201–210 of 369 posts
This looks fun but not really useful. My hope would be that in 20 years everyone has a little bot that 24/7 runs a garden for you and provides every family with 80% of their vegetable need. Imagine the amount of acreage we could return to nature / co2 sinking.
I would love a drone or robot that selectively kills invasive weeds and leaves native ones.
This looks fun but not really useful. My hope would be that in 20 years everyone has a little bot that 24/7 runs a garden for you and provides every family with 80% of their vegetable need. Imagine the amount of acreage we could return to nature / co2 sinking.
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Every family having to have a robot instead of a handful of tractors for every ten thousand families or so. And that is likely a less optimal use of acreage. I think what you might actually be advocating for is “people should convert more residential land into gardens” which is always fun. I love my garden as a hobby. We keep trying to un-invent the division of labour. Edited for unnecessary pre-coffee poor behaviour…
I did some quick math on this 10,000 number and I think it’s off by at least an order of magnitude. You have to assume everyone needs the tractors at roughly the same time and the cost/time of transporting, loading, unloading, etc severely limits the efficiency in a suburban environment.
I’m not a farmer but I live in a farming city, and one thing I notice is that the crops around here are definitely not all harvested at the same time. Some are harvested months before others. Even the same crops like corn or various beans are harvested weeks apart. For corn sometimes months. Farms also share a lot of equipment. Though a lot of farms are just absolutely massive corporate farms so it’s not really “sharing” but has the same effect.
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Each person owning their own farm is orders of magnitude less efficient that one large farm serving many people.
From what I recall, it depends on your definition of efficiency. Large farms are more efficient in terms of mass of produce per unit of labour but less efficient in terms of mass of produce per unit area.
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Each person owning their own farm is orders of magnitude less efficient that one large farm serving many people.
There are already some good points made about efficiency, but I’ll also add that for an individual sometimes it’s not about efficiency but about survivability in the event of a crisis. As we saw in 2020, over indexing on efficiency can lead to cascading failures that put individuals at risk, so it’s logical that some would want to mitigate the risk of food production failures.
I don’t know what you mean here. By 2020 I assume you mean the covid-19 pandemic? I agree that the pandemic itself put people at risk. But what do you mean by “cascading failures that put individuals at risk”?
From my perspective society and systems of it kept on going despite the large scale upheavals happening. If for anything I would cite 2020 as evidence that things are not as fragile as we suspected. But maybe you have a different perspective?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Each person owning their own farm is orders of magnitude less efficient that one large farm serving many people.
There are already some good points made about efficiency, but I’ll also add that for an individual sometimes it’s not about efficiency but about survivability in the event of a crisis. As we saw in 2020, over indexing on efficiency can lead to cascading failures that put individuals at risk, so it’s logical that some would want to mitigate the risk of food production failures.
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Doesn't rain fall on the leaves as much as the soil?
in the wild, plants compete for space and resources and the leaves act as a funnel to direct water (including dew) to the roots that might not otherwise be captured. the leaves can also serve as a shield to prevent the soil around the roots from being eroded by rainfall. in a garden where plants do not have neighbours competing for space and water isn't scarce, there's no reason to water the leaves when you could jus…
We do plants a disservice by studying them when they’re grouped together by species and age cohort, and generalizing their behavior under those conditions.
You can recreate these circumstances in your garden by, for example, planting the three sisters (beans, squash, corn) together. You can also opt to grow perennial versions of your crops and stagger their planting / surround them with annuals the complement their chemical needs.
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Nature isn't perfect and has disadvantages compared to us. We don't have to invent ex post facto explanations for why something is the case in nature or why there is some un-intuitive reason as for why the natural way is better.
> Nature isn't perfect and has disadvantages compared to us. That's assuming that we are somehow outside of nature. > We don't have to invent ex post facto explanations for why something is the case in nature or why there is some un-intuitive reason as for why the natural way is better. We don't have to , no , but we do , because that's how we learn. Nobody was claiming the "natural" way was better, just that it migh…
No it isn’t. You know what they meant, you are just one-upping them on a technicality in a way that doesn’t advance the discussion at all.
This looks fun but not really useful. My hope would be that in 20 years everyone has a little bot that 24/7 runs a garden for you and provides every family with 80% of their vegetable need. Imagine the amount of acreage we could return to nature / co2 sinking.
Each person owning their own farm is orders of magnitude less efficient that one large farm serving many people.