141–150 of 173 posts
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Peas famously have been cultivated from a single mutation that does not burst when ripe. They can't reproduce without human intervention.
Even when birds or small mammals eat and digest the seeds?
There are some plans that need an animal to digest the seed covering, but not all plants have that as part of their reproduction cycle. (I'm not sure what pea's natural cycle was)
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Deeper roots tend to make for healthier soil. This is why dandelions are such a boon for someone with poor soil. Their deep roots break up poorly aerated soil allowing aerobic bacteria to produce nutrients for plants. Modern farmers are keenly aware of soil quality and spend a lot of time and money to keep their farms running at top efficiency. The thing that worries me the most about modern farming is the use of pet…
>Modern farmers are keenly aware of soil quality and spend a lot of time and money to keep their farms running at top efficiency. You sure about that? When I was ARS, sure there were 3-4 farmers I met who took SOC and and soil health seriously; individuals who wanted to think about their soil as an ecosystem and grow their soils as they did their crops. Then there were the other 96-97 farmers you would meet who could…
We run a little market garden. I follow all sorts of agronomy feeds and information and then read and watch what other growers are doing. Even the most "regenerative" and "ecological" growers don't seem to get it... There's no free lunch. I've read analysis which points out that there is not even enough manure produced on the planet to fertilize our farm fields without chemical additions, and don't even think about compost, it's not even close... and all the soil retention and cover cropping one does will only slow down, not reverse, top soil loss. If you're not losing carbon in your soils, it's because you're bringing it in from somewhere else, and it's lost there.
So many permaculture types trying to imply that what works for them in their backyard city gardens works on a large scale. It does not. I learned the hard way.
I see "no till" market garden growers whose solution is basically to dump 100 cubic yards of compost on their beds each year and plant into that instead of tilling. This is the Richard Perkins etc. method, and it's intellectual dishonesty. All that compost comes from somewhere and that place now in turn has a carbon deficit.
At least, this is all the case until we can find a way to efficiently extract CO2 from the atmosphere and turn it into solid soil ammendment. Trees and cover crops can't do it fast enough.
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>> Its purely anecdotal, but the vast majority of farmers I had the opportunity were not good farmers It is purely anecdotal. It greatly depends on the location and the generational age of the farmer the extent to which they are concerned with soil conservation. Cultural practices in farming tend to have wide adoption swings, (neighbors see what their neighbors are doing, etc) Entire counties will be using convention…
> I find your identification of 96-97% of farmers as short-term profiteers rude and borderline offensive. It could be right. The smaller the farmer the less likely they are to realize how much the investment in better farming is worth it. The very large farmers have the numbers showing the investment is worth it, they control a lot of land, but are only a minority of farmers. I'm still with you that > 90% is a bad es…
The 20+ year trend in farm size is unmistakeable across the signficant economic classes, btw. Farms are increasing in size and the number of farms is decreasing.
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Is it good for humans to eat more fertiliser, pesticides etc ?
This is like asking if the vitamins that you give to a chicken as a chick will poison you when you eat it as adult, I am not talking of hormones or growth agents, just literal common vitamins You don't eat "the vitamins" you eat the chicken, you don't eat the fertilizer, you eat the plant
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Unless human nature has changed last week, this is not going to be used to use less land, only to produce more on the same land. We are already overproducing food, that doesn't prevent us to try to produce more.
There has to be demand for that produce. The market ultimately decideds how much food we need to grow. Where I'm from (New Zealand) there are various schemes in place to encourage farmers to retire low productivity land and fence/plant buffer zones around waterways.
The market, at this point, has produced concentration of power and hasn't sold distribution problem.
Creating something that can produce even more is not gonna help.
Nutrition is fine, it's been tested. Not that it matters anywhere. The real poor need different nutrition, not more (or less) of the same. And your problem is you'll be to fat, or fine, or need targeted nutrition supplements in a pill under some circumstances like vegan or pregnant or winter in a colder climate.
It tastes fine.
It's not a Chinese scam (Western uni's were involved)
It wrecks the soil is a dumb statement, it improves the soil quality.
It's a real carbon sink.
Deeper roots also mean big trees in places that were hard before.
It's not just potatoes and rice and foods. It might be useful on all types of plants, like drugs, flowers, wood, scents. They just tried rice and potatoes first.
The only issue is it's a Noble prizing winning find. Why hasn't it got more press if it's true? This could be because everyone is fucking stupid. Or there's a big catch that no one has mentioned yet. 50/50 on that.
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https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/soil-depletion-an... So there are at least 3 studies performed by different teams in this article that indicates you're incorrect in your assertions as applied in practice.
That article is ... confused. Donald Davis, the main source for most of the article, suggests that a lack of selection towards nutritious crops as the cause of lower nutrition, while the article itself claims that the cause is poorer soil quality. Noticeably, neither of these points support the argument that engineered crops are any worse for the soil than past crops. Also, the article suggests that the studies thems…
Several factors come immediately to mind, is the plant reaching a threshold wherein micronutrients are at "unity" and so uptake is reduced and thus reaches a plateau (or saturation), and so distribution into fruit is proportionally diminished as volume increases? Is there some natural law that is prohibitive, something like the square-cube law? Or are the plants locally depleting the nutrients, and then relying on natural diffusion? Is there a "long-range dependency" that is opaque? All else failing, I would suggest that it's highly probable that the nutrient disparities that are evident in these studies could reflect that maintenance of the proportion of nutrients to that of volume might leave the plants fated to death, and so our selection process is predetermined to either volume or nutrient content. Which begs the question, at what intersection do we find the highest degree of efficacy in selecting foodstuffs?
Given a plant that could expand both volume and nutrient proportionally, what would the result be? I'd conjecture rapid depletion of locally available nutrients, up to the point where diffusion and natural deposition becomes an ineffectual mode of conveyance and demands manual upkeep else the organism would be given to death.
Perhaps I'm presumptuous, I don't mind being so, I'll have to ask you to forgive me for my ignorance. I only ask for your participation in this discussion as it seems you're privileged to have a mind much more discerning and honed in this craft than mine own.
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> I find your identification of 96-97% of farmers as short-term profiteers rude and borderline offensive. It could be right. The smaller the farmer the less likely they are to realize how much the investment in better farming is worth it. The very large farmers have the numbers showing the investment is worth it, they control a lot of land, but are only a minority of farmers. I'm still with you that > 90% is a bad es…
I provided actual numbers of conservation tillage adoption that are highly correlated. I don't know what else to provide you besides actual data to correct the bias in your understanding. The 20+ year trend in farm size is unmistakeable across the signficant economic classes, btw. Farms are increasing in size and the number of farms is decreasing.
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>Modern farmers are keenly aware of soil quality and spend a lot of time and money to keep their farms running at top efficiency. You sure about that? When I was ARS, sure there were 3-4 farmers I met who took SOC and and soil health seriously; individuals who wanted to think about their soil as an ecosystem and grow their soils as they did their crops. Then there were the other 96-97 farmers you would meet who could…
Don't have you tell you this, and not disagreeing with you.. but ... Farming is mining. It's extractive. Every bit of plant matter we ship off our farms in the form of food is carbon and nitrogen that is no longer in our soils. I concur most farmers don't give a crap. But even the ones who do, it just slows it down, doesn't stop it. We run a little market garden. I follow all sorts of agronomy feeds and information a…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unless human nature has changed last week, this is not going to be used to use less land, only to produce more on the same land. We are already overproducing food, that doesn't prevent us to try to produce more.
There has to be demand for that produce. The market ultimately decideds how much food we need to grow. Where I'm from (New Zealand) there are various schemes in place to encourage farmers to retire low productivity land and fence/plant buffer zones around waterways.
With food: "oh, this apple has scratch marks from insects, throw it in the bin" — this is just one of them. "Best before" dates in the past results in lot of untasted food go to waste too. Etc.