269. David R. Montgomery: How to Heal Our Soil

I want to start with several myths that I bust in regen.

The first one is the myth that we must choose between protecting the environment and feeding the world.

It's just not true.

And there's a number of studies, I'll just sort of cherry pick some.

facts out of as we go here, but in almost half the direct comparisons in a study back in 1990, organic crop yields were comparable to or exceeded conventional ones.

We hear a lot about we need conventional agriculture to feed the world because it can grow more food than organic.

It's highly context dependent.

Almost half the studies that have been documented and summarized in that study showed that organic yields were comparable to or higher than conventional.

And organic yields were 10% lower on average in this 2007 paper, but conventional yields in the developed world exceeded conventional.

And that organic farming exceeded conventional yields in the developing world.

In industrialized agriculture, conventional produced more food in this study.

But in the agriculture that feeds most of the world, it was the opposite.

Organic farming did.

So how are we going to feed the world? What depends on who we're talking about feeding and how.

In other studies, diversified organic rotations decreased crop yields to less than the yield gap to less than 10% and investments in organic research could eliminate or reduce the difference.

In other words, we've invested billions of dollars over the last half century in increasing crop yields in conventional farming systems.

There's reason to think that if we made comparable or even fractional investments in organic farming, we could bring organic yields up to comparable to conventional.

And part of that, in the most recent study that's looked at this, in 2018, yield differences declined over time between conventional and organic, but that only several years of soil building and organic systems, and I'll get to critiquing organic systems in a minute, but soil building, the key thing here, could reduce the yield gap.

In other words, practices that build healthy, fertile soils they can actually grow as much food as what we call conventional agriculture today.

We don't have to choose between protecting the environment and feeding the world.

Second myth, that regenerative farming, and I'll get to defining what that is and talking a lot more about it in a book called Regen.

You're probably expecting that.

But the myth that regenerative farming can't scale up to replace conventional methods.

You talk to most sort of agricultural reporters in the world, and they'll basically go, well, can regenerative farming scale up? You know, you could never feed the world that way.

Well, wrong again.