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Perennial rice: Plant once, harvest again and again

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Re: Perennial rice: Plant once, harvest again and again

#161

Post by UberFly »

scns wrote: post #152
wolfgangK wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really wish there was a name (that I knew of) for this logical fallacy of using precise quantities of meaninglessly confused categories. What do you think "farmland" is ? Our ancestors who knew how to raise cattle and farm cereals for millennia were surviving on the verge of starvation : why do you think that was ? Were they so dumb they'd rather die of hunger than convert some of their grazing pastures to cereal a…

> a pound of soy protein won't have the same effect on your body as a pound of meat proteins. True. Eating meat will raise your inflammation markers by 70%. > nutrients and their bio availability (e.g. iron and B12) Fe3 from animal sources has a better uptake by the body. Fe2 from plants is good enough if you combine it with Vitamin C. Parsley contains both. Animals in conventional agriculture have to be fed B12, for…

"Game Changers" is a terrible place to plant your fact-flag. Like all documentaries of its type, there is no balanced fact-checking, questionable "experts" basing their opinions on small inconclusive studies, etc, etc.

Re: Perennial rice: Plant once, harvest again and again

#162

Post by richardw »

wolfgangK wrote: post #139
Aromasin wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To put this into context, animal agriculture is responsible for 18% of the worlds CO2 emissions, uses 83% of the world's farmland, but only produces 18% of our calories and 37% of our protein.

I really wish there was a name (that I knew of) for this logical fallacy of using precise quantities of meaninglessly confused categories. What do you think "farmland" is ? Our ancestors who knew how to raise cattle and farm cereals for millennia were surviving on the verge of starvation : why do you think that was ? Were they so dumb they'd rather die of hunger than convert some of their grazing pastures to cereal a…

“The grass/food that cattle eat, what would happen to it if let to decompose ?”

It would decompose (once) and then natural habitat would return because we need less of that land, capturing carbon more permanently because it’s released more slowly. In Brazil, exactly the opposite is happening: deforestation to feed cattle. Are you arguing for that deforestation?

Re: Perennial rice: Plant once, harvest again and again

#163

Post by hcurtiss »

tfourb wrote: post #142
mardifoufs wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What % of farmland used for meat production is actually usable for something else? I don't think cattle grazes on prime land, or even mildly productive land.

It really depends on what you define as "usable". I am currently looking out of a window in the Bavarian Forest and see nice lush green meadows which would be perfectly productive under many different types of crops, but which are mostly used as pasture and meadow for hay production, because the landscape is hilly, which isn't well suited to be farmed with the heavy equipment that has become standard in i.e. corn and…

Yes, with humans working hoes. I do not call that progress.

Re: Perennial rice: Plant once, harvest again and again

#164

Post by ledauphin »

barathr wrote: post #5

The Land Institute has been doing amazing work for decades, and it's great to see they've done it for a common grain. Their work on Kernza was fascinating but seemed unlikely to catch on. The question will always come back to yield loss (vs. annual cultivars) vs. cost savings due to perenniality.

i wish Kernza would succeed. It is a more interesting-tasting grain than wheat!

Re: Perennial rice: Plant once, harvest again and again

#166

Post by tfourb »

hcurtiss wrote: post #163
tfourb wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really depends on what you define as "usable". I am currently looking out of a window in the Bavarian Forest and see nice lush green meadows which would be perfectly productive under many different types of crops, but which are mostly used as pasture and meadow for hay production, because the landscape is hilly, which isn't well suited to be farmed with the heavy equipment that has become standard in i.e. corn and…

Yes, with humans working hoes. I do not call that progress.

Currently less than 1% of the population in many industrialized countries are working in agriculture. That is laughably few people and there is no reason why it couldn't be a greater share of the population. Guess what: many people are actually enjoying this kind of work when it isn't presented in a context of total exploitation.

And no, while agriculture certainly tends to be physically demanding, it is not unreasonably so, even when done at small scale and with smaller machines. Small scale agriculture has been mechanized to a large degree and mechanized solutions have even been developed for very sustainable approaches to agriculture like agroforestry and syntropic agriculture.

Re: Perennial rice: Plant once, harvest again and again

#167

Post by yamtaddle »

wolfgangK wrote: post #139
Aromasin wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To put this into context, animal agriculture is responsible for 18% of the worlds CO2 emissions, uses 83% of the world's farmland, but only produces 18% of our calories and 37% of our protein.

I really wish there was a name (that I knew of) for this logical fallacy of using precise quantities of meaninglessly confused categories. What do you think "farmland" is ? Our ancestors who knew how to raise cattle and farm cereals for millennia were surviving on the verge of starvation : why do you think that was ? Were they so dumb they'd rather die of hunger than convert some of their grazing pastures to cereal a…

> Our ancestors who knew how to raise cattle and farm cereals for millennia were surviving on the verge of starvation : why do you think that was ? Were they so dumb they'd rather die of hunger than convert some of their grazing pastures to cereal agriculture ?

This is one of those "not even wrong" kind of things. The conditions that led to famine-cycles plaguing the Old World until the arrival of New World crops, and later the Green Revolution, have nothing at all to do with modern farming or land use, not even in the way you're trying to make the connection. This is all just completely irrelevant to the point you're trying to use it to make.

"Were pre-contact old-world farmers just too dumb to kill their cows so they could plant more wheat and stop starving every few years?", asked rhetorically to imply that reducing meat farming can't possibly help with any modern problems. I mean... it's just a nonsense question, the context they were operating in, the global population size, and their farming practices are so far removed from what we do now that it doesn't make any sense to frame it this way. No, they weren't too dumb to think of that, and no, it wouldn't have helped if they had tried it, but neither of those things are relevant to the modern situation, at all.

Re: Perennial rice: Plant once, harvest again and again

#168

Post by sampo »

In one of his videos in Youtube, permaculture farmer Richard Perkins said that mankind has 6000 years of agriculture, but has mostly concentrated plant breeding efforts to annual plants. We mostly eat annuals. (Plants that grow and die in one year.)

But, he said, imagine what kind of perennial (plants that live multiple years) food plants we could have, if we invested similar 6000 years of effort to perfecting perennial food plants. Like fruit trees and nut trees and whatever.

The benefits of perennials being, you don't need to plat then anew every year. And because the plants and especially their root systems are not killed off at the end of every summer, the soil is not vulnerable to erosion, because the plant roots stay in the soil and hold it together.

Re: Perennial rice: Plant once, harvest again and again

#169

Post by samstave »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #75
samstave wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Rice is the national dish of the Philippines" -- A relative who worked in the Philippine government on RICE specifically His other quote was "we have this department because Rice needs to be on every plate, every meal" The flooding isnt to prevent weeds, its to prevent INSECTS, and rice is very water tolerant. --- So, wouldnt it be sane to say that perennial rice in a small growing area would be good.... also, have…

You could just give the rice a haircut. Plants do pretty well getting reasonably mowed.

It is well known that grass does much better for Bees, when allowed to grow further than where Humans prefer their lawns.

Anyone that actively kills nature is my enemy.

Re: Perennial rice: Plant once, harvest again and again

#170

Post by hinkley »

ccooffee wrote: post #32
chris_va wrote: post #18

(disclaimer that I manage a climate group, but not a rice expert) They touch on, but don't get into the details on one of the more interesting aspects of perennial rice. Rice fields are actually a huge emitter of methane. Depending on the accounting, they contribute as much to global warming as the aviation sector. The fields emit methane when flooded, the stagnant water gets oxygen depleted, and the biomass in the s…

I hadn't heard about rice fields emitting methane before. I was able to quickly find an article, "Methane emissions from global rice fields: Magnitude, spatiotemporal patterns, and environmental controls"[0], which states: > Our study estimated that CH4 emissions from global rice fields varied from 18.3 ± 0.1 Tg CH4/yr (Avg. ±1 SD) under intermittent irrigation to 38.8 ± 1.0 Tg CH4/yr under continuous flooding in the…

It's a similar problem with hydroelectric dams. If you drown a biosphere, then methane is a product of anaerobic decay. So it's a question of how much material is there to decay, and what fraction of that decay is oxygen deprived, so that it can't fully oxidize the C-C, C=C, and C-H bonds to water and carbon dioxide.
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