reduce or eliminate their need for all manner of sprays and the amount of labor required to apply them, but yields remain comparable, overall profits go up. And even if it ultimately is better suited so smaller farms of a few hundred acres, Organic Valley is an example of a successful farmer cooperative where small farms banded together to maintain the buying, selling, and distribution power enjoyed by much larger farms. There are ways for small farms to meet the demand when they work collaboratively to solve the problem of scale.
Great video man. Yup my dad was a farmer, he had to be the accountant, machanic, driver, scientists, HR everything that you can imagine. And let me tell you it's hart breaking to see all that hard work go down the drain in one season because of drought, flooding or frost. Damn hardest job in the world
Great topic, Joe.
Part of my "vision for a sustainable future" includes multi-level, climate controlled fields, for crops that don't work in vertical farms (and excludes tree-based food).
As stated in this video several times, this also requires a massive shift in infrastructure (which we need for MANY reasons) but has many benefits:
Water conservation through recycling evaporation and run-off, reuse/recycling of fertiliser so also pure water is released into waterways, fully electric, overhead machinery, controlled lighting, humidity and watering tuned per crop, physical exclusion of wildlife to prevent culling, killings and crop loss, significant reduction in land-area requirements (significance limited initially by material science) and closer proximity to population areas to massively reduce transport costs.
Or ... we could pat ourselves on the back for using paper, rather than plastic straws and say we've done our bit for sustainable living.
We are far too lazy and greedy to do the right thing or to help with global warming. All I see these days are big trucks , big cars, big house, to much waist !!!
All folks do is talk. They dont actually do and those few that actually do they can barley afford it. We need to be kind to those that are going forward and working twards a better , healthier life. These politicians talk but when they get into iffice they stop and they dont do.
Yes we are defenatly heading twards another dust bowl.
Its really simple really.
Stop tilling the dirt!!!
There is a really good documentary on netflix about it. Sorry but I cant remember the name off hand.
I really like watching your videos, you have a lot of very interresting content. This one is kinda special to me since I actually am a farmer. You got most of the stuff right, but no till farming (or zero till by some) does indeed have the advantage of lower risk of erosion, but usually comes at the cost of an increase in the use of pesticides and there are also several different ways to till. the classic plow, expensive but very effective against weeds, but also the worst in compacting the ground. cultivator, quite cheap and the most used method, but the least effective against weeds. and then there is the disccultivator wich is somewhat inbetween... now the transgenetic stuff (or gmo crops) have a huge potential but can also be quite dangerous. I'm swiss and here in Switzerland GMO is banned, but I've been working on very large farms in canada for about 2 years (6000 acres and more). and ive seen the absolute devistation gmo can have on farmland. just an example, there is a type of crop wich is called roundupready (all kinds like wheat, canola,barley etc.) wich is resistant to glyphosate, so after you plant this you can then just use glyphosate to kill everything else. well, the year after when youd like to plant something else you need a way to get rid of last years offshoot from the harvest, but monsato got you covered there and its called libertyready. you can now imagine what happens in subsequent years and how you have to increase the use of more and more toxic chemicals to keep farming. but there are also other studies that have shown a gmo rice plant that has close to the same photosynthetic efficiency than corn, wich means it only takes less than a third the amount of water to grow as it usually would.
I am a strong advocate to people farming there own food. even though in the long run that might be bad for business but i think if more people have a garden outside (or inside for whose without enough space) and learn to appreciate growing things that will give them health and lower the cost of living by just a bit. Its regional and the satisfaction of tasting something straight from soil (wich is sooooo much bettter then all this overprocessed stuff that is sprayed with chemicals to censerve it longer) is not just good for your physical health, but also mentally. sorry for my long text but i wanted to take the opportunety to contribute knowlege.
With respect to what came before, I think the next great agricultural revolution will be indoor and controlled environment farming. Hydroponics/Aquaponics. Currently has start-up cost issues but I'm optimistic these can be optimized.
For certain crops, sure. Staples? Absolutely not.
@@Phyto. The technology is nowhere near maturity. I'm not convinced we can't figure out how to make wheat in a controlled environment.
I’m a fifth generation Nebraska farmer. Everything you said was spot on, this might be the best explanation of the current catch 22 situation agribusiness is in. Thank you
As someone who grew up on a farm and currently lives on (though does not farm) the family farm, let me tell you it is not that there aren't people who WANT to farm; there are plenty. It's that it is simply economically unfeasible to get into farming without either being left a significant piece of farmland or a whole lot of money, at least here in the fertile black soils of Northern IL. Farms are like everything else in our economy - they're now heavily consolidated as the big, wealthy farmers and business interests/investors buy out the family farms, and land that once would have supported ten or twenty middle class farming families is now being farmed by one family or business concern. Land prices/rents have skyrocketed, as has equipment, fuel, fertilizer, pesticides, etc..., and there is just no way for a normal person, let alone a young person, to get into farming without being born into a landed dynasty or being independently wealthy. Like everything else today, it's big business and big money and you've either got it or you don't. For frame of reference, our family farm here is 160 acres with maybe 145 tillable, the balance being timber/pasture and the house and barnyard. In the old days, when my grandpa farmed it, it used to be farmed largely "regeneratively" with row crop/hay/livestock rotation (or what used to just be called "farming"). Today however, it is rented out since you can't make a living on 160 acres, and it's just corn and beans. You VERY rarely see livestock on row crop farms anymore, at least around here. And for frame of reference regarding cost of admittance, that 160 acres that is not nearly enough to live on is worth probably $2 million at today's local land prices. This is in an area where you can buy a pretty nice house for $150,000 and the average working guy with a decent job probably makes $45~50K/year. I would LOVE to get into regenerative agriculture, and with a farm this size, it would be fairly easy to manage but it takes a whole lot more than just the desire, and at the end of the day, you still have to be able to make a living at it...
Cover crops absolutely don't need to be supported by gov't incentives. If you look at New Zealand, they have virtually no farm subsidies and cover crops are standard practice there. Actors under capitalist systems have a natural incentive to produce as much as they feasibly can for the longest time they can, and farmers are no different. The real reason why American farmers don't plant cover crops is because they have crop insurance guaranteed by the government, and so don't actually have to bear the full financial costs of crop failures.
That's not to say that New Zealand is perfect; they've been extremely slow to adopt other sustainable practices like No-Till Farming. Other than that, great video chap -- I really like seeing ppl cover lesser-talked about but extremely important environmental problems.
subsidizing corn is one of the chief methods the U.S. used to undercut Soviet food prices, and consider how much goes into cattle feed as well as "high fructose corn syrup". Many American farms have based their economic models on subsidized corn, it's unlikely to change easily or anytime soon.
@@squirlmy That and ethanol for fuel. Reforming the US's agricultural system is a really difficult task, but we have a strong incentive to do it in terms of human health, environmental stability, food security, and even immigration. One thing that's almost always overlooked in discussions of Mexico -> US illegal immigration is the fact that it was supercharged by heavily subsidized US farms outcompeting less subsidized Mexican farms. As Mexican farms lost market share, farmhands had virtually no choice but to surge northward to find work in their field.
Pun intended.
Yep! I’ve known American farmers who have made more off crop insurance than they have crops.
I have a few points I find might help future agriculture:
Movable scaffolding(on wheels or rails) with Solar Panels to provide dual use for the land (agriphotovoltaics) and one could attach robotic arms to the scaffolding that can plant/harvest stuff automatically.
Plant more beans and other legumes to get more nitrogen back into the soil.
Use composting instead of too much artificial fertilizer and manure.
Yes, Covercrops (that can then be turned into compost)! Yes, combine crops that help each other!
Stop using animals, especially cows have a very bad Climate-Output. Animals always make agriculture less efficient. They use more land and water per calorie produced.
Of course, in order for these things to work we need to massively overhaul how land is owned and how food is priced. The government should provide financing for investments in ecologically better methods. Ideally land would be community owned by those that source the food from there. If we invest more in automation, then nobody has to be a farmer anymore.
Yeah, supporting the green new deal would be a step in the right direction.
Again, we see fundamental conflict of interests when standard investor-driven, profit-based business practices skew essential human services. Well researched presentation...AND done in an easy-to-watch format.
My wife and I owned and operated a small farm. We focused on fresh veggies for our local markets. Since this was a retirement project for us we had the luxury of being able to experiment with differing approaches to "growing our greens." We began by following the commonly used plow, fertilize, plant approach to farming. The soil was bereft of organics and quickly reverted to brick-like solidarity after being plowed. except for becoming a temporary mud bath following rains. We avidly studied permaculture and other similar farming techniques. It became evident that despite the appeal of these sustainable practices, they could not scale up to large commercial farms. We experimented by putting in a 32 x 80 foot high tunnel greenhouse. Which we completely filled with compost purchased by the ton from a recycle center. Planting in compost yielded amazing results. One caveat, compost consumes nitrogen until it has finished. You may need to add nitrogen until the breakdown is complete. We found that crops continued to improve as the compost aged. When planting in compost. The friable (crumbly) texture of compost allows plants to develop much larger root systems. We added raised plant beds ( 4' wide, 12" deep ) outside the greenhouse with similar success. I should mention there is a source of free compost if you put in some work. Many tree companies would be happy to have a place to dump wood chips. You can speed up composting of the chips by adding nitrogen. Sustainable farming is labor intensive and is practical only for premium priced products like fresh locally grown vegetables. It is labor of love and not a lucrative profit center. . Raised plant beds are easy to build and maintain (you can even use plastic totes filled with compost). For what it is worth, the "green new deal" contains many ill conceived economy killing schemes that should be shunned
I love the discussion about regenerative Agriculture, as for scaling up right now I am working on a project to make regenerative gardens happen in people's backyards, my solution isn't to maim the system of everyone's inputs, what my solution is, is everyone becoming more involved in their own food. Up here in northern michigan I can have a strawberry patch a full acre in size with no weeds just by using woodchips about an inch overtop of them in the fall every year, Not needing to apply every year but every other year once the area's soil has developed well with all the fungi, plus woodchips are free so essentially it costs me nothing and it's drought resistant i don't water any of them and they can go months without rain because of the water holding capacity of the soil. This method can be brought over and mimicked anywhere else almost because it mimics what the forest does. I make food forests so basically i plant underneath my fruit trees, it staggers my crop yield time so a lot of times i can get something like broccoli for a whole season, I get all kinds of root crops and delicious treats, life truly is better. I also command a small worm farm and a growing number of rabbits to boot, they feed eachother, growing crops from rabbit poop thats gone through a worm gut and put outside as my compost layer, small scale but it scales up when more people get involved and can make money too from other people's land. My model is if i grow enough food for whoever is there and then some, which is easy to do than i can make profit off of other peoples land and they can eat too! It just keeps building and increasing check my youtube videos for my gardens!
Joe, while I appreciate your research, following the same path we have over the last hundred years will get us nowhere. We risk turning our farmlands into deserts for all practical purposes. While it's true the current agriculture environment is not attractive to most, there have been a lot of recent interests in farms from the young and old. It's true, who wants to work on a megafarm 24/7? These farms would have to be cut down where they're at the appropriate size to be sustainable. I disagree that the mega farms produced variety. They produce sameness and substandard nutrition. For variety you pay a higher cost value and that is produced in smaller quantities by smaller farmers. For the future there will have to be a variety of solutions not just one. The Netherlands, a small country by European size, produces a massive amount of food for its neighbors using greenhouses. Urban gardens, smaller regenerative farms, greenhouse farms, every imaginable variation will play a part in our future food source. As we have seen during this pandemic, widening our scope of where we source our food is imperative.
Solar/wind farms powering hermetically sealed large scale vertical farms. Can be placed closer to population centers, meaning less carbon for transport and processing. The latter can be done mostly on site. Way less waste. Water collection built into the structure. Much less water waste. No pesticides, herbicides, or other complex chemicals necessary. Jobs for higher population zones. Can be located literally anywhere humans live. Allow rural land to rewild and develop small scale businesses less dependent on global economy. People in rural zones don't want to interact with the masses or government oversight, anyway. Monocrops would still exist in the bread belt. Will it happen? Hell no.
Main-stream Media never had felt a amount of pain they deserve for what they've done into our society
This is my fave channel. I’m currently in biosystems engineering. I squealed when I saw with video. I joined the major specifically to work with soil conservation.
You should cover Run off from farms. In my local area, farmers drain their fields into the local rivers. Polluting the rivers and filling them with harmful chemicals.
And the vast majority of the crops that are grown... are fed to animals that are killed. If only there was a way to grow food just for humans.
based
I's like to see a video on pros and cons with GMO and organic farming. I have many friends who only buy GMO, but hey, isn't like everything we eat kind of bread through thousands of years to get us the best version? Isn't actually everything GMO in a way?
Hybridization is not GMO.
@@Exploregen yeah, it kind of is…just the scale of the tools employed has changed.
@@Exploregen Thanks 👍
@@donovansteltzner9080 NOPE
Sorta. Kurzgesagt does a video titled; Are GMOs Good or Bad? Genetic Engineering & Our Food. It explains the topic quite well. I found it very interesting and learned a few things I didn't know about GMO's
I can’t believe something so important is getting screwed over. It’s almost like capitalism isn’t sustainable.
Silvopasture is amazing! What people don't realize is that livestock NEED shade and windbreak. Trees also provide protection from aerial predators and some cover during rain and storms. The shade provided by trees keeps the temps down and actually helps livestock to be more productive (it helps them bred and birth more easily and with less stress, and helps them to produce more and better milk & wool). And running chickens or guinea fowl along with larger livestock, and rotating livestock between multiple silvopasture paddocks or fields helps to reduce parasite load for everybody. That means naturally healthier animals, fewer vet visits and lower vet bills, and fewer to no chemicals needed for regular dewormings, few to no pesticides used etc. Soil, crops and animals are all healthier and more productive. Rolling fields of nothing but grass may make for beautiful pastoral scenes, but they're costly (financially, ecologically and physically) to maintain and livestock that are grazed or foraged on them aren't quite as productive as livestock grazed or foraged among the trees.
I think what eventually needs to happen is that we as humans need to go back to depending on LOCAL farms and seasonal foods that are regionally native. Maybe we like avocados, but if they can't be grown locally and have to be imported from other countries, we end up doing a LOT of damage just for the benefit of that 1 fruit. We need to be willing to return to times when, if something was out of season, you just don't eat it until its season comes back around. It would take so much for the average person in western civilization to be willing to give up the conveniences that industrial agriculture offers, though, that I don't see us committing to these very necessary changes anytime soon.
Grew up on a small farm (100 owned 100 rented) in Illinois. My dad did the four-year crop rotation. He also made sure he farmed on the contours to reduce erosion during rains and snow melt. He had about 20 head of Black Angus beef cows and in the Fall he would turn them out on the harvested corn fields to eat stalks and the corn the corn picker missed. Only time we had to feed hay to the cows was in the depth of winter and early spring. By summer they were out grazing on grass again. Farming is really hard for the farm wife. My poor mom fought dirt and mud her whole life. In later years my dad sold off his livestock, only raised corn and soybeans and could sit in the house during the winter. My mom never got to "retire".
The pandemic came and taught everyone the importance of having multiple stream of income, unfortunately having a nice paying job doesn't mean you are financial secured anymore. So we all need to put in an etra-income earning chance, like investment.
I agree with you and I believe that the secret to financial stability is having the right investment ideas to enable your earn more money, I don't know who agrees with me but either way I recommend either real estate or crypto and stocks.
Yeah!! It would be more beneficial and yield more profit if you actually trade on Cryptocurrency I've been trading since the dip, I've made so much profit trading
I've always wanted to trade on Crypto but got confused with the fluctuations in price
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@Larry Mitchell his availability is on what's apk ⬆️⬆️
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Mechanic on organic farm in south jersey for 4 years...today. happy 2-22-22.
Ok our tomato tunnels produce huge amounts. No less than half end up on the ground. Maybe half that goes to market, ends up in the compost pile.
The last 2 year have broken the farm. We had to buy a fleet of delivery vehicles and drivers to deliver to 2,000+ people that couldnt come to market. Now im fixing everything that was broken by first time drivers so he can sell it all to make up for it.
The sweet potatoes came up too thin, so the entire crop was a waste. He outsourced from lancaster for a large amount of what we sold. The soil cant take the heat thats only been increasing.
All the diesel fuel is one thing, but there is SOOOO MUCH Grease. Grease by the case. A $100 oil filter is cheap. $15k to repair a $30k bobcat. Some seeds cost $.05-$.10 each and there are 1000 needed for that 1 variety. I make $30k alone, which is highly underpaid for keeping a farm moving.
Its rough, but i dont hate it, ive learned a lot, i just bought a mortgage and i get to be outside a lot. Tons of percs.
The kicker is no white people can last more than a couple months. The same mexican workers come, legally, and work 10+ hours a day, 6 days a week, for lower( legally untaxed) pay. They work for 8 months and go home. They break everything they touch though. High repair costs.
Thanks for this one Joe!
I left Texas to help my family's farm in Michigan 6 years ago, and it's equal parts spiritually nourishing and thankless hard work. I find many consumers don't appreciate that most small farmers aren't getting rich from their labor, so much as they're making as much money as possible to reinvest in their infrastructure. Winds destroy roofs, equipment repair/replacement is constant, input costs and property taxes are steadily increasing, and if you're lucky there's enough left over to actually build your productive capacity rather than simply treading water.
The supply shortages of the last few years have driven some supermarket customers to our barns; many are seeing the wisdom of taking beef in bulk from us at $4/lb rather than throwing down a hundred or more for a single steak dinner for four. As our product proved out and demand has increased, we've been inspired to expand our kitchen garden so we can stock a roadside produce stand in our front yard.
Everyone can be part of the solution to industrial farming's shortcomings, and I take a great deal of pride from helping to feed my neighbors. Paying us directly for our work is often more economical for the consumer (no small army of intermediaries taking a cut), there is less overall waste (unsold/uneaten food becomes fertilizer), transport is limited to getting it off the field and into your car, and the proceeds mostly stay in the local economy rather than getting spread out among Corporate Persons. Circle of life, indeed.
I paid $38 for a steak on a plate yesterday, served with a sauce and potatoes. It was great, but needed some organic greens.
Edible Acres and Charles Dowding are two fantastic channels that focus on permaculture and no dig agriculture respectively. I'm finding myself somewhat in the middle, attempting to line no-dig gardens on the margins of the permaculture
Hey Joe, I must say that so many topics you present are right on the mark and illuminate vitally important issues, many of which remain as yet to be resolved.
Hard times are ahead of us I am convinced, and so much of that hinges on the continuing growth of human population. I'm glad I am old.