No-till no-herbicide farming system in trial since 1981
They&#x27;re running 72 experiments on 12 acres. That&#x27;s mostly interesting to me because that&#x27;s an incredibly small area of land. US corn agriculture is on about 83 million acres of land. Subsaharan African Agriculture also plants about 83 million acres of maize. They see yields that are 1&#x2F;3 to 1&#x2F;4 of US agricultural yields. These yield gaps dramatically close when you start using fertilizer and modern agricultural practices. (The One Acre Fund puts out some pretty good data on this, the Burke and Lobell lab at Stanford have a few good papers on this as well.)<p>In short, I would just ask people to remember that there are quite a few farmers who would <i>love</i> to stop paying for fertilizer if it didn&#x27;t impact their yields: all of them in fact. It&#x27;s one of their biggest costs generally. When an organization says &quot;The Farming Systems Trial was started by Bob Rodale, who wanted scientific backing for the recommendations being made to the newly forming National Organic Program in the 1980s&quot; they&#x27;ve incorporated confirmation bias into their heart.<p>I&#x27;m certainly biased, I&#x27;m the CTO of a company that&#x27;s trying to improve agricultural inputs by financing access to smallholders in subsaharan Africa (Apollo Agriculture, we&#x27;re actually a YC F1 company also,) but it&#x27;s worth noting that this is research that&#x27;s quite a bit outside the normal recommendations that ag scientists believe. I also worked at The Climate Corporation before, to put all my potential biases out on the table.