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thesephantomhands t1_iwauthl wrote

I just finished the book Regenesis and it talks all about this as a way of establishing better connections to the soil and a less rapacious relationship to the environment in general. The world needs food production to be high yield low impact, with tilling, fertilizers, and herbicides being some of the most taxing things we do. This represents a step in the way of a more sustainable future. And Regenesis is a truly great exploration of these issues - definitely worth a read.

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mhornberger t1_iwcln9a wrote

Unfortunately most of the methods he wrote about were very labor-intensive. Those guys rarely get a day off, and it has to be a work of passion for them. I don't see that scaling.

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thesephantomhands t1_iwcmnkw wrote

If that's true, it would definitely be a hurdle. But the benefit of a perennial (according to the book in the way that it's presented), it would require no tilling, less pesticides, herbicides, etc. Just the difference in no-till versus tilling every year is a dropoff in labor. There might be other things that I'm missing. What extra labor are you talking about?

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mhornberger t1_iwcn2g6 wrote

> What extra labor are you talking about?

The book itself talked about how labor-intensive some of the processes were. Not amenable to automation. I'm not asserting it's more labor-intensive, rather the book mentioned that several times. I only got halfway through it though. I felt it was talking either about shifts that were already happening (no till, cover crops, etc), or that wouldn't scale.

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thesephantomhands t1_iwco6a7 wrote

Okay, I could see where you're coming from, but I don't remember him talking about things that wouldn't scale or things that were prohibitively labor intensive. I'm very new to all of this, but I was quite inspired by the book. If they're going to be solutions or helpful, we would need to take those factors into account.

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