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One of the reasons you monocrop is that it makes it easier to harvest and plant with machines— starting with the invention of the plow, probably, but imagine if
by empath75 7y ago
One of the reasons you monocrop is that it makes it easier to harvest and plant with machines— starting with the invention of the plow, probably, but imagine if we developed intelligent robotic plant harvesters that could tend to entire ecosystems, instead.
- adrianN 7y agoHow about we try to improve the machines so that they work on healthy fields instead of finding ways to engineer crops that suck the Earth dry quicker.
- mschuster91 7y agoIt doesn't work this way. Healthy fields require regular, extended downtimes to regenerate. You can't "fix" a depleted soil, this is something that nature must do alone. The only fix is to legally mandate (or incentivize by subsidies) that soil gets to regenerate. The problem is that this will reduce the amount of usable agrarian fields by a massive amount and so prices will rise - which governments want to avoid like the plague. What they ignore: if we continue down that path the soil is fucked beyond repair in decades...
- christophilus 7y agoGiven how much we waste, I wonder if it would really affect prices much. Also, you can regenerate land with permaculture, but trying to do permaculture at scale or with automation would be pretty challenging.
- jelliclesfarm 7y agoIt’s totally possible. Like any new tech, it can only be adopted when it’s done at a large scale to be affordable. We have to make farms smaller and smarter. And start training agronomists and farmers to start becoming STEM friendly with their methods otherwise they are never going to comfortable transitioning from tractor to robot.