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I don’t understand how people grew things without glyphosate. Getting rid of the weeds manually is extremely labor intensive. It’s many hundreds of hours of hir
by dyauspitr 2y ago
I don’t understand how people grew things without glyphosate. Getting rid of the weeds manually is extremely labor intensive. It’s many hundreds of hours of hired labor every week.
- marcosdumay 2y agoPeople didn't remove all the weeds before glyphosate. Nor did all the work manually.
- dyauspitr 2y agoWhat do you mean they didn’t do it manually?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- marcosdumay 2y agoThere are several types of weed removal equipment one can plug on a tractor at the different stages of the life-cycle of the crops.
- bluGill 2y agothey used a culivator. Basically a hoe you pull behind the tractor. this of course burned a lot more fuel [read CO2]
- pfdietz 2y agoAnd chewed up the soil.
- stevenwoo 2y agoSmaller farms, smaller plots, greater variety in crops. There's a bit in episode eight of the documentary series Omnivore contrasting farmers in Mexico versus industrial farming in the USA, showing one of the remaining farmers in Mexico and how they do corn, talking about how a million Mexican farmers were put out of work because they could not compete with lower cost imported corn from the USA after NAFTA.
- guelo 2y agoSlashing and mulching, crop rotation, sturdier non-gmo varieties. The problem is that a lot of these techniques don't scale to the tens of thousands of acres and small margins of large industrial farms.
- DaoVeles 2y agoIt is one of these paradoxes. Yes, the older techniques can IF done right match or even exceed calories per acre. But that is in ideal conditions. You could scale this up provided you want 25%-50% of the population working farming, that is not going to happen voluntarily. In most normal conditions, large scale agro needs large scale solutions and unfortunately Glyphosate is but one of these tools to get that scale up.
- cryptonector 2y agoPol Pot understood this, evidently, and tried to convert Cambodia's population to being largely agricultural. This led to the near extinction of humans in Cambodia, which it would seem many commenters here would applaud.
- Modified3019 2y agoDon't forget burning. Lighting residues on fire after harvest, or running across fields with propane flamers was thing. Propane flaming is still rarely done in our few remaining mint fields. It helps control both diseases, weeds, and spider mites (though that latter we finally have somewhat economic options for predatory beneficial applications)
- randomdata 2y agoThey used the venerable row-crop cultivator, or scuffler is it is affectionately known.