[jeromenerf]

> We killed the microbiology, the research is already done. Keep many kinds of plants in the soil year round, stop adding chems, this increases yield 3x and water retention enough to reduce irrigation demand up to 70%.

Permaculture, no-till, ... Not sure there are definitive research conclusions on this, especially "3x yield".

IME, the conclusions are not as straight cut, nor as general and imply profound changes, such as mixing crops, cultivating more land, reducing yield, never leaving the soil exposed. Many things that have to be done together, with local optimizations, to get significant improvement.

Just like "electric cars" don't directly solve the "many privately owned petrol cars" problem. A solution being the "electric car tech" + another ownership / sharing model + urbanism changes.

[patimejia]

"Applications to a sandy soil of the partially purified surface-active compounds improved soil water retention up to 314.3% compared to untreated soil. Similarly, after 36 h of incubation, the humidity uptake rate of treated sandy soil was up to 607.7% higher than untreated controls." ... "Overall, results revealed that polyextremotolerant bioemulsifiers of bacteria from arid and desert soils represent potential sources to develop new natural soil-wetting agents for improving water retention in arid soils." https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5984429/

[timcash]

Have you gone out and done some experiments for yourself? or is this from reading about it?