Again, plant diversity is not the source of benefits. "The presence of individual species, rather than diversity per se, determined the soil binding capacity of the system." Open access. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

I don’t have a deeper message other than: Food and farming issues almost always involve tradeoffs. I wish people would grapple with the tradeoffs rather than retreat to vibes and ideology. END

Why do organic, agroecology, and regenerative ag all look so similar? Because they're built on the same foundation: pop ecology; notions about nature that feel intuitive but don't hold up to scrutiny. csanr.wsu.edu/pop-ecology/

This is one of the most clear‑headed soil microbiome papers I’ve read. No hype, just solid science. You might be shocked by how much we still don’t know about soils. By @noahfierer.bsky.social Unfortunately, not open access. www.nature.com/articles/nrm...

Imperfect land sparing, with only 30% of land spared devoted to conservation is still better than land sharing. Why? Because the worst thing ag does to nature is convert it to cropland. Everything after conversion is insignificant in comparison. besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

"Nature knows best" sounds wise. But we invented farming because nature didn't know best for growing crops. Pop ecology's tradeoff-free farming doesn't hold up to scrutiny. csanr.wsu.edu/pop-ecology/

Pop ecology gives us appealing slogans—“nature knows best,” “the balance of nature”—but fails to reflect reality and so misleads agriculture. Here's what the ecology of reality actually tells us. My latest... csanr.wsu.edu/pop-ecology/

Sorry, but more sustainable farming isn’t more natural farming. It’s farming that doesn’t overrun so much of the earth. That means higher-yield farming that makes more food per acre, so it doesn’t need so many acres to make food.

Journalist challenge: Use “Machine Learning” when you mean machine learning and “LLM” when you mean LLM. Ditch “AI” as a catch-all term, it’s not useful for readers and it helps companies trying to confuse the public by obscuring the roles played by different technologies. 🧪

Much of this applies to the nonsense I see about and sometimes within agriculture.

New Extension publication: Cover Crop Mixtures vs. Monocultures: What the Research Shows. pubs.extension.wsu.edu/product/cove...

What will happen to glyphosate? Nice report. www.breakthroughjournal.org/p/the-clock-...

Why am I skeptical about soil microbiome testing? Microbial communities vary dramatically at tiny scales: root tips, inside aggregates, where plant material decomposes. These microsites host unique communities, yet most tests only give a broad snapshot, missing these critical microsite differences.

What they did is show that nitrogen is the limiting nutrient for plant growth, even for reforesting, even after 20 years of letting biological-N fixation occur. scitechdaily.com/this-hidden-...

A reminder that the soil micro-environment is much more diverse than our soils tests tell us. "At this scale, pH can vary by more than 1 unit over mm or sub-mm distances, driven by localized microbial activity or organic matter decomposition." bsssjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Here's the new food pyramid if you look at the actual # of recommended servings and not at the graphic. bsky.app/profile/hhso...

“We did our absolute best to get the best possible outcome from these products.” but “The biggest surprise of anything is that nothing worked anywhere,” says Naeve. “Even among cynical people like me, that was really shocking.” Me too. blog-crop-news.extension.umn.edu/2026/01/do-b...

This chart documents one of humanity’s greatest achievements, in my view. We just lived through the fastest population growth in human history. It would have been impressive if food supplies had merely kept pace — but on every continent, they grew even faster than the population.

A key question in sustainable vs regenerative ag is the goal itself. If we define regeneration as restoring soil to its pre‑conversion state, that’s likely unachievable in annual crop rotations.

Saturday, Grand Coulee near Lake Lenore. Lichen, fungi, moss, etc.

I just published: In praise of experts: distinguishing sense from nonsense in the age of AI Can chatbots flag bad science? In a sea of polished, plausible noise, expertise matters more than ever. medium.com/p/in-praise-...

Uh, spannend. Wieder was Interessantes was für Gesprächsstoff hinsichtlich Carbon Farming und Öko-Landbau sorgen könnte.

ken have i told u about the humble potato

What is the most profitable industry in the world, this side of the law? Not oil, not IT, not pharma. It's *scientific publishing*. We call this the Drain of Scientific Publishing. Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820 Background: doi.org/10.1162/qss_... Thread @markhanson.fediscience.org.ap.brid.gy 👇

"Healthy soils = healthy crops" sounds great for social media, but reality is more complex. Soil health matters, but so do genetics, weather, management, etc.. Agriculture isn’t a one-variable equation. csanr.wsu.edu/fine-tuning-...

Bluesky VS X. Agriculture is not on Bluesky.

"Fertile soil"’ is mostly a myth. Crops need water, light, and nutrients—these can be managed even on sandy soils with just 0.5% SOM and irrigation. What’s often called ‘fertile’ is just mining old nutrient stores post-conversion. Management matters more.

Whatever your research question, I can assure you it is *NOT* answered by a combination of linear mixed models, random forest, and structural equation models.

The idea that we can precisely fine-tune our soils is wrong. But this has not stopped a swarm of salesmen from swooping upon budding soil micromanagers, hawking their bio-products. csanr.wsu.edu/micromanagin...

How many times do I have to tell you that we are not going to solve any food crises by growing bougie lettuce indoors.

Distressed to see I guess I'm out of a job. AI has figured out everything there is to know about maize domestication. (Found this online when looking for images for a talk)

This is the left doing its best RFK Jr. imitation, ignoring the preponderance of the evidence on a substance that they really really really want to hate. Glyphosate's combination of safety & effectiveness makes it the best broad-spectrum herbicide we've ever had.

Brassica oleracea / Brassica oleracea / Brassica oleracea

🌱 Here’s one of the tropical pumpkin hybrids I bred last year. It was easy to grow, productive and very early. I harvested this one just 78 days after transplanting. It’s also delicious – incredibly sweet and nice balance of floral and savory notes.

The irony is, the advocates pushing "justice" in food systems are usually pushing low-yield organic/regenerative approaches that are nice for Chez Panisse but make food more expensive for the poor and more damaging to the planet.

If something is bad, don’t make it sound even worse If something is good, don’t make it sound like the One Weird Trick that can fix everything If something sounds like it could be right, but you know it’s wrong, don’t write or reshare it Double check stuff before amplifying We are the algorithm

"There are probably few sciences that are so closely identified with a specific ideology as is the science of ecology." True. Yet Weiner goes on to argue that both the science and the ideology of ecology are needed, a dangerous proposal... jacobweiner.dk/download/2me...

If this works, it's a new day for beekeepers.

Cover crop mixture research, 5 states, 17 site-years, concludes that CC mixture diversity and seeding rate did not consistently improve CC performance, measured soil parameters, or cash crop yields. But they cost more. Open access. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10...

Dramatically? 🤔 Fertilizers yes, fungi not so much. SPUN spin.

Fertilizer DOES NOT burn up soil organic matter. Long-term study finds "NP fertilization substantially augments both the quantity and stability of soil organic carbon stocks." scienmag.com/long-term-n...

AI is right up there with biofertilizer as a deceptive marketing term. AI is just A. Biofertilizer is just bio.

Ecologists, agroecologists, and regenerative agriculture advocate for biodiversity as a solution to many agricultural challenges. However, the research supporting this approach is often not directly applicable to crop production. Read on to learn why... csanr.wsu.edu/why-ecologic...

How dare they focus on yield to reduce hunger, poverty, and the destruction of biodiversity. Productivity drivel! 🙂

Still shocked that a senior official would endorse biodynamic farming. I don’t know a single serious ag or environmental expert who supports it. Some back organic or regenerative—I disagree with them, but at least there’s debate. But biodynamic? It's based on mysticism, not science. t.co/4ZNJ5gv4rq

New paper published this week! "Herbicides Have Minimal and Variable Effects on the Structure and Function of Bacterial Communities in Agricultural Soils" enviromicro-journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Cover crops do important things, including building soil organic matter. But the potential contribution to carbon sequestration is negligible.

Move over mycorrhizal fungi. "These results provide the first lab-based evidence that common non-mycorrhizal networks can occur and suggest that fungal networks among plants may extend beyond mycorrhizal fungi." www.nature.com/articles/s42...

We don't compare arid vs. humid soils and then call the arid soils "degraded" because they have less soil organic matter. They have less SOM because they have less water and so less C inputs. Same with cropped soils, due to harvest. This is unavoidable. csanr.wsu.edu/soil-organic...