fossilesque
Grubberfly 🔮
Person264
jlow (he/him)
Deebster
wizardbeardwould just
Farmers have been rotating crops for hundreds of years man. Corporate farms rotate crops too. Step down off that soapbox for a moment.
The whole joke is that the person in the image would have made fun of the idea in ancient times, killing the food supply of early civilization and setting us all back by thousands of years.
小莱卡
triplenadirsome crops replenish nutrients, e.g. legumes directly fixing nitrogen from the air.
just because capitalist industrial agriculture is addicted to fossil fuel fertilizers doesn’t mean it’s the only way to farm.
Cover crops can help a bit in soil that’s not seem significant agricultural use yet… by biologically mining and aerating the soil (ie. plants with deep and hardy tap roots can break through some plow pan and clay to extract mineral nutrients beneath).
Like you say, external inputs and care are needed to amend the soil to grow useful food crops. If they weren’t, we’d still be foraging, without need to settle areas and dedicate energy to agriculture.
There has to be a balance, we need to understand that as long as we export harvests out of the field we need to import nutrients into the field. We can’t expect plants to naturally replenish the nutrients that we unnaturally extract.
Also we need to understand that when we introduce heavy machinery into a field, we need heavy machinery to break compaction. Plants and soil organisms simply cannot naturally break the compaction caused by our unnaturally heavy machinery that is heavily concentrated in the small contact area of a tire.
Some of these dogmatic beliefs lead to “regenerative” farmers being more extractivists than the industrial farmers they demonize.
Absolutely. I’m happy to see more people on the same page here. Conservation of Mass is a law that we have to abide by.
On compaction, I have read on some cultivars of root grass crops being capable of penetrating plow pan and freeing up the soil underneath but I have not yet read any studies that empirically validate this. And, even if the data proves it, the proposed process is NOT fast and requires assistance from seasonal freeze/thaw cycles to help mechanically crack the compacted layer. So, not likely useful for remediation of fields needed to grow food in the short to mid term.
Darth_Reagan [they/them, comrade/them]All plants require different levels nutrients to grow. If the same plant is grown repeatedly in the same soil then the soil will run out of the nutrients that plant needs and growing that plant becomes difficult. By rotating through plants with different nutrient requirements, the soil can maintain a sustainable balance of nutrients.
We now use the scientific method to argue ideas, but in the past ideas could just be laughed at if people thought they sounded dumb. People laughed at ideas like the sun being the center of the solar system and doctors needing to wash their hands before surgery. Refusal to accept these ideas held humanity back from technological advancement.
embed_meBecause change is costly and therefore a risk. When it seems that resources are scarce, risks are dangerous, and it can seem rational to destroy ideas that cost more resources, lest your imagined model of society collapse for lack of resources as the idea takes over.
It’s always conservatism, in other words.
ThatWeirdGuy1001Let’s not take the religious aspects out of it though.
The church said earth was the center so saying the sun was the center was going against the church which was blasphemy. Blasphemy punishable by lifelong imprisonment or death.
Likely both as dungeons weren’t exactly life friendly.
We now use the scientific method to argue ideas, but in the past ideas could just be laughed at if people thought they sounded dumb.
Used to before the whole covid scam anyway. Now it’s “trust the science” which of course is an oxymoron. The whole point of science is that we don’t trust it, we verify it. And that wasn’t allowed.
As others have said, a monoculture will drain those specific nutrients.
Beans are kinda special being a nitrogen fixer. Lot of plants will drain nitrogen so we fertilize as supplement.
Plant beans, squash, and corn together and you won’t need to rotate your fields and the plants will form a sort of symbiosis working together.
skulblaka
happybadger [he/him]She is playing the part of the dumb antagonist saying Jeff is stupid for rotating his crops.
Somehow the dumb antagonist is 5000 years old.
👍Maximum Derek👍