5 ms·

I read an article a few years ago but I cannot for the live of me remember even the larger context, so I don't even know what to ask Google to find it again. Mi

I read an article a few years ago but I cannot for the live of me remember even the larger context, so I don't even know what to ask Google to find it again. Might have been in the context of "The omnivores Dilemma" and the "grass farmer" he visited and described? Don't know if I got it form that book itself or something else I read. It mentioned that when they (don't remember who "they" was either) studied the productivity of rice production somewhere in Asia they found that traditionally worked land was much less productive than industrial-style rice agriculture. BUT - and there was a huge "but": They studied only rice, and that is how they came to that conclusion. Turned out they completely ignored that the traditional method produced not just rice but a long list of other stuff too. So yes, it was "inefficient in producing "just rice". Nature is a huge complex system. How about instead of continuing on a path that surely is not just sub-optimal, but probably even dangerous because it is counter to how nature works and you have to brute-force your way to "success" we give up the idea of gigantic monocultures, and instead go for complexity? That means fields that don't actually look like fields. Where lots of very different kinds of plants all grow together. Yes, that won't work with our current machinery, and not with current knowledge. But I think that you can create biological systems that are far more productive than anything we can get from monocultures, plus none of the dangers. That requires huge amounts of research, experiments - and IT!! Because all that knowledge is too complex to give to every farmer. We need to put that knowledge into systems that then are easy to use. I think trying to force our way to food victory won't work, over time you have to add more and more fixes for all the shortcomings that slowly accumulate in that system, from soil quality to side effects such as the wide distribution of poisons. With enough knowledge we might truly create the Garden of Eden on earth: We let nature do all the work (#) and only go in to grab our food. Like it used to be in hunter/gatherer times, but now managed by us based on the vast amounts of knowledge and "magic tools" (that contain lots of that accumulated knowledge and free the user from having to know even a fraction of it) we created so that it scales to the billions of people. It will also help us when we think about terraforming new planets :-) (#) Nature has trillions and trillions of little machines powered by sun energy working in unison. This is not far-fetched. We already know quite a bit about biological systems, and we have successfully created reasonably complex and large biological systems in some areas.

hcarvalhoalves 8y ago
This is already done in some cases, cocoa is one example. Some decades ago a disease started spreading amongst cocoa crops, and no solution was known. It still menaces crops today. Turns out cocoa is less sensible to disease if you grow it inside the forest vs as monoculture, but because of the shade and density the production is smaller.
icebraining 8y ago
But is there any actual evidence that the "complexity approach" can produce as much as the current model? I mean, I like the sound of the idea, but that's why I'm wary of it; sounds a bit too good to be true.
- ItsMe000001 8y ago
  Not if you only measure "rice", as in the example. If you keep externalities out of it than it's hard to compete too. Do you know how highly subsidized current food production is? All that energy (actual energy) that goes into it, when stuff is supposed to be able to grow on its own? We don't even have to look at the unknown unknowns of all the poisons. We use up sun energy stored millions of years ago to get our current energy, and the cost for doing so is zero because nature does not know about money.
saalweachter 8y ago
I mean, modern corn is fucking astounding from a productivity standpoint. Pre-industrialization corn and wheat yielded something like 10-20 bushels per acre. I have a book from the turn of the century I keep for the cover titled "How to Grow 100 Bushel Corn in Poor Soil" (spoiler: guano), and now corn harvests are something like 180 bushels an acre and wheat something like 60. There's a lot of reasons for this (mechanization, fertilizers, pesticides, selective breeding and genetic engineering) but the short story is when you talk "traditional" versus "modern" agriculture, you're talking an order of magnitude productivity increases on a per-acre basis, along with another order-of-magnitude increase on the acres worked per farmer.
- r00fus 8y ago

hcarvalhoalves 8y ago

This is already done in some cases, cocoa is one example. Some decades ago a disease started spreading amongst cocoa crops, and no solution was known. It still menaces crops today. Turns out cocoa is less sensible to disease if you grow it inside the forest vs as monoculture, but because of the shade and density the production is smaller.

icebraining 8y ago

But is there any actual evidence that the "complexity approach" can produce as much as the current model? I mean, I like the sound of the idea, but that's why I'm wary of it; sounds a bit too good to be true.

ItsMe000001 8y ago
Not if you only measure "rice", as in the example. If you keep externalities out of it than it's hard to compete too. Do you know how highly subsidized current food production is? All that energy (actual energy) that goes into it, when stuff is supposed to be able to grow on its own? We don't even have to look at the unknown unknowns of all the poisons. We use up sun energy stored millions of years ago to get our current energy, and the cost for doing so is zero because nature does not know about money.

saalweachter 8y ago

I mean, modern corn is fucking astounding from a productivity standpoint. Pre-industrialization corn and wheat yielded something like 10-20 bushels per acre. I have a book from the turn of the century I keep for the cover titled "How to Grow 100 Bushel Corn in Poor Soil" (spoiler: guano), and now corn harvests are something like 180 bushels an acre and wheat something like 60. There's a lot of reasons for this (mechanization, fertilizers, pesticides, selective breeding and genetic engineering) but the short story is when you talk "traditional" versus "modern" agriculture, you're talking an order of magnitude productivity increases on a per-acre basis, along with another order-of-magnitude increase on the acres worked per farmer.

r00fus 8y ago