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this post was submitted on 24 Jul 2024
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Step 1 might be to not plant the same crop on the same land for two and a half decades straight.
Years ago I went to Kenya and Tanzania to asses some fields for trials of new cultivars my group was developing. There were a lot of issues with people seeing a yearly decrease in crop yield. But the major issue was actually the lack of crop rotation causing a buildup of disease in the soil which was weakening the plants each year.
I don't know this guy or his field. And, not carefully fertilizing fields can cause root burn for sure. But poor agricultural yield in Africa is definitely impacted by poor crop rotation.
Wasn't farming invented in Africa? Or at least the nearby Middle East. This has been a known issue for years.
I bet it's an issue with farmers needing money now, because of low crop prices. Crop prices are cyclical, so hopefully it works itself out without too much economic damage.
Soccer was invented in England. How's that going for them?
It would have been developed by humans all around the world at the same time. Technology and knowledge weren't the limiting factor--humans have always known that you can toss some seeds in the soil and a plant will come out. What was lacking was the climate--the last ice age ended about 12,000 years ago and only after that was massive cultivation possible. It was after that where you see settlements and eventually cities appear.
It's more complex than this, but it's related to climatic change.
First, we're still in the ice age. We're just in an interglacial period.
During the glaciation, humans mainly hunted a few big game. It was an inhospitable environment.
When the glaciation ended, the climate became more stable, warmer, more clement. Rivers rised and became calmer, as the sea level rose.
Humans started diversifying and broadening what they ate. They collected much more plants, hunted more animal species, notably small game, fished much more. It was the mesolithic.
In zones that were particularly abundant in resources, probably at the edges of ecozones, it became possible and interesting to settle down somewhat, and defend this territory against outsiders. Owning resources allowed to invest time and labor into making things more productive. Domestication was part of that.
Not all regions are suitable, or have sufficient domesticable species. Some places took much longer than others to really get farming going, and most never did, until domesticates arrived there from somewhere else.
Hmm, it seemed to be a problem with subsistence crops too. We were working on black rot resistance in sukuma wiki which isn't a cash crop. We were working on resistance specifically because it reduced the need to rotate crops. People could grow it more continuously without risking yield loss.
Methinks it’s a capitalist issue, not a farming issue.
Farmers can’t bank seeds and have to buy new every year or face legal consequences.
Probably also planting based on value of crop vs cost of growing not nutritional red of the community.
It's not an "ism" issue. This has happened in countries that were completely anti-capitalist. It's just a biological imperative: you have to rotate crops, regardless of who runs your country.
The Soviet Union and the PRC demanded quantities of cash crops for export too. If your choice is rotating crops or staying out of the gulag, you're not going to rotate.
Anti-capitalist maybe, but pro capital. Dear leader and his cronies need the cash crops to for export, fancy houses don’t grow on trees. They grow off the the sweat of the worker.
I didn’t intend to say the farmer is making the choices solely for personal profit. They grow what sells, or what they’re told to, so they can afford to live, not their choice.
In the end I see we agree. It’s not about an ism. It’s all about cash. Money. Capital. And greed doesn’t care about crop rotation- it’s too short sighted.
The sort of work that is succeeding in parts of Africa, Pakistan, and India is setting up what they call food forests. Put some fruiting tree species in the center and surround throughout with fruiting and vegetable producing plants. This will form a more complex web of creatures that can live together and produce food for the people who take care of them. No fertilizers, no irrigation--just crops that are appropriate for the region. They can take years to get going, though, which is the hard part. Once they are going, it's just a question of tending to them.
You also can't really mechanise that, so forget about sending the kids to the city for high school. And it's pretty much guarenteed you need to fertilise at least a bit to get the same yield, just by conservation of mass of P and N, assuming you're harvesting from it.
Contrary to popular opinion, farming is not simple or easy, and there's actual reasons monoculture at scale is so popular.
This isn't about trying to integrate with modern life. It's realizing that aspects of modernity are obscene and some things should go back to how they were done millennia back.
Bro, how many cobs have you husked by hand? What about cotton balls carded, spun and woven? Grain reaped? I haven't done much of those things, but enough to get that it sucks. And that's not even going into the various things all those educated people in the the city make possible, like medicine so you don't die at 5 from a bacterial infection.
Assuming you're in the US, why do you think illegal immigrants are the ones that work the fields? Unless you're about to reveal you're a rural Indian this is some seriously out of touch Marie Antoinette shit.
I think they meant like around population centers to supplant regular food. But I don't know where that would actually be...
My crazy idea is Suburbia has a lot of lawn, and my dad showed me a garden can feed a family more than I would have thought. But who has time to do that? So you nake a law that you forfeit sections of your land, not x feet near your house if they have no existing agricultural or industrial activity for open planting, until at least the next season. Maintained lawns wouldn't exist unless you were somewhere sufficiently rural.
Hopefully, otherwise they're telling the starving African kids to go back to the stone age to save the environment, while they presumably stay somewhere air conditioned. The sad thing is that they probably don't even realise how insulting that is.
Densifying suburbs is a huge thing that needs to happen. It won't change the world, because as big as suburbia is rural areas are bigger, but it will help. It also would do a lot to keep transport emissions down.
This is what I am talking about. You can restore desolate land and make it produce food for humans:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1vKAPL_WfBA&t=47s&pp=ygUPYW5kcmV3IG1pbGxpc29u
It's unclear why you are projecting some nonsense about me wanting to keep Africans in the stone age. Maybe try to be a bit more charitable.
You said ~~we should~~ much poorer people than you should go back to the way things were thousands of years ago, including living in the boonies handweeding mixed-use gardens in order to not starve. Maybe you're still letting them use metal tools, but that's kind of a weak improvement. They could do agriculture the same way the people who feed your white-collar ass do, with a bit of education and a leg up, but that's not good enough apparently for your highness. Look, I'm trying to be charitable, but this is so outrageous it's hard.
A quick look through your profile suggests you were recently a banker in California. You should basically shut up about how much baking in the sun people you have nothing to do with need to endure. Until you goddamn try it, at least.
They didn’t say that, you inferred it. Also your take on them not going to school? The fuck? They can definitely do both
I really feel that there must be a streak of racism among the people who responded to this thread. It was weird how people took exception to the idea of food being made in a community.
I think there's a streak of racism among Westerners who think they know better than the people on the ground, if we're going there.
In fact, the people who actually show up to help have a nickname for your lot: "Great White Savior"
I don't think you're a bad person. Or a racist. I do think you stepped in shit and are digging yourself deeper out of, like, pride.
Nah, man, this is all on you. Talking about what people in Africa, India, and Pakistan are experimenting with in their own country does not make anyone outside of there a white savior. This is really all on you.
You didn't just talk about it. You said they should all do it, and specifically shouldn't do standard agriculture, like what you depend on. If they find a use for mixed planting, great, and obviously they do sometimes.
We're done. You're toxic, have a block.
No, mate. I'm close with actual relief workers IRL. ^Albeit^ ^one^ ^less^ ^as^ ^of^ ^a^ ^couple^ ^weeks^ ^ago^ ^:(^
Keeping the kids out of school so they can work the land so you don't starve is common as dirt. It's as simple as a certain number of hours in a day, and school taking a good half of them. Shit, even farming folk here in the West did similar things a century ago.
A terrible idea, putting food production in communities and making sure they are fed. I should have known better. You're right, massive agriculture in the hands of a powerful elite is the only answer.
They fucked something up, even if it's not that. You'll notice the soils of the US midwest are good as gold after a near-century of this shit.
That's not really their fault, though. Presumably nobody came and explained the best practices.
No the soils in the Midwest are not good.
https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/7e1766e613384ea59aef9ff17ccbdc9c
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0341816224002716?via%3Dihub
Erosion and soil profile degradation from poor farming practices are a huge issue.
If you want to get "out into the weeds", yes there's still problems. Water usage is insanely unsustainable in some areas too, which is the real emergency. Until the water table dries up yields are continue to be great.
Looking at the first paper:
So that's the timescale we're talking. The Kenyan policy started in 2008, so 2mm/year topsoil loss isn't the issue. I also wonder how this figure changed around the dustbowl period, when practices were much worse yet.
Fun fact, no-till uses even more chemicals. If you're not mechanically digging up weeds and pests you've got to kill them other ways.