And these days people don’t believe it’s necessary that we move to polyculture farming. Monoculture farming is depleting the soil no matter if you crop rotate.
Do you have any evidence/resources to back that up? I am not trying to start a fight, just interested to learn more, my first intuition being that crop rotated mono culture would be better for economies of scale as equipment tends to be highly specialized
You just need a large enough rotation.
What difference would 8 variety’s planted at once vs each planted over an 8 year cycle? Even if you have 8 different species, you still need to rotate them around. So you’re just doing it smaller scale in the end anyways….
As long as you do it right, they will all take and add their own benefits to and from the soil. Even if you have 1000 plant species on your garden, you can’t plant the tomatoes in the same spot every year, that’s not how poly farming works, you still need a rotate within….
The poly culture buddy is talking about is more for self sufficient homes. When you’re talking large farms, it’s easier for them to focus on a single crop a year, and roster through them, less storage requirements, less variety of fertilizers and pesticides (ughh another topic).
But yeah you as a family can’t just eat potatoes one year, beans the next, starve for a year while you use clover to fix nitrogen back into the soil. But yeah a collective of eight farmers all growing and rotating their equipment and shit. Fan fucking tastic best way to operate and best for the soil.
But in the end, it all still needs to rotate every year, your soil can’t magically move nutrients from an acre away. The plant only has access the size of its root network.
Depending on your garden you sort of do crop rotation anyways in many setups.
Like if you have four quarter plots of a 48ft2 piece of lawn and do a different crop in each quarter, then rotate the next year. Makes it easy for even yourself to harvest. Easier to notice where your ripe beans to harvest are when they aren't mixed in with your corn plants.
I’ve got 3 4’x12 plots myself, not quite enough to rotate tall stuff like tomatoes and sunflowers properly, but that’s why I maybe do some clover cover crop behind that one one year instead.
Well for individuals I saw the concept of I forget the exact name, something like forest farming or what, basically you start combining plants vertically too, so you add some producing bushes and trees next to your normal crops
Would start by looking up how plants interact with each other and with mycelial networks—monocropping deprives the farm of an important support network, and the soil and plants’ subsequent underperformance leads to unsustainable use of pesticides, additional water supply etc. to compensate. Monocropping to simplify the field layout and crop gathering makes plenty of intuitive sense, as does cutting down all your trees so you can plant more crops. It’s also not a good long-term plan to treat these unfathomably complex systems that have evolved over millennia as something we’re going to improve using our intuition.
Polyculture farming is good for the land and good for yields, but monoculture is easier for the government to rule over.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/16/book-review-seeing-like-a-state/
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/10/14/book-review-against-the-grain/
You don't have to. You can just use some petroleum derived fertilizer to make up for all the issues you're causing and ignore them until you die and it's someone else's problem. This also creates more CO2 emissions, which is just bonus food for your crops and warmer temperatures. Totally not an issue that needs to be addressed...
What people say that? I have never heard anyone have that belief except if I stretch it, in astroturfing ads. Nobody believes that. Corporations decide. They are not humans. You are not controlled by humans but by huge devil machines
Of course they do. Beans, no poop challenge, ????, profit!!! repeat as needed.
(...we need more memes!)
There's also jeans, sticks, and Star Trek crossed with whatever other pop culture you like
For a second I thought this was about Stardew Valley and that I would get higher star crops by rotating them through the season.
I could see that in a more realistic mod. Crop rotation, leaving farm land fallow and such!
I'm unconvinced holding back our people by 5000 years is a bad thing. If that hadn't happened, there might not have been a humanity for us to be born into. Or maybe we'd be at Star Trek levels now.
Though our existence depends on our history, so even if it would have been a better one, we wouldn't get to see it.
I don't think we'd be at Star Trek levels, but I do think it's OK if we went slower. The breakneck pace of development since the Industrial Revolution hasn't been done in a way that's healthy for the planet or for people.
As things are, we might have a Mars colony by the end of the century, but with a ruined Earth behind it. If we pushed that Mars colony out another century and focused on improving the planet we have, that would be OK. These goals aren't necessarily mutually exclusive--a Mars colony would likely take a tiny fraction of Earth's combined economic output over the next 80 years--but there's a lot of things we would do to make things more sustainable that will be more expensive in terms of label price. We aren't fully incorporating the true cost of things on the current label price, so of course those will go up when they properly reflect reality.
Crop rotation isn't that, though. It's a good idea for efficient use of agricultural land over the long term.
