The Roots of Your Profits - Dr Elaine Ingham, Soil Microbiologist, Founder of Soil Foodweb Inc

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Recommends schiffern · 2015-08 · on “U.S. honeybee colonies hit a 20-year high”

>if neonicotinoids are a net win for agriculture The logic here seems to be that: * Farmers buy neonicotinoids. * Therefore, neonicotinoids have a net positive effect on agriculture. (in other words, like a good libertarian you are assuming that the market has complete/perfect/accurate information) Unfortunately that's just not true. Today's farmers simply don't have the required soil science/botany/ecology/hydrology knowledge. Worst, they are actively misled by biocide and fertilizer salesmen, who have a natural profit motive to convince farmers that their products are essential. Far from being essential, in reality pesticides destroy the nutrient harvesting ability of healthy soil. Soil mi

Recommends schiffern · 2015-08 · on “U.S. honeybee colonies hit a 20-year high”

>Because the alternatives to neonicotinoids are broader-spectrum pesticides Well 'ere's yer problem! ;) You're starting off by assuming that agriculture must use pesticides to grow food. But is that really true? I submit to you that it is not. Furthermore, I submit that a food system that depends on pesticides is doomed to self-destruct (because of inevitable biogeophysical processes). Pesticides destroy the nutrient cycling microorganisms in the soil leading to infertility, erosion, and ultimately desertification. Again, soil microbiologist Elaine Ingham explains the process better than I could: [this video] >I don't know why you insist on being so overtly hostile You're right. My apologies, and

Recommends schiffern · 2017-10 · on “Insects Are in Serious Trouble”

> If I eat a banana that has potassium in it, it lends to the fact that it took potassium out of the soil. This is true. However the little-known fact is that healthy soil contains all the "machines" required to break down the abundant insoluble potassium (along with every other necessary element) present in rock particles into plant-soluble fertilizer. This "insoluble pool" contains enough nutrients for literally thousands of years of plant growth, if only the soil life is present to unlock it. The problem is that tillage kills this soil life, and that dead land now requires the constant import of external fertilizer to grow food. Pesticide and fertilizer application also kills these organi

Recommends vram22 · 2020-10 · on “No-till no-herbicide farming system in trial since 1981”

Also see, very significantly, Elaine Ingham, soil (biology) scientist, Ph.D., also founder of startup soilfoodweb.com (to consult and get her research applied widely). Almost all the farmers I mentioned above, quote her work with respect and apply it in their operations, and consider it key to their results. She (along with many other researchers, over years, not a sudden thing) has come out with some rather startling results that, as I said, are being applied by these guys and many others. A key result is that it is the quantity and diversity of the life in the soil that is as (or more) important to soil health and hence farm results (now and long term) as the actual levels of plant nutrien

Recommends schiffern · 2023-02 · on “Microbes are 'active engineers' in Earth's rock-to-life cycle”

For a practical discussion of how this biotic cycling connects to agriculture, Dr Elaine Ingham delivers a salient presentation.[0] [0] [this video]

Recommends vram22 · 2023-12 · on “How the nutritional value of staple crops dropped by 50% since the 1960s”

Yes. I keep sharing Gabe Brown's three-part video series titled Treating the Farm as an Ecosystem, now and then, here on HN, whenever such threads come up. Some really solid practical and pragmatic stuff there, on regenerative agriculture, which, as I understand it [1], goes beyond organic farming, and is related to many of the issues talked about in this thread. [1] I had done organic gardening successfully, for a few years, some time earlier, so I have at least some practice and experience (and also a lot of reading and thinking about what I read) as the basis for my opinions of his work and those of others I mention, such as Elaine Ingham (a video by her is below too). One of her most ast

Recommends schiffern · 2024-10 · on “In the US, regenerative farming practices require unlearning past advice”

> Living soil consumes rock minerals making them available to plants. Thank you. This is one of those super-underappreciated biological facts. Industrial ag treats soil like it's a tank of fertility, and guess who sells the refills? Biologists know that healthy soil is a factory , making new fertility out of rock/air/rain/sun. Direct from soil microbiologist Dr Elaine Ingham: [this video]

Cites schiffern · 2016-03 · on “Build a Personal Food Computer”

Synthetic materials don't come from nothing. Following the supply chain backwards they're all[1] mined from somewhere, either as fossil fuels or minerals like potash and limestone. All the NPK fertilizers (which this system uses) come from mined materials. Far from "not harming plants or animals," this material extraction comes with huge (but externalized) ecological, social justice, and wealth concentration problems. And of course it's completely unsustainable. Now compare that to how healthy soil functions: microorganisms leach minerals directly from grains of sand/loam/clay, essentially manufacturing in-situ minerals into bioavailable form right at the root zone. Nitrogen fixation is simi