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It’s amazing how crude our agriculture system is. We’re so focused on serving ads, automating cars, creating virtual worlds, building bombs… but we can’t create

It’s amazing how crude our agriculture system is. We’re so focused on serving ads, automating cars, creating virtual worlds, building bombs… but we can’t create a meal without hurting animals or the earth. Even a planet full of vegetarians requires the most fertile land and fresh water to be used for crops. Take a drive through Iowa or the San Joaquin valley, it’s amazing how unnatural it looks.

ruffrey 3y ago
A lot of smart people and savvy farmers are working on regenerative agriculture. Monoculture crops turn the living soil into dirt, and there are simple, cheap practices to bring it back.
- iancmceachern 3y ago
  And have been for thousands of years. Monoculture is what's new and weird.
  - bamboozled 3y ago
    Monoculture is likely what happens when agriculture meets wall st.
  - Turing_Machine 3y ago
    Well, "new and weird" if "new" is counted as 23,000 years ago, and "weird" is counted as "being different from the hunter-gatherer lifestyle". The earliest crop-raising cultures for which we have decent records (Mesopotamia, Egypt, China) all had specialized fields for different crops.
    - iancmceachern 3y ago
      Not even close. "We found some evidence for" does not equal " All crops were raised this way". I.e. just because they found some evidence of specialized fields in the remains of those civilizations, does not mean they grew all their food exclusively that way. Also, you are simply wrong. "Three Sisters" The Three Sisters are the three main agricultural crops of various Indigenous peoples of North America: squash, maize ("corn"), and climbing beans (typically tepary beans or common beans). In a technique known as companion planting, the maize and beans are often planted together in mounds formed by hilling soil around the base of the plants each year; squash is typically planted between the mounds. The cornstalk serves as a trellis for climbing beans, the beans fix nitrogen in their root nodules and stabilize the maize in high winds, and the wide leaves of the squash plant shade the ground, keeping the soil moist and helping prevent the establishment of weeds. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Sisters_(agriculture) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Sisters_(agriculture) And then when you go to the companion planting wiki article it highlights that it's been in use around the world for many years, China, etc https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Companion_planting https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Companion_planting To say this, to say that humans just started off right from monoculture is crazy. We just went straight from hunter gatherers to having large curated monoculture fields that are cultivated and specifically planted. No. "Though the transition from wild harvesting was gradual, the switch from a nomadic to a settled way of life is marked by the appearance of early Neolithic villages with homes equipped with grinding stones for processing grain." https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/development-agriculture/ https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/developmen...
- dqv 3y ago
  The common refrain against polyculture/intercropping/whatever is that it’s harder to harvest. That’s going to be a big deal I think - being able to reasonably, cheaply, automate fast harvesting. It doesn’t seem like there’s much on the subject of automating it yet. The other issue is the possibility of lower yields. Honestly though, more labor and lower yields with the promise that future generations will have healthy soil is a reasonable trade off to me.
  - Ekaros 3y ago
    So how do you spend your time today on the fields?
delta_p_delta_x 3y ago
> Even a planet full of vegetarians requires the most fertile land and fresh water to be used for crops. If everyone turned vegetarian—or better still, vegan—we could easily return 75% of current cropland to nature[1], and still feed more people than we do today. Meat is just ridiculously water- and resource-intensive; plus, the animals that are reared for said meat are non-trivial contributors to CO2 and CH4 in the atmosphere. [1]: https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets > we can’t create a meal without hurting animals This is a Western problem. India, for instance, contains more vegetarians than the rest of the world put together, times five.
CaptainNegative 3y ago
And there's a lot of money poured into keeping it that way. Sonoma County, CA lets organized theft gangs roam free, but conjure up the ridiculous charge of felony conspiracy to commit misdemeanor trespass for someone saving sick ducks from a duck farm after authorities refused to act on reports of California Prop 2 violations. The reason the DA couldn't go with burglary is because that would require the object taken to have positive value, and those companies don't want to claim they also sell slaughtered animals who were diseased to the verge of death. If they discard their bodies as they corpses they do, they are of no value to the farmers and thus could not have been the subject of a burglary.

ruffrey 3y ago

A lot of smart people and savvy farmers are working on regenerative agriculture. Monoculture crops turn the living soil into dirt, and there are simple, cheap practices to bring it back.

iancmceachern 3y ago
And have been for thousands of years. Monoculture is what's new and weird.
- bamboozled 3y ago
  Monoculture is likely what happens when agriculture meets wall st.
- Turing_Machine 3y ago
  Well, "new and weird" if "new" is counted as 23,000 years ago, and "weird" is counted as "being different from the hunter-gatherer lifestyle". The earliest crop-raising cultures for which we have decent records (Mesopotamia, Egypt, China) all had specialized fields for different crops.
  - iancmceachern 3y ago
    Not even close. "We found some evidence for" does not equal " All crops were raised this way". I.e. just because they found some evidence of specialized fields in the remains of those civilizations, does not mean they grew all their food exclusively that way. Also, you are simply wrong. "Three Sisters" The Three Sisters are the three main agricultural crops of various Indigenous peoples of North America: squash, maize ("corn"), and climbing beans (typically tepary beans or common beans). In a technique known as companion planting, the maize and beans are often planted together in mounds formed by hilling soil around the base of the plants each year; squash is typically planted between the mounds. The cornstalk serves as a trellis for climbing beans, the beans fix nitrogen in their root nodules and stabilize the maize in high winds, and the wide leaves of the squash plant shade the ground, keeping the soil moist and helping prevent the establishment of weeds. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Sisters_(agriculture) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Sisters_(agriculture) And then when you go to the companion planting wiki article it highlights that it's been in use around the world for many years, China, etc https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Companion_planting https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Companion_planting To say this, to say that humans just started off right from monoculture is crazy. We just went straight from hunter gatherers to having large curated monoculture fields that are cultivated and specifically planted. No. "Though the transition from wild harvesting was gradual, the switch from a nomadic to a settled way of life is marked by the appearance of early Neolithic villages with homes equipped with grinding stones for processing grain." https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/development-agriculture/ https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/developmen...
dqv 3y ago
The common refrain against polyculture/intercropping/whatever is that it’s harder to harvest. That’s going to be a big deal I think - being able to reasonably, cheaply, automate fast harvesting. It doesn’t seem like there’s much on the subject of automating it yet. The other issue is the possibility of lower yields. Honestly though, more labor and lower yields with the promise that future generations will have healthy soil is a reasonable trade off to me.
- Ekaros 3y ago
  So how do you spend your time today on the fields?

delta_p_delta_x 3y ago

> Even a planet full of vegetarians requires the most fertile land and fresh water to be used for crops. If everyone turned vegetarian—or better still, vegan—we could easily return 75% of current cropland to nature[1], and still feed more people than we do today. Meat is just ridiculously water- and resource-intensive; plus, the animals that are reared for said meat are non-trivial contributors to CO2 and CH4 in the atmosphere. [1]: https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets > we can’t create a meal without hurting animals This is a Western problem. India, for instance, contains more vegetarians than the rest of the world put together, times five.

CaptainNegative 3y ago

And there's a lot of money poured into keeping it that way. Sonoma County, CA lets organized theft gangs roam free, but conjure up the ridiculous charge of felony conspiracy to commit misdemeanor trespass for someone saving sick ducks from a duck farm after authorities refused to act on reports of California Prop 2 violations. The reason the DA couldn't go with burglary is because that would require the object taken to have positive value, and those companies don't want to claim they also sell slaughtered animals who were diseased to the verge of death. If they discard their bodies as they corpses they do, they are of no value to the farmers and thus could not have been the subject of a burglary.