Some specifics:

With respect to your suggestion: In the US, farm subsidies are pretty much a “third rail” politically. If there is one area of true bipartisanship, that’s it; D or R, Senators from certain States only vote one way. And no Presidential candidate is ever going to Iowa to campaign against Big Corn.

This is one of those things where we might be able to get some of the more egregious abuses reduced, but the main flow will continue. Possibly, we could go back to paying people not to grow crops, but that comes with lots of its own problems and opposing vested interests.

Killian’s “no till” agriculture: There is now some question about whether it actually works in the long term to sequester carbon. But, it is also dependent on the use of herbicides, and we are now seeing the (inevitable) arrival of Roundup-resistant weeds to share the acreage with our GMO Roundup-resistant crops. Going “organic no-till” means more equipment and more labor.

“Local”, from both Scott and Killian:

Completely ignores local conditions (soils, growing seasons, climate), as I pointed out earlier. And also ignores the inefficiency in terms of transportation. It creates less CO2 to ship produce cross-country than to have lots of pickup trucks trying to move small quantities around local country roads. And, again– growing seasons!

Anyway, I may check back on this but obviously there is not going to be any dialogue on specifics with these guys.

However, not everyone is a fiscal conservative like me. If another nation prefers a more proactive approach, who am I to tell them no? And if some barefoot hippy dippy tribal commune wants to follow Killian’s plan, they should if it is appropriate for them. Again, who am I to tell Killian to use a tractor when Killian doesn’t want to do that? And if Killian wants to live without money, fine by me. The common factor is that all humans eat food and agricultural methods can be designed in a way that sequesters enough carbon in the soil to offset your fossil fuel use.

Whether it is a planned economy or a free market economy, there is a way to get the carbon in the soil. That’s the important part. The rest is just creative way to remove the political and socio-economic barriers preventing it from happening already. Killian has one way and many people are attracted to it, others like me are not willing to go full on Luddite. But there clearly is more than one way to skin that cat. The biophysical doesn’t really give a damn what the politics of the farmer might be. All that matters is if the ecosystem function of carbon sequestration in the soil is restored, and on how many acres.

I can see how you might be confused because killian keeps jumping in and obfuscating the issue with the anti capitalism, anti technology, anti pretty much everything excpt going back to living in tee-pees and/or mud huts. It can work. Tribal communities can sequester carbon too, as evidenced here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pIMmIvY5m2o
or we can go full scale commercial as evidenced here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgmssrVInP0
and that in action
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZP_tR4FNx3E

Both the 2 above in dry marginal land, but it works with more moisture even better:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8HhR413tSI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yxMNHsK-IpI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z5YPnA6OqvU
And there are transitional modes that are not completely organic even:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLcbBftKo3c
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yPjoh9YJMk
They still sequester more carbon than emissions by a lot. 5-20 tons/ha/yr +/- minimum. Some do much more.

Again, I am not here to micromanage economies. That’s what got us to this point in the first place! All I am really stressing is we should not be subsidizing models of production that are causing AGW. IT IS LITERALLY INSANITY.

But the conversation that needs to be made about the myriad ways and options that could fit with a agriculture mimicking natural ecosystem function is for each community/nation to decide.

Oh and BTW if you are skeptical that ag would change quickly only by eliminating the massive billions supporting it unsustainably all you need to do is use Cuba as a test case.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, they could no longer afford to subsidize Cuban ag. It immediately collapsed. Withing 2-3 years it was producing more food than before with basically no fertilizers or pesticides simply because Cuba was under embargo from US and had almost no internal manufacturing capability. They had no choice, but they did have a highly educated and motivated population that solved it fairly quickly.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2008/apr/04/organics.food

Not a perfect analogy since it is an island, but it does show that food production per acre increases, although food production per man hour labor drops.

Personally my own research is in scaling up methods. Just because Cuba used mules because they were forced to do it, doesn’t mean we can’t figure out other ways to scale it up with tractors too.

You are quite convincing.

Well, that’s a first!

I do recall reading various articles critical of corporate industrial farming causing soil problems etc… But just assuming you are right on the economics and sustainability of small and local, what do you do? You cannot legislate to force people to follow your model.

Nor would I want to. This conversation is not in isolation. Ag does nto stand a lone silo deep in space, right? It is within the context of rapidly changing climate and rapidly diminishing resources. There are multiple pathways to get people to awareness, but mine is reality + risk assessment + solution = change.

This is simple: Once one understands the risks, understands the risk assessment *and* understands the solutions, one will willingly change.

More importantly, perhaps, once one comes to full awareness, the fact facing them is: There is no choice.

Or do you try to put a price or some sort of penalty on the damage caused by large agribusiness? Or regulate them in some way? Treat it as a tragedy of the commons issue requiring some sort of response.

I consider this a waste of time since Sanders lost the nomination. That was the last chance we had for Big Gov to be an integral player in all this because my personal risk assessment is that we could, at any time, be in the middle of a rapid rise in temps, but political change is extremely slow. The only sane response is simplicity yesterday. So, let the system that is fall while we build the system that must be. Multiple “great” thinkers agree on this method of transition, so I can’t be too far out in the weeds.

That makes sense to me in theory at least, but would come up against powerful political forces.

There are more of us than them. When whole communities choose to stand for a regenerative future, it will no longer matter what power is brought to bear.

Yes big business is supplanting small business. But again, as above, what do we do?

Do regenerative. Really, it is that simple.

Being devils advocate,I don’t know if small,organic and natural is better. Look at poor Indian farmers etc.

Small, natural and organic does not equal regenerative. Very simply, perhaps too simply, regenerative is a design process as well as a system state. The former is the how you get the latter.

Its also possible to have large scale, mechanised, organic and sustainable. Small farmers kill soils too. I think its more about management, technique, and good knowledge than scale or ownership structure.

Nope and yep and yep and nope. Sadly, I have a class now…

Later –> It’s also about decent and firm environmental rules, and hoping like hell government has enough courage and foresight to understand this. No hope of this with someone like Trump.

Also how will capitalism end, by Wolfgang Streeck, and no is not enough by Naomi Klein.

Last first: Pleased or not pleased is not an issue. I think we hinder the conversation, here and globally, by personalizing it. It’s not about want or not want, like or not like, it’s about what, objectively, is sustainable.

“…highly labor intensive…”

You are not quite clear on the subject. A permaculture-based food system is the opposite of this. Some examples: More reliance on perennials, so less replanting; no-till; local, so less transport time, effort, vehicles, etc.; water flow primarily passively managed once design is finalized; nature-mimicking designs like food forests require virtually no maintenance after the first 3-5 years, only some chop-and-drop trimming/mulching and harvest. Maybe 2 – 5 days a year.

When you think of regenerative ag, you have to throw out *all* your preconceptions about farming and gardening.

Re: Tractors, etc. Yes, they are unsustainable. That doesn’t mean there are not old/ancient technologies that can be sustainable and/or sustainable machines made, perhaps from wood or bamboo, e.g. Also, there is an issue of pre-existing infrastructure and tools. Wit hthe caveat of carbon issues, there is no reason we should not use what tools we have already created, or can sustainably or nearly sustainably recycle and make, to help create that sustainable future.

The problem is, this is not most people’s framing of the use of tech. Worse, there are people who are supposedly regen ag VIPs who are climate deniers, or close to it, such as Salatin. Such people give little thought to extremely unsustainable choices because they are focused on the food and soil while ignoring the role of tech altogether, and even embracing it.

Thus, the message is very mixed and often plainly wrong. Use the term “appropriate technology” to research this issue of tech, sustainability and transitioning to regen ag.

In other words, the happenstance that much of natural gas’ emissions aren’t counted since they are via leaks as opposed to burning enables humanity to pretend that there’s been some movement, but the facts are starkly clear: NOTHING has been done except rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic so that many of the chairs are behind a screen and so “don’t count”.

Kind of like taking a gunshot victim, turning him over so the original wounds don’t show and then shooting him again with a smaller weapon while also poisoning him, and then crowing about how healthy the victim must surely be after your “work”.

The other issue is government subsidies. When Hong Kong eliminated the tax creidt for electric vehicles on April 1, sales of Tesla vehicles dropped to zero. Interesting, their prediction is for pure electric vehilces, not plug-in hybrids, which they envision sales peaking in the 2030s, before falling in favor of pure electric vehicles. Currently, plug-ins account for 2% of the new car market, while pure electrics are about 0.5%. While theiir prediction is possible, it does not appear to be based on anything more substantial than a gut feeling.

My post: An ignorant proposal for a BEST project rip-off

The cynical ‘Red-team’ proposal, promoted by all the usual suspects, is also the subject of a guest post on aTTP by Michael Tobis. The comments are up to 166 at the moment.

BPL: We’re not, but our agriculture is. All human agriculture grew up when the world was at 287-288 K. The issue has never been heat per se, although AGW will bring more and deadlier heat waves. The issue is the effect of AGW on our civilization, which will be negative, to put it mildly.

Oldest Homo sapiens fossil claim rewrites our species’ history http://www.nature.com/news/oldest-homo-sapiens-fossil-claim-rewrites-our-species-history-1.22114
“Remains from Morocco dated to 315,000 years ago push back our species’ origins by 100,000 years — and suggest we didn’t evolve only in East Africa.”
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/66/Ice-core-isotope.png